Traditional Farming Methods Quotes

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.

However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before.

We lived off the land in Italy.

Tools were made and born were hands, Every farmer understands.

Happy he who far from business, like the primitive are of mortals, cultivates with his own oxen the fields of his fathers, free from all anxieties of gain.

I do think that there is a big difference between family farms and agri-business, and one of the distressing things that I think has occurred is with consolidation of farm lands. You've seen large agri-businesses benefit from enormous profits from existing farm programs, and I think we should be focusing most of those programs on those family farmers.

One of the first sights that shocked me, when I came to Israel in 1921, was an Arab turning over a field with a very primitive plow; pulling the plow were an ox and a woman. Now, if it means that we have destroyed this romantic picture by bringing in tractors, combines, and threshing machines, this is true: we have.

The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

The horse would plough, the ox would drive the car. No; do the work you know, and tarry where you are.

I haven't seen a tractor working all day. The country has gone sane and got back to horses. Farmers all look worse, but they feel better.

It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'