Monoculture Farming Quotes

In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.

Food production has affected the environment more than any other activity humans have engaged in. Humanity devotes more land to food production than anything else - roughly a third of the surface area of the earth, much of which was once forest but has been converted by humans into farms or grazing lands.

Seasonally ploughing and harvesting crops will mash up a few moles, slice through a burrow of field mice and crush any ground-nesting bird chicks. Far more significant, however, is the creation of the field in the first place: an act that replaces entire ecosystems, along with all their animal inhabitants.

We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.

Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true.

Men swagger around calling themselves "cattlemen" but abuse their grass like a rapist. And abuse their cattle with concrete fecal feedlots without any regards to rumen function. Vegetable growers plow thousands of acres, planting monocrops of annuals in a never-ending tillage routine that totally annihilates carbon wealth. Why? Why are we so enamored of things that destroy carbon and disrespect the animals under our care? Grass. Lowly grass. It just gets no respect. And yet it is the lifeblood of the planet.

Loss of soil productivity, which is causing extensive land abandonment, is a widespread by-product of current practices in agriculture and animal husbandry. Since 1945, 11 percent of the earth's vegetated surface has been degraded—an area larger than India and China combined—and per capita food production in many parts of the world is decreasing.

If you're a commodity corn farmer in Iowa, you're locked into an infrastructure that keeps you a commodity corn farmer.

The measure discriminates definitely against products which make up what has been universally considered a program of safe farming. The bill upholds as ideals of American farming the men who grow cotton, corn, rice, swine, tobacco, or wheat and nothing else. These are to be given special favors at the expense of the farmer who has toiled for years to build up a constructive farming enterprise to include a variety of crops and livestock.

Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.

Herein lies our problem. If we level that much land to grow rice and whatever, then no other animal could live there except for some insect pest species. Which is very unfortunate.

Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.

Here is my Farm Relief bill: Every time a Southerner plants nothing on his farm but cotton year after year, and the Northerner nothing but wheat or corn, why, take a hammer and hit him twice right between the eyes. You may dent your hammer, but it will do more real good than all the bills you can pass in a year.