#farming

By 2030, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, fish farming will dominate fish supplies. Given how wrong the FAO has been in the past--saying catches were going up when, in fact, they were going down--this statement is worth examining carefully. When you do, you find it to be an observation of previous trends, not a reflection of what could happen or what people might want--in the same way as Red Delicious was once far and away the most popular apple in the United States because it was basically the only apple you could get. The FAO is simply observing that fish farming is the fastest growing form of food production in the world--growing at 9 percent a year and by 12-13 percent in the United States. Nobody is asking us whether we want this. It is just happening. The continued destruction of mangrove swamps in poor countries to provide shrimp for people living in rich countries is simply the market operating in a vacuum untroubled by ethics. It is a reflection of what will go on happening if we do not find ways of exercising any choice in the matter. ↗

— Charles Clover

#ethics #farmed-fish #fish #fish-farming #fishing

When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings. ↗

— Masanobu Fukuoka

#farming #zen #nature

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. ↗

— Aldo Leopold

#living #nature #nature

The cost to reconnect animals to live in natural settings without human support is a debt that many animals in transition must honor with their lives. ↗

— Young Tim

#farm-life #farming #nature

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#factory-farming #meat #science #veganism #vegetarianism

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#farming #food

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#ecology #farming #symbiosis #nature

Coming from a farming background, I saw nothing out of the ordinary in running barefoot, although it seemed to startle the rest of the athletics world. I have always enjoyed going barefoot and when I was growing up I seldom wore shoes, even when I went into town. ↗

— Zola Budd

#always #athletics #background #barefoot #coming

The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place. ↗

— David R. Brower

#chemicals #farming #fertilizer #first #fuel

What I loathe is the multi-national conglomerates who must take responsibility for the degradation and pollution of so much of our landscape with their factory farming and greed. ↗

— Fay Godwin

#factory #farming #greed #i #landscape