Traditional Farming Quotes

Homesteading is gone.

Cambodia is barbarian. The people do not know the proper way to grow food. They use mattocks and hoes but no oxen. They grow enough rice … but do not know how to store rice for an emergency.

Farmers are always conservative. They stick to what they have learned from their fathers and from their grandfathers. This is the same all over the globe.

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

To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are 'production units,' and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests.

When I grew up, we always had our chickens, and we ate our eggs, and we ate our chickens. The family always had a pig, and we would kill it at Christmas and eat it for three or four months afterwards.

Central African farmers don't have any animal power because sleeping sickness kills all the animals - cattle, the horses, the burros and the mules. So draft animals don't exist, and farming is all by hand, and the hand tools are hoes and machetes.

I grew up in an agricultural family, and I never distanced myself from where the food comes from. I think it's quite natural.

Of all the peoples of the world, the Chinese are probably the most at home with their excrement. They know its value. For 4,000 years they have used raw human feces to fertilize fields.

Probably 99 percent of Nuba are subsistence farmers. They have maybe two or three cattle, a few goats. Now there are food shortages, so they're very thin. But traditionally, they are very strong and muscular. They grow sorghum, okra, a bit of corn, some peanuts. If they need money, they'll sell one of their animals or sell some sorghum.

Happy the man who, removed from all cares of business, after the manner of his forefathers cultivates with his own team his paternal acres, freed from all thought of usury.

Horses raise what the farmer eats and eats what the farmer raises. You can't plow the ground and get gasoline.

I come from a family that has grown their own food from well into times of slavery, provided for themselves and people around them. So I found, through conversations about the earth and about the house with my neighbors, a lot of common ground.

You get lots of people, especially where I live, who go in to a butcher and insist on organic beef - even when the butcher has better-tasting stuff from a farm that's been producing wonderful meat for 100 years but hasn't jumped through the hoops to get organic certification.

The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.

I live in the house my great-grandfather moved to in 1865... I spent all my summers here as a kid haying with my grandfather, and it was my favorite place in the world.

As a Midlander and a big walker, I'd always loved ridge and furrow fields, the plough-marked land as it was when it was enclosed. It is the landscape giving you a story of lives that ended with the arrival of sheep.

It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.

We can move water easily with plastic pipes. We can move shade around with nursery cloth like a tinker toy for animals and plants. Yet we have developed this necessity to grow food with chemical fertiliser because we have forgotten the magic of manure.

I farm taro. I have eight varieties of taro, which is a staple of the Hawaiian people from about 2,000 years ago, and sweet potatoes, and it's a sustainable living, agriculture, off the grid.

My mother's people are Old Order Mennonite - horse and buggy Mennonite, very close cousins to the Amish. I grew up in Lancaster County and lived near Amish farm land.

My first love was, and remains, manual labor; sowing and harvesting, the pastures, the flock, and the cattle.

We had our wheat. We made our own olive oil. We made our wine. We had chickens, ducks; we had sheep, cows, milk. So I was raised in a very simple situation but understanding really food from the ground... the essence of food and the flavors. And those memories I took with me, and I think that they lingered on.

My grandmother had a courtyard of animals, like goats and chickens. She made ricotta cheese, cooked with potatoes warm from the garden, grew everything from beans to wheat. It was simple, seasonal food, and we all ate what was produced 10 miles from where we lived. It was that way for centuries.