Agricultural Business Quotes

In his new autobiography, 'Capital Gaines,' Chip talks about the farm work - and he says he does, in fact, do it himself.

My dad was the manager at the 45,000-acre ranch, but he owned his own 1,200-acre ranch, and I owned four cattle that he gave to me when I graduated from grammar school, from the eighth grade. And those cows multiplied, and he kept track of them for years for me. And that was my herd.

I am not a pig farmer. The pigs had a great time, but I didn't make any money.

It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.

The second purchase was my ranch, Mockingbird Hill. The third purchase was Longhorn cattle.

I saw more stupid people in graduate school and three decades in academia than I ever did who ran 100 acres without going broke.

But as a young kid, I never did, really have an ambition to be a farmer. I never thought, gee, I would like to farm, and I want to raise these crops. I didn't quite know what I wanted to do.

There was a revolution going on at home. Why didn't I earn some money? Why didn't I do something practical, like chicken farming?

We're the biggest food and agriculture company in the world.

Contract farming can be promoted if it is structured on the basis of a win-win situation both for the producer and the purchaser.

My advice to anyone who wants to join in on farming is diversify. Nature is diversified, and I know you'll always have a core thing that you'll really like, but hang stuff around the edges of it. It will make your place more interesting for people to come to, and it's a lot easier to sell something else to an existing customer.

We are still looking for opportunities in plantation, in palm oil. When it is bad, you want to buy because, in the long term, I am confident that plantation is a good bet. To me, it is always in demand; there is no substitute yet for palm oil.

This was more than just a cow - this was an entire career I was looking at.

I co-own the ranch with my brother, and he and his wife are really the backbone of the operation.

The journalists think that they cannot say too much in favor of such "improvements" in husbandry; it is a safe theme, like piety;but as for the beauty of one of these "model farms," I would as lief see a patent churn and a man turning it. They are, commonly, places merely where somebody is making money, it may be counterfeiting.

My father was trained as a saddler, but in fact as a young man worked in his father's business of rearing and selling cattle, so he grew up in the countryside.