Agriculture Love Quotes

There can be no such thing as a “global village.” No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.

We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture - it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we 'grow' our lives - we believe that we 'make' them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.

The ten billion animals that are killed every year for meat and the virulent consequences of contemporary animal agricultural practices remain conspicuously absent from public discourse. How often have you seen media exposés on the violent treatment of farm animals and the corrupt practices of carnistic industry? Compare this with the amount of coverage afforded fluctuating gas prices or Hollywood fashion blunders. Most of us are more outraged over having to pay five cents more for a gallon of gas than over the fact that billions of animals, millions of humans, and the entire ecosystem are systematically exploited by an industry that profits from such gratuitous violence. And most of us know more about what the stars wore to the Oscars than we do about the animals we eat.

All the backpedaling and backstepping that goes on with powerful women today, with Hillary Clinton saying she could have stayed home and baked cookies and blah blah blah, and then offending everybody so that she had to say that she does, in fact, *love* to make cookies, loves it almost as much as she likes to trade agricultural futures. I mean, what is that about? All this I'm really a lady, I'm really a nice girl crap- who needs it? It really is nothing more than surrender.

Anna Karenina was about how there were two kinds of men: men who liked women (Vronsky, Oblonsky) and men who didn’t really like women (Levin). Vronsky made Anna feel good about herself, at first, because he loved women so much, but he didn’t love her in particular enough, so she had to kill herself. Levin, by contrast, was awkward, boring, and kind of a pain, seemingly more interested in agriculture than in Kitty, but in fact he was a more reliable partner, because in the bottom of his heart he didn’t really like women. So Anna made the wrong choice and Kitty made the right choice.

If you are a feminist and are not a vegan, you are ignoring the exploitation of female nonhumans and the commodification of their reproductive processes, as well as the destruction of their relationship with their babies; If you are an environmentalist and not a vegan, you are ignoring the undeniable fact that animal agriculture is an ecological disaster; If you embrace nonviolence but are not a vegan, then words of nonviolence come out of your mouth as the products of torture and death go into it; If you claim to love animals but you are eating them or products made from them, or otherwise consuming them, you see loving as consistent with harming that which you claim to love. Stop trying to make excuses. There are no good ones to make. Go vegan.

The spectacle of this lovely nation, with its great agricultural wealth and its cultural riches , continually stepping on its own toes, made me wonder if France suffered a kind of national neurosis

After a few days of rain, the seedlings will push through the soil and unfold their tiny leaves. Two weeks later, if the rain is still good, we then carefully apply the first round of fertilizer, because each seedling requires love and attention like any living thing if it's going to grow up strong.

Ethan’s love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and “fellows doing things.

The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It's the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn't Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on postcards?

Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all-and to find in all of it opportunities for growth. If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture-it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we "grow" our lives-we believe that we "make" them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, snake meaning, make money, make a living, make love. I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, "How does a baby grow?" But an American child will ask, "How do you make a baby?" From an early age, we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere "raw material" that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it.

(Wolf) shrugged, without a hint of self-pity. "I don't know what they can or can't grow in the agriculture sectors. Whatever it is, I'm sure it can't compete with Benoit Farms and Gardens." His eyes twinkled, and Scarlet - to her own surprise - started to blush again. "You two are giving me a stomachache," Thorne griped. "I'm pretty sure that's the meat," said Cinder, ripping a piece of dried mystery meat with her teeth.

Embedded in every conversation about feeding people, conserving natural resources and ensuring a a healthy diet, both now and in the future, is the threat of the loss of agricultural biodiversity—the reduction of diversity in everything that makes food and agriculture possible, a shift that is the direct result of our relationship with the world around us.

Guy struck a jangling chord on the keyboards and then another. 'You know,' he announced, sitting back and crossing his arms. 'We need some new material. We’ve got to write some new songs.' 'Like what?' He shrugged. 'I don’t know. Throw out some ideas.' 'Love! Death! Existential struggle!' Emily intoned dramatically, rattling out a drumroll. 'Agriculture!

