194 Quotes About Farming

Wine is a gateway drug to environmentalism.

A farmer who neglects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

With tractors, you just don’t get the feel of tilling that land. So when planting season comes around, I use a hoe. To grow one useful whore, that’s the motto of my pimp farm.

En route to California I had a few drinks with an American executive for Falstaff Brewing Company who said he'd been a hobo from '37 to '39. He talked about a friend of his who had lost his legs beneath a freight train and died. He told me he knew something about farm labor contractors. "Killers," he called them. And said it again, "Killers.

‎A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. Its blackmail, really.

Our animals don't do drugs. Instead, we move them almost daily in a tightly choreographed ballet from pasture spot to pasture spot.

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,Is a mystery even now.For if a man should have been contentIt was him; two acres of barley,One of potatoes, four bullocks,A milker, a slated farmhouse.He was last seen going out to ploughOn a March morning, bright and early.By noon Brownlee was famous;They had found all abandoned, withThe last rig unbroken, his pair of blackHorses, like man and wife,Shifting their weight from foot toFoot, and gazing into the future.

Adam went on, “Every morning in the army that damned bugle would sound. And I swore to God if I ever got out I would sleep till noon every day. And here I get up a half-hour before reveille. Will you tell me, Charles, what in hell we’re working for?”“You can’t lay in bed and run a farm,” said Charles. He stirred the hissing bacon around with a fork.