#farming

In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#hayduke #tree-farming #nature

The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#vegetarianism #food

The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us. ↗

— Jeannette Walls

#common-sense #daughter #farming #mother #ranch

Ellis,” he said. “You’re watchin’ a miracle right under your nose.” He gave a few of the seeds to Ellis and let him drop them into the hole he had already made. “In each of them little things, God put life. Now you take care with it, and you feed it with water and sunlight. And, most important of all of ’em, put it in good ground, and that life is gonna sprout right out. ↗

— Tracy Winegar

#farming #inspirational #inspirational

Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians. ↗

— Jacques Yves Cousteau

#barbarians #farming #hunting #like #sea

I wonder how it is that people's philosophies have come to spin faster than the changing seasons. ↗

— Masanobu Fukuoka

#simple-living #change

Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education. ↗

— Alice Waters

#community #education #farming #food #education

I know the pleasure of pulling up root vegetables. They are solvable mysteries. ↗

— Novella Carpenter

#farming #education

Please. Put the gun down and we'll talk. A beautiful woman holding a small cannon plays hell with my concentration. Christovao (Chris) Santos, Sanctuary ↗

— Sharon K. Garner

#children-s-book-illustrators #farming-in-brazil #mercenaries #romance #romantic-suspense

Sustainable farms are to today's headlong rush toward global destruction what the monasteries were to the Dark Ages: places to preserve human skills and crafts until some semblance of common sense and common purpose returns to the public mind. ↗

— Gene Logsdon

#sustainability #age