Rural Challenges Quotes

Texas' and America's farmers are suffering. As the Member of Congress representing the 10th Congressional District of Texas, I have traveled throughout our area and have seen first-hand how the drought has affected our agricultural communities.

After I returned from Oxford, I spent 5-6 years in a village in Madhya Pradesh - 25 km. outside Bhopal - along with a group of people working with the communities. But, over time, we realised that there were just too many constraints, and for ordinary citizens to be the change agent was not that easy.

I'm a farmer. I always will be a farmer. When I die, I'll be a farmer. It's something that I've wanted to do since I was 8 years old. I can tell you also that I see opportunity slipping away for our kids.

You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

It's so hard to make noise coming from a small town that by the time you start branding yourself, you've grown in a certain way.

Running a farm is about solving a problem, and that's always interesting to me. But it's a constant process.

Most farmers know that their children's future will probably not be in agriculture, but they have a hard time imagining a different life.

You come from the city and think small means simple when all it realy means is complicated in a smaller place. Which sometimes adds to the complication.

You might be a redneck if getting a package from your post office requires a full tank of gas in the truck.

On this National Agriculture Day, when we all should be taking time to thank and pay tribute to America's farmers, ranchers and their families who produce the food for our tables, we are finding those same people in dire need of our help and support.

I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.

Kids in urban and rural areas face so many challenges, and they show up at schools that don't have the extra capacity or extra resources to meet their needs.

Once you're out in a place where there's one sheriff for the county, people have to learn how to get along with each other and that means going to the dump illegally and dumping your garbage and hoping the guys don't call you on it and being terrified of this to your core until you realize after many years that the guys at the dump don't really care where your garbage is coming from.

In the south of France the phones cut in and out, the electricity isn't particularly reliable. I think many people would get very irritated with that life.