Small-Scale Farming Quotes

A secure and independent agricultural peasantry is the only base on which a people rises.

The small land holders are the most precious part of a state.

My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.

We have the industrial agriculturalists who try and make an argument that big is beautiful. But if you do the math, and particularly if you factor in that the price of oil is going to go through the roof, and so the price of transportation is going to go through the roof - making it abundantly clear that it's out of whack. The efficiency arguments are already crumbling, particularly if you actually include the cost of food pollution that these industries cause. They are tremendously unsustainable and tremendously inefficient.

I started natural farming after the war with just one small plot, but gradually I acquired additional acreage by taking over surrounding pieces of abandoned land and caring for them by hand.

"I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want."

I bought an ant farm. I don't know where I am going to get a tractor that small!

I am but one member of a vast team made up of many organizations, officials, thousands of scientists, and millions of farmers - mostly small and humble - who for many years have been fighting a quiet, oftentimes losing war on the food production front.

The farmers markets were another step to giving people an opportunity to take more power over their own lives-and also to provide another outlet for organic produce. That is important because the production and distribution of food is increasingly being monopolized and controlled by large corporate structures, large financial structures.

The big producer is going to figure out how to deal with whatever the rules are, but the little guy who is running a few hundred units or maybe feeding 1,500 cattle a year, how will they ever comply with these requirements?

Many young and beginning farmers start out in local markets. Some stay there, and some scale up.

To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America - not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

I do think that there is a big difference between family farms and agri-business, and one of the distressing things that I think has occurred is with consolidation of farm lands. You've seen large agri-businesses benefit from enormous profits from existing farm programs, and I think we should be focusing most of those programs on those family farmers.

Far from being a “luxury for the rich,” organic farming may turn out to be a necessity not just for the poor, but for everyone.

This kingdom [Colombia] … does not enjoy an active commerce. It’s subsistence consists of gold taken from its mines, without trade, export of its agriculture and manufactures…. The local officials everywhere are indifferent and careless as to their duty; the people are steeped in poverty; trade is almost extinct; capital is lacking, and there are no opportunities for its investment; the only source of support is the cultivation of small patches of ground. Every one seeks to subsist on the government by procuring some little office.

To me, the most critical thing in agriculture is investing in the peasant agriculture, transforming peasant agriculture.

Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free and should be encouraged to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.

So, I went to McGill University in Montreal to study soil chemistry and microbiology, which I did complete, but realized early that little of this could be applied in our country, because we were learning of a Green Revolution that would suit a farmer who had 3,500 acres and not our poor farmer.

I always wanted to have my own farm. I've never been able to achieve that. It's kinda tough.

My father was a prosperous hatter-farmer - making hats for the local markets during the winter months, tilling his little ten-acre farm during the summer time.

It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

Perhaps never in the history of a nation founded by agrarian self-starters has the federal government propped up rural America to such a degree.