Agroecology Quotes

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

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.

I'm attracted to people who work their little plot of land and cultivate it and cultivate it.

After the Green Revolution, I came up with the concept of the Evergreen Revolution. In this we will see increase in farm productivity but without ecological harm.

The unmerited fear of genetically modified organism crops threatens scientific advancements in biotechnology needed to meet the growing global demand for safe and affordable food.

If we want to prevent both climate and ecological catastrophes, the key task is to minimise the amount of land we use to feed ourselves, while changing the way the remaining land is farmed. Instead, governments almost everywhere pour public money into planetary destruction.

Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

I want Britain to lead the world in food and farming and to do that we need enough productive agricultural land.

I think the only real knowledge I had before I went to Iowa was what I learned from 'Food Inc'. But once I got there and developed these extensive relationships with the farmers, I realized that we're basically made of corn.

I dream of living off the land completely - in vain, because the monkeys eat everything.

As human pastoralists discovered 8,000 years ago, raising animals can be an efficient way of harnessing otherwise unusable resources such as grass.

The Second Green Revolution, as the world's population grows to over 9 billion by 2050, is the new revolution we have to have to lift food production by another 75 percent.

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.

The National Policy for Farmers calls for a paradigm shift from measuring agricultural progress merely in terms of growth rates, to measuring it in terms of the growth in the real income of farm families.

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.

When I grew up in Italy in the 1950s, it was still very agricultural. Food was very important; produce was very important. Everyone made their own olive oil. It took me a long time after I moved here to understand that Americans are much further away from their food.

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

A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.

The more we can grow on already cultivated land, the better.

Unless people can become natural people, there can be neither natural farming nor natural food.

American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.

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.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.

We lived off the land in Italy.

Our country is an agriculture-based country. And slowly, we are forgetting our roots.