Among poor people, there's not any question about women being strong -- even stronger than men -- they work in the fields right along with the men. When your survival is at stake, you don't have these questions about yourself like middle-class women do.
I don't have farmers I can convert into factory workers.
I've been doing work for the farmers of Maharashtra.
Here we grow the flax and grain; here we raise the meat they eat, and the wool to keep them warm; we cut trees to build their houses and firewood to heat their stoves.
I'm this dude that can play a farmhand and a handyman and sometimes a Greek god.
I'm a semi-literate farmer and hired killer. I ain't in the power game.
My dear, my native soil! For whom my warmest wish to Heav'n is sent, Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!
I dreamed of a future as a muscular, tanned, kibbutznik, who plowed the fertile fields of the Jezreel Valley in the day, sang religiously in the dining hall in the evening, and fiercely guarded the farmland at night, riding a noble horse.
I'll tell you, my dad played and sang, and it didn't take me long to figure out that playing a guitar was a whole lot better than getting ahold of a hoe handle or chopping cotton, man.
There are no slaves in Russia, only peasants attached to the land.
It would require more hands to manage a stock of sheep, gather them from the hills, force them into houses and folds, and drive them to markets, than the profits of the whole stock were capable of maintaining.
Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn't deserve my special food.
My first job entailed spending a summer working in a cornfield in Nebraska.
Jacob: I've never seen so much manure. Wade: Baggage stock horses. They pack'em in 27 a car. Jacob: how do you stand the smell? Wade: what smell?
People would ask me how I could stand the long campaigning, how I could stand being charged with the responsibilities of a great nation, one of the most powerful and difficult jobs in the world. It wasn't any more difficult than picking cotton all day or shaking peanuts.
There's nothing like castrating 20 pigs before lunch. I did that during school whenever the need arose. They'd call out the agricultural class and put us in trucks to go help the local farmers.
I worked in rose fields, and I worked in potato fields. I did some bouncing.
The greatest job I ever had was working on my family farm. Each morning my father would come into my bedroom around 4:30 am and command me to get up and work the fields. I would spend the next two hours before school slopping pigs and cropping tobacco.
Capitalist agricultural production prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer.
The spinning work is performed by the poor people who live in villages and scattered houses. The clothiers, who generally live in the towns, send out the wool weekly to the spinners. At the same time, the clothiers' servants and horses bring back the yarn that they the spinners have spun and finished.
Cincinnatus was ploughing his four jugera of land upon the Vaticanian Hill, the same that are still known as the Quintian Meadows, when the messenger brought him the dictatorship, finding him, the tradition says, stripped to the work.
I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me. And aren't I a woman?
My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea.
We saw men haying far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut. In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike.
There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.
