Soil Degradation Quotes

There are two major challenges before Indian agriculture today: ecological and economical. The conservation of our basic agricultural assets such as land, water, and biodiversity is a major challenge. How to make agriculture sustainable is the challenge.

The purpose of farming is to deprive other species of the land and sequester it for our own use. But by perfecting the art of monoculture, it has become too easy for us to exterminate everything else, leaving no wild plants, no food for insects, and a barren land for birds.

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.

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.

Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased: it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.

Soil erosion is a national menace.

Unkindness to anything means an injustice to that thing. If I am unkind to you I do you an injustice, or wrong you in some way. On the other hand, if I try to assist you in every way that I can to make a better citizen and in every way to do my very best for you, I am kind to you. The above principles apply with equal force to the soil. The farmer whose soil produces less every year, is unkind to it in some way; that is, he is not doing by it what he should; he is robbing it of some substance it must have, and he becomes, therefore, a soil robber rather than a progressive farmer.

China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.

To see rich land eaten away by erosion, to stand by as continual cultivation on sloping fields wears away the best soil, is enough to make a good farmer sick at heart.

It helps to think of soil as a living organism covered with skin like a human. We can live with a certain percentage of our skin damaged, but if too high a percentage is damaged, we die. So, too, does soil and thus most life

History is largely a record of human struggle to wrest the land from nature, because man relies for sustenance on the products of the soil. So direct, is the relationship between soil erosion, the productivity of the land, and the prosperity of people, that the history of mankind, to a considerable degree at least, may be interpreted in terms of the soil and what has happened to it as the result of human use.

You can't chemical your way out of soil infertility

People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother Nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.

I grew up in a family of peasants, and it was there that I saw the way that, for example, our wheat fields suffered as a result of dust storms, water erosion and wind erosion; I saw the effect of that on life - on human life.

How we grow food has enormous effects on the environment - climate change as well as pollution of air, water, and soil.

People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother Nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.

A field becomes exhausted by constant tillage.

We have to stop treating soil like dirt.

Since chemical fertilizer burns out the soil organic matter, other farmers struggle with tilth, water retention, and basic soil nutrients. The soil gets harder and harder every year as the chemicals burn out the organic matter, which gives the soil its sponginess. One pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water. The best drought protection any farmer can acquire is more soil organic matter.

If agriculture goes wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right.

In parts of Montana, salt concentrations in soil water, have reached those double those of seawater.

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.

Topsoil is a place of digestion. It sucks and chews things into smaller pieces. When it's hungry, it turns grey and stony; when it's thirsty, it opens thousands of cracked lips. Subsoil is more skeletal: it doesn't digest.

The Green Revolution was criticised by social activists on the ground that the high-yield technology involving the use of mineral fertilizers and chemical pesticides is environmentally harmful.

Runaway technology, whose only law is profit, has for years poisoned our air, ravaged our soil, stripped our forests bare, and corrupted our water resources