Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When coffee prices fall below production costs, farmers are often forced off their land, and they lose their homes, everything. With fair trade, farmers get a fair price for their harvest with a guaranteed minimum, so they can invest in their crops.
Throughout Africa, as in much of the world, women are responsible for tilling the fields, deciding what to plant, nurturing the crops, and harvesting the food. They are the first to be aware of environmental damage that harms agricultural production.
Saying you must rotate three crops a year, a certain percentage of your land must be set aside, and some of the other proposals, my sense is that it's a little anti-technology, and the ability of European farmers to feed Europe is reduced as a result.
Global warming will threaten our crops, so natural food will be scarce. Hourglass, curvy bodies will be the aspirational beauty standard, representing that those women have access to bounties of fulfilling yet healthy food, which means they are affluent.
In the seventeenth century, the science of medicine had not wholly cut asunder from astrology and necromancy; and the trusting Christian still believed in some occult influences, chiefly planetary, which governed not only his crops but his health and life.
Washington state's 2nd Congressional District is a major producer of small fruit crops such as raspberries and strawberries. This research center is doing important work to help farmers enhance the quality, yield and marketability of their small fruit crops.
In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.
On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.
We're dabbling in eugenics all the time, breeding ideal crops to replace less aesthetic or nutritious or hardy varieties; leveling forests to graze cattle or erect shopping malls and condos; planting groves of a few familiar trees that homeowners and industries prefer.
As a civil servant in charge of the government's Strategy Unit, I brought in many people from outside government, including academia and science, to work in the unit, dissecting and solving complex problems from GM crops to alcohol, nuclear proliferation to schools reform.
Like the producers of crops, airplanes, and books, producers of natural gas provide goods to meet the size of their available market. The larger the market, the more they can produce, and the more revenue they can obtain to cover their fixed costs and invest in future development.
The battle over genetically modified crops is rife with business interests and political opportunism. When GMOs were first produced in laboratories around the world, they were rightly heralded as a tremendous leap forward in our ability to supplement nature by providing high-nutrient foods.
Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.
By converging people, process, and data, the benefits the Internet of Everything delivers to humanity are seemingly infinite. Imagine being able to track and understand, and then predict, long-term weather patterns. Farmers will be able to plant crops that have the greatest chance for success.
Seasonally ploughing and harvesting crops will mash up a few moles, slice through a burrow of field mice and crush any ground-nesting bird chicks. Far more significant, however, is the creation of the field in the first place: an act that replaces entire ecosystems, along with all their animal inhabitants.
We're going to move from a commodity economy where you basically grow the same kind of crops - where a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn - to an ingredient economy where there will be a kernel of corn that will be designed for fuel, there will be a kernel of corn designed for livestock.
If I wasn't acting, I would own a farm. Not like growing crops but maybe have a few animals like cows, and maybe an alpaca or a llama. I would chop wood all day. I would make a living doing that; it's, like, an idealistic scenario for me. It's very contrary to my upbringing, but maybe that's the appeal to it.
When men and women, boys and girls, are denied the right to education, the right to own land, the access to basic services like healthcare and clean water, a fair price for the crops they grow, a fair wage for the work they do, or the right to be part of making decisions that affect them, the result is poverty.
Will biofuel usage require land? Absolutely, but we think the ability to use winter cover crops, degraded land, as well as using sources such as organic waste, sewage, and forest waste means that actual land usage will be limited. Just these sources can replace most of our imported oil by 2030 without touching new land.
Harvesting the biosphere is still the most fundamental human activity. Without that, everybody's dead, really. We could do quite well without microchips, or the business site of 'Atlantic Monthly,' the gated communities, Guccis, and high-growth GDP. But we cannot do without harvesting the crops and cutting down the wood.
I have been intimately involved in the techniques of genetic modification as a scientist since GMOs were first conceived. In that time, hundreds of studies and tests have been done on GMO safety - and we've seen no scientific evidence that GMOs are inherently more dangerous than crops produced by traditional plant breeding.
I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries - the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.
I used to help my grandfather on the farm, driving tractors, raising crops and animals. I used to feed some of the baby cows and pigs, and I had to be no older than 7 or 8. Then at about 9 or 10 I started driving tractors. It showed me at an early age what hard work was all about and how dedicated you have to be, no matter what you do.
Growing up in Georgia, my dad was a farmer and we worked in agriculture, so we were always looking up at the sky, checking if rain was in the forecast. That always set the tone for the mood in my household, whether we had rain coming in or not - we knew the crops would be good and it was going to be a good week around the Bryan household.