It is hypocritical to exhort the Brazilians to conserve their rainforest after we have already destroyed the grassland ecosystem that occupied half the continent when we found it. A large-scale grassland restoration project would give us some moral authority when we seek conservation abroad. I must admit that I also like the idea because it would mean a better home for pronghorn, currently pushed by agriculture into marginal habitats-The high sagebrush deserts of the West. I would love to return the speedsters to their evolutionary home, the Floor of the Sky. Imagine a huge national reserve where anyone could see what caused Lewis and Clark to write with such enthusiasm in their journals-the sea of grass and flowers dotted with massive herds of bison, accompanied by the dainty speedsters and by great herds of elk. Grizzly bears and wolves would patrol the margins of the herds and coyotes would at last be reduced to their proper place. The song of the meadowlarks would pervade the prairie and near water the spring air would ring with the eerie tremolos of snipe.

Culture, as in “agriculture”, is the cultivation of the soil from which men grow. To determine proper methods, we must have a clear idea of the crop. “What is man?” the Penny Catechism asks, and answers: “A creature made in the image and likeness of God, to know, love, and serve Him.” Culture, therefore, clearly has this simple end, no matter how complex or difficult the means. Our happiness consists in a perfection that is no mere endless hedonistic whoosh through space and time, but the achievement of that definite love and knowledge which is final and complete. All the paraphernalia of our lives, intellectual, moral, social, psychological, and physical, has this end: Christian culture is the cultivation of saints.

When the culture of the East, its chief characteristic, is added to the strength of body and the strength of mind of the agricultural center, its special contribution, and these two great characteristics are constantly imbued with the spirit of independence and love of liberty which lives in the hearts of the dwellers of the mountains, their main quality added to the national character, there is every reason to believe that we shall have a people and institutions such as will be permanent; with such wealth of resources, of such high education and intelligence, and of such vitality, of such longevity, of such devotion to freedom and hostility to centralization and tyranny as shall enable this Nation of ours to stand indefinitely; and to maintain in the future years its manifest destiny of leading the peoples and nations of earth in the principles of free government, constitutional security and individual liberty. Under these and under these alone, the faculties, the aspirations and inspirations of mankind may be unfolded into their full flowering to the fruition of an ever greater and more humane civilization.

We need to get beyond our ignorance of the other. We need to move beyond the thinking that white privilege means that all whites live a privileged life. This perspective ignores the reality of class in this country. The plight of poor whites was largely ignored until the last presidential election. According to the 2013 data from the US Department of Agriculture, 40.2 percent of food stamp recipients were white; 25.7 percent, black.4 What’s Their Story? We would do well to hear and learn from the stories of whites, especially those who share the common struggle of poverty and marginalization. In Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance shares his story of growing up poor: “To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”5 When we understand the details of the other’s story we realize that we have much more in common than we ever imagined.

When I first began to criticize small farming, a number of critics (most of them small-scale farmers) roundly condemned me for supporting agribusiness. In my favorite example to date, Joel Salatin, who figures prominently in the grass-fed-beef chapter, condemned my “love affair with confinement hog factories”! This reaction, while wildly inaccurate, is nonetheless important to take seriously. Most notably, it’s almost comically indicative of how narrowly we have framed our options. Joel was serious. His accusation shows that by constricting our choices to animal products sourced from either industrial or nonindustrial operations, by holding up the animal-based alternatives to industrial agriculture as our only alternative, we have silenced discussion of the most fertile, most politically consequential, and most reform-minded choice: eating plants. This alternative to the alternatives changes the entire game of revolutionizing our broken food system. It places the food movement on a new foundation, infuses it with fresh energy, and promotes the only choice that keeps agribusiness executives awake at night.

she approached the town of Pampa. This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept. No relief in any sense of the word. The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself. Dusty dead or dying halfheartedly planted trees floated by in Leila’s headlights. To her they were Texan and therefore lovely in their way. The Sonic parking

Then there is the very salient question of what the commandments do not say. Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly “in context” to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended? In verse 2 of the immediately following chapter, god tells Moses to instruct his followers about the conditions under which they may buy or sell slaves (or bore their ears through with an awl) and the rules governing the sale of their daughters. This is succeeded by the insanely detailed regulations governing oxes that gore and are gored, and including the notorious verses forfeiting “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” Micromanagement of agricultural disputes breaks off for a moment, with the abrupt verse (22:18) “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” This was, for centuries, the warrant for the Christian torture and burning of women who did not conform. Occasionally, there are injunctions that are moral, and also (at least in the lovely King James version) memorably phrased: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” was taught to Bertrand Russell by his grandmother, and stayed with the old heretic all his life. However, one mutters a few sympathetic words for the forgotten and obliterated Hivites, Canaanites, and Hittites, also presumably part of the Lord’s original creation, who are to be pitilessly driven out of their homes to make room for the ungrateful and mutinous children of Israel.

By first light, immigrants haul crates of melons and buckets of ice over the narrow cobblestone streets. Old men sell salted capers and branches of wild oregano while the young ones build their fish stands, one silvery torqued body at a time, like an edible art installation. It's a startling scene: gruff young palermitani, foul-mouthed and wreathed in cigarette smoke, lovingly laying out each fish at just the right angle, burrowing its belly into the ice as if to mimic its swimming position in the ocean. Sicilian sun and soil and ingenuity have long produced some of Italy's most prized raw ingredients, and the colors of the market serve as a map of the island's agricultural prowess: the forest green pistachios of Bronte; the Crayola-bright lemons and oranges of Paternò; the famous pomodorini of Pachino, fiery orbs of magical tomato intensity.

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

The principal energy sources of our present industrial civilization are the so-called fossil fuels. We burn wood and oil, coal and natural gas, and, in the process, release waste gases, principally CO2, into the air. Consequently, the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: Even a one- or two-degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences. In the burning of coal and oil and gasoline, we are also putting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere. Like Venus, our stratosphere even now has a substantial mist of tiny sulfuric acid droplets. Our major cities are polluted with noxious molecules. We do not understand the long-term effects of our course of action. But we have also been perturbing the climate in the opposite sense. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have been burning and cutting down forests and encouraging domestic animals to graze on and destroy grasslands. Slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial tropical deforestation and overgrazing are rampant today. But forests are darker than grasslands, and grasslands are darker than deserts. As a consequence, the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the ground has been declining, and by changes in the land use we are lowering the surface temperature of our planet. Might this cooling increase the size of the polar ice cap, which, because it is bright, will reflect still more sunlight from the Earth, further cooling the planet, driving a runaway albedo* effect? Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right, a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows. The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown.

But believe me, Henry. You’re not the first Snow White I’ve seen, and you probably won’t be the last. You’ll do what you can with the resources you have, and you’ll serve your story by trying to save me.” Sloane dropped her head again. “I should be trying to save you. That would subvert the narrative. But instead here we are, you saving me, or dying in the process. Dying is a lot more likely.” “Only if you take things at face value,” I said. “I’m not going to eat anything you hand me, drink anything you’ve touched, borrow your comb, or put on any of your rings. You know what I will do?” “What?” asked Sloane, not sounding as if she believed that the answer could matter in the slightest. “I’ll shoot you in your goddamn head if I really and truly feel that you’ve become a danger to yourself and others. And then I’ll take your body down to the folks in Agricultural and ask them to use you to fertilize an apple tree. And when you’ve grown to a lovely size and started bearing fruit, I will sit underneath you and not eat a single one of your inevitably poisoned apples.” Sloane glanced at me through her hair, and for a moment I actually saw a wisp of a smile on her face. “You’d do that for me?” she asked.

Allowing the utmost latitude to the love of power which any reasonable man can require, I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of the general government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description. The regulation of the mere domestic police of a State appears to me to hold out slender allurements to ambition. Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend all the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion; and all the powers necessary to those objects ought, in the first instance, to be lodged in the national depository. The administration of private justice between the citizens of the same State, the supervision of agriculture and of other concerns of a similar nature, all those things, in short, which are proper to be provided for by local legislation, can never be desirable cares of a general jurisdiction. It is therefore improbable that there should exist a disposition in the federal councils to usurp the powers with which they are connected; because the attempt to exercise those powers would be as troublesome as it would be nugatory; and the possession of them, for that reason, would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, or to the splendor of the national government.

As Marlboro Man slid open the huge barn doors and flipped on the enormous lights mounted to the beams, my heart began beating quickly. I couldn’t wait to smell its puppy breath. “Happy wedding,” he said sweetly, leaning against the wall of the barn and motioning toward the center with his eyes. My eyes adjusted to the light…and slowly focused on what was before me. It wasn’t a pug. It wasn’t a diamond or a horse or a shiny gold bangle…or even a blender. It wasn’t a love seat. It wasn’t a lamp. Sitting before me, surrounded by scattered bunches of hay, was a bright green John Deere riding lawn mower--a very large, very green, very mechanical, and very diesel-fueled John Deere riding lawn mower. Literally and figuratively, crickets chirped in the background of the night. And for the hundredth time since our engagement, the reality of the future for which I’d signed up flashed in front of me. I felt a twinge of panic as I saw the tennis bracelet I thought I didn’t want go poof, disappearing completely into the ether. Would this be how presents on the ranch would always be? Does the world of agriculture have a different chart of wedding anniversary presents? Would the first anniversary be paper…or motor oil? Would the second be cotton or Weed Eater string? I would add this to the growing list of things I still needed to figure out.

But I am pondering over the skill with which you have presented the whole argument in support of your proposition, Ischomachus. For you stated that husbandry is the easiest of all arts to learn, and after hearing all that you have said, I am quite convinced that this is so. Of course it is, cried Ischomachus; but I grant you, Socrates, that in respect of aptitude for command, which is common to all forms of business alike—agriculture, politics, estate-management, warfare—in that respect the intelligence shown by different classes of men varies greatly. [...]Just as a love of work may spring up in the mind of a private soldier here and there, so a whole army under the influence of a good leader is inspired with love of work and ambition to distinguish itself under the commander’s eye. Let this be the feeling of the rank and file for their commander; and I tell you, he is the strong leader, he, and not the sturdiest soldier, not the best with bow and javelin, not the man who rides the best horse and is foremost in facing danger, not the ideal of knight or targeteer, but he who can make his soldiers feel that they are bound to follow him through fire and in any adventure. [...]And this, in my judgment, is the greatest thing in every operation that makes any demand on the labour of men, and therefore in agriculture. Mind you, I do not go so far as to say that this can be learnt at sight or at a single hearing. On the contrary, to acquire these powers a man needs education; he must be possessed of great natural gifts; above all, he must be a genius. For I reckon this gift is not altogether human, but divine—this power to win willing obedience: it is manifestly a gift of the gods to the true votaries of prudence. Despotic rule over unwilling subjects they give, I fancy, to those whom they judge worthy to live the life of Tantalus, of whom it is said that in hell he spends eternity, dreading a second death.

Gods in The Lost Hero Aeolus The Greek god of the winds. Roman form: Aeolus Aphrodite The Greek goddess of love and beauty. She was married to Hephaestus, but she loved Ares, the god of war. Roman form: Venus Apollo The Greek god of the sun, prophecy, music, and healing; the son of Zeus, and the twin of Artemis. Roman form: Apollo Ares The Greek god of war; the son of Zeus and Hera, and half brother to Athena. Roman form: Mars Artemis The Greek goddess of the hunt and the moon; the daughter of Zeus and the twin of Apollo. Roman form: Diana Boreas The Greek god of the north wind, one of the four directional anemoi (wind gods); the god of winter; father of Khione. Roman form: Aquilon Demeter The Greek goddess of agriculture, a daughter of the Titans Rhea and Kronos. Roman form: Ceres Dionysus The Greek god of wine; the son of Zeus. Roman form: Bacchus Gaea The Greek personification of Earth. Roman form: Terra Hades According to Greek mythology, ruler of the Underworld and god of the dead. Roman form: Pluto Hecate The Greek goddess of magic; the only child of the Titans Perses and Asteria. Roman form: Trivia Hephaestus The Greek god of fire and crafts and of blacksmiths; the son of Zeus and Hera, and married to Aphrodite. Roman form: Vulcan Hera The Greek goddess of marriage; Zeus’s wife and sister. Roman form: Juno Hermes The Greek god of travelers, communication, and thieves; son of Zeus. Roman form: Mercury Hypnos The Greek god of sleep; the (fatherless) son of Nyx (Night) and brother of Thanatos (Death). Roman form: Somnus Iris The Greek goddess of the rainbow, and a messenger of the gods; the daughter of Thaumas and Electra. Roman form: Iris Janus The Roman god of gates, doors, and doorways, as well as beginnings and endings. Khione The Greek goddess of snow; daughter of Boreas Notus The Greek god of the south wind, one of the four directional anemoi (wind gods). Roman form: Favonius Ouranos The Greek personification of the sky. Roman form: Uranus Pan The Greek god of the wild; the son of Hermes. Roman form: Faunus Pompona The Roman goddess of plenty Poseidon The Greek god of the sea; son of the Titans Kronos and Rhea, and brother of Zeus and Hades. Roman form: Neptune Zeus The Greek god of the sky and king of the gods. Roman form: Jupiter

The blinking message light on the phone screamed at us when we walked into the bedroom of our suite. Marlboro Man audibly exhaled, clearly wishing the world--and his brother and the grain markets and the uncertainties of agriculture--would leave us alone already. I wish they’d leave us alone, too. In light of the recent developments, though, Marlboro Man picked up the phone and dialed Tim to get an update. I excused myself to the bathroom to freshen up and put on a champagne satin negligee in an effort to thwart the external forces that were trying to rob me of my husband’s attention. I brushed my teeth and spritzed myself with Jil Sander perfume before opening the door to the bedroom, where I would seduce my Marlboro Man away from his worries. I knew I could win if only I applied myself. He was just getting off the phone when I entered the room. “Dammit,” I heard him mumble as he plopped down onto the enormous king-size bed. Oh no. Jil Sander had her work cut out for her. I climbed on the bed and lay beside him, resting my head on his arm. He draped his arm across my waist. I draped my leg around his. He sighed. “The markets are totally in the shitter.” I didn’t know the details, but I did know the shitter wasn’t a good place. I wanted to throw out the usual platitudes. Don’t worry about it, try not to think about it, we’ll figure it out, everything will be okay. But I didn’t know enough about it. I knew he and his brother owned a lot of land. I knew they worked hard to pay for it. I knew they weren’t lawyers or physicians by profession and didn’t have a whole separate income to supplement their ranching operation. As full-time ranchers, their livelihoods were completely reliant on so many things outside of their control--weather, market fluctuations, supply, demand, luck. I knew they weren’t home free in terms of finances--Marlboro Man and I had talked about it. But I didn’t understand enough about the ramifications of this current wrinkle to reassure him that everything would be okay, businesswise. And he probably didn’t want me to. So I did the only thing I could think of to do. I assured my new husband everything would be okay between us by leaning over, turning off the lamp, and letting the love between us--which had zero to do with markets or grains--take over.

