Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.
When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.
Ecology should be object lessons that the world sees, that explains in a visceral, physical way, the attributes of God.
Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn't deserve my special food.
I always said if I could figure out a way to grow Kleenex and toilet paper on trees, we could pull the plug on society.
The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation.
While vegans and meat-eaters disagree, we can all be united in our fear and hatred for the horror that is factory farming.
I'm suggesting that criminalizing chemically fertilized grass in favor of unnaturally-fed corn is not a rational trade off.
In general, we run the farm like a business instead of a welfare recipient, and we adhere to historically-validated patterns.
Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen. Start building up your larder! We don't even use that term any more.
You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.
I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.
Our animals don't do drugs. Instead, we move them almost daily in a tightly choreographed ballet from pasture spot to pasture spot.
I think it's one of the most important battles for consumers to fight: the right to know what's in their food, and how it was grown.
Choose to patronise your local farmers; as eaters, you need to demand a different type of food. Appreciate the pigginess of the pig.
The average person is still under the aberrant delusion that food should be somebody else's responsibility until I'm ready to eat it.
I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.
The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
I'm incredibly optimistic about what individuals can do. We have technology that our grandparents would have given their eye teeth for.
If every American for one week refused to eat at a fast-food joint, it would bring concentrated animal feeding operations to their knees.
Don’t complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine.
We move the cows every day to a new spot which allows the grass time to recuperate and go through its what I call 'the teenage growth spurt.'
Amazingly, we’ve become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe.
I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered.
Our main deal is pastured livestock. So we have beef cattle, pigs, turkeys, laying chickens, meat chickens, rabbit, lamb and ducks - egg-layer ducks.
We should be rolling in the dirt, gardening, wrestling with some brambles and skinning animals for supper. These are important immune system builders.
It really disturbs me that the environmental movement has been co-opted by creation-worshippers instead of being encouraged by the Creator-worshippers.
Gluten intolerance and celiac disease are direct results of American agriculture policy and, specifically, the government's wading into the food arena.
Our motto is we respect and honour the pigness of the pig and the chickenness of the chicken. That means not confining them in a house with hundreds of others.
An orchard can grow pastured poultry underneath. A beef cattle or sheep farm can run pastured poultry behind the herbivores, like the egret on the rhino's nose.
The industrial food system is so cruel and so horrific in its treatment of animals. It never asks the question: 'Should a pig be allowed to express its pig-ness?'
Unfortunately in the U.S., the courts have pretty much sided with the GMO lobby and suggesting that a farmer has no rights to be protected from GMO contamination.
Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?
Our culture doesn't ask about preserving the essence of pig; it just asks how can we grow them faster, fatter, bigger, and cheaper. We know that's not a noble goal.
I don't want to sound too mystical or weird but it's important to know what garlic smells like when it's cooking, or what eggs look like when they're cracked out of a shell.
Instead of buying into the global agenda, which is using food as just industrial stuff, we would say we view food as biological, a living thing, that belongs in smaller communities.
Too often, parents whose children express an interest in farming squelch it because they envision dirt, dust, poverty, and hermit living. But great stories come out of great farming.
What we're looking at is God's design, nature's template, and using that as a pattern to cut around and lay it down on a domestic model to duplicate that pattern that we see in nature.
The cycle of life is death, decomposition and regeneration, and a person who wants to stop killing animals is actually anti-life because it's only in death that life can be regenerated.
Throughout high school, I peddled my eggs, had a vendor stand at the local curb market - precursor to today's farmers' markets - and competed in 4-H contests and interscholastic debate.
We believe that the farm should be building 'forgiveness' into the ecosystem. What does that mean? That a more forgiving ecosystem is one that can better handle drought, flood, disease, pestilence.
We will never sell or have an IPO. What that does is suddenly flushes you with cash. It makes you now work for a group of stockholders, who, again, put pressure and temptations on your true-blueness.
Our land-healing ministry really is about cultivating relationships: between the people, the loving stewards, and the ecology of a place, what I call the environmental umbilical that we're nurturing here.
Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true.
Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn't mean we should do it, not if we're really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism.
There's a short chain between field and fork, and the shorter that chain is - the fresher, the more transparent that system is - the less chance there is of anything from bio-terrorism to pathogenicity to spoilage.
There's a big difference between industrializing production of tractors and industrializing production of food. We like technology, but we really like technology that allows us to do better what nature does itself.
From my earliest memories, I loved the farm. My grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine and had a huge, well kept garden with an octagonal chicken house in the corner.
Think of all the mesquite in Texas, the pinyon pines, the acorns in Appalachia, every place has the possibility of mass production. It's an infrastructural system so nestled in ecology, it's a more beautiful ecology.
You know, in our culture today, our Western, reductionist, Roman, linear, fragmented... culture, we don't ask how to make a pig happy. We ask how to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, and that's not a noble goal.