#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

I never dreamed about being an actor, because that was out of reach. Coming from a small town that was big in farming, and also big in clothing factories, you don't dream about being a professional football player or an actor. ↗

— Herschel Walker

#actor #also #ball player #because #being

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors. ↗

— Edward Dahlberg

#conscience #farming #our #scruple #writing

The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn't always where you want to use it, and it isn't always when you want to use it. ↗

— Bill Gates

#energy #farming #trouble #use #want

The land is ours. It's not European and we have taken it, we have given it to the rightful people... Those of white extraction who happen to be in the country and are farming are welcome to do so, but they must do so on the basis of equality. ↗

— Robert Mugabe

#country #equality #european #extraction #farming

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that. ↗

— Larry Page

#around #ask #been #doing #driven

I am also the product of a place called Paint Creek. Doesn't have a zip code. It's too small to be called a town along the rolling plains of Texas. We grew dryland cotton and wheat, and when I wasn't farming or attending Paint Creek Rural School, I was generally over at Troop 48 working on my Eagle Scout award. ↗

— Rick Perry

#also #am #attending #award #called

As Gill says, "every man is called to give love to the work of his hands. Every man is called to be an artist." The small family farm is one of the last places - they are getting rarer every day - where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of the last places where the maker - and some farmers still do talk about "making the crops" - is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made. This certainly is a spiritual value, but it is not for that reason an impractical or uneconomic one. In fact, from the exercise of this responsibility, this giving of love to the work of the hands, the farmer, the farm, the consumer, and the nation all stand to gain in the most practical ways: They gain the means of life, the goodness of food, and the longevity and dependability of the sources of food, both natural and cultural. The proper answer to the spiritual calling becomes, in turn, the proper fulfillment of physical need. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#farming #love #spirituality #work #family

Commercial agriculture can survive within pluralistic American society, as we know it - if the farm is rebuilt on some of the values with which it is popularly associated: conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community. To sustain itself, commercial agriculture will have to reorganize its social and economic structure as well as its technological base and production methods in a way that reinforces these values. ↗

— Marty Strange

#community #farming #family

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#vegetarianism #food