propose that we consider our farmers on a spectrum, let’s say, of agrarianism. On one end of the spectrum we have farmers like James, interested in producing the finest foodstuffs that they can, given the soil, the climate, the water, the budget, and their talent. They observe how efficacious or not their efforts are proving, and they adapt accordingly. Variety is one of the keys to this technique, eschewing the corporate monocultures for a revolving set of plants and animals, again, to mimic what was already happening on the land before we showed up with our earth-shaving machinery. It’s tough as hell, and in many cases impossible, to farm this way and earn enough profit to keep your bills paid and your family fed, but these farmers do exist. On the other end of the spectrum is full-speed-ahead robo-farming, in which the farmer is following the instructions of the corporation to produce not food but commodities in such a way that the corporation sits poised to make the maximum financial profit. Now, this is the part that has always fascinated me about us as a population: This kind of farmer is doing all they can to make their factory quota for the company, of grain, or meat, or what have you, despite their soil, climate, water, budget, or talent. It only stands to reason that this methodology is the very definition of unsustainable. Clearly, this is an oversimplification of an issue that requires as much of my refrain (nuance!) as any other human endeavor, but the broad strokes are hard to refute. The first farmer is doing their best to work with nature. The second farmer is doing their best despite nature. In order for the second farmer to prosper, they must defeat nature. A great example of this is the factory farming of beef/pork/chicken/eggs/turkey/salmon/etc. The manufacturers of these products have done everything they can to take the process out of nature entirely and hide it in a shed, where every step of the production has been engineered to make a profit; to excel at quantity. I know you’re a little bit ahead of me here, but I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question: What of quality? If you’re willing to degrade these many lives with impunity—the lives of the animals themselves, the workers “growing” them, the neighbors having to suffer the voluminous poisons being pumped into the ecosystem/watershed, and the humans consuming your products—then what are you about? Can that even be considered farming? Again, I’m asking this of us. Of you and me, because what I have just described is the way a lot of our food is produced right now, in the system that we all support with our dollars. How did we get here, in both the US and the UK? How can we change our national stance toward agriculture to accommodate more middle-size farmers and less factory farms? How would Aldo Leopold feel about it?

I know I’ll never get every single thing I dreamed of. I’ll never be thin. I’ll never win a Pulitzer or even, probably, the pie-baking contest at the Agriculture Fair in Truro every August (because I think the judges are biased against summer people, but that’s another story). I will never get a do-over on my first marriage, or on my older daughter’s infancy; I’ll never get to not be divorced. I will never give birth again, and neither of my births were what I’d hoped for. I’ll never get my father back; never get to ask him why he left and whether he was sorry and whether he ever found what he was looking for. But, dammit, I got this far, and I got some stories along the way, and maybe that was the point, the point of the whole thing, the point all along.

lanes. The mill wheel on the horizon turning its daily grind as chimneys breathed tendrils of smoke into the Wiltshire sky and smartly attired gentlemen played cricket on the Barley Field. Nothing now. Not even the distant din of agricultural equipment ploughing the fields. Just silence. Heavy. Oppressive. I glimpsed something then, a quick movement at the very edge of my field of vision. There were enough trees in the churchyard; it might easily have been a branch stirring on the wind . . . I looked to the great elm tree at the far end of the churchyard and saw, in the shadow cast by its overhanging branches, an ornate memorial stone fashioned from smooth white marble in the shape of a lamb. On either side of the lamb were two stone urns. Something told me there was only one family in Imber who could have afforded such a monument. With weather-worn angels looming on all sides of me, I crossed the churchyard to examine the impressive monument, and wasn’t surprised to find I was right. IN LOVING MEMORY OF PIERRE HOWISON HARTWELL APRIL 1925 – OCTOBER 1930

More and more companies and organizations worldwide discover the power of the heart on the work floor. Schools, hospitals, factories, commercial companies, agricultural institutions, charities, large or small, exchange more and more the power structure of the traditional pyramid with the power structure of self-organized teams, built upon a foundation of authenticity and purpose.

Humanity began in a precarious world where tiny bands foraged and scrimped for food by day, huddled together for warmth by night. With the advent of agriculture came mass aggregation in towns and cities. The industrial revolution took work out of the home, making the populace “a mass of undifferentiated