Jaggi Vasudev Quotes

Almost all the knowledge required to produce more food than eroding soil is available today - we just need to use that knowledge within a holistic paradigm - managing agriculture holistically, forming the policies that undergird it holistically.

A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.

Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place.

My real emphasis is on the farmers who are taking care of the land, the farmers who are really thinking about our nourishment.

Each year some 1,400 square miles of land in Northern China turns into desert …. Civilization can survive the loss of its oil reserves, but it cannot survive the loss of its soil reserves.

We must continue as in millennia past, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves and, each year, plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered.

All money for agricultural extension, land grant universities has been toward developing industrial food. Lots of money has been invested toward maximizing yield. If you took even a small amount of that money and put it toward organic research, I don't have any doubts you could match those yields.

When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.

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.

Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by the careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be saved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints, conditioned by small fidelities, skills, and desires. Soil loss is ultimately a cultural problem; it will be corrected only by cultural solutions.

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.

A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period.

The only investable idea I have real confidence in is farming and forestry. My family owns some forest, and now we're closing on a farm. Make the farming more sustainable and the forestry more sustainable, and everyone benefits.

The linear, single species idea of farming is an assault on ecological function. Something's going to break down in that system - anything from soil structure, in economics... but where to start is with true ecological function.

Food and the way we grow it and produce it are a major cause of environmental degradation.

The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.

Vegetables deplete soil. They're extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals.

Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it's never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives.

A paradigm shift, where, in addition to physical inputs for farming, a focused emphasis placed on knowledge inputs can be a promising way forward. This knowledge-based approach will bring immense returns, particularly in rain fed and dry land farming areas.

Africa is the most weathered continent in the world; 75 percent of its soil has been degraded. You don't just bring that back. I always like to say it's like putting an oxygen mask on a cadaver; it just isn't going to work.

Soil erosion is a national menace.

If a man farms his land to the waste of the soil or the tress, he destroys not only his own assets but Nature's assets.

We have to stop treating soil like dirt.

By having a direct stake and involvement with the process of plants growing, of having your hands in the soil and tending it carefully and with love, your world and everyone's else's world too, becomes a better place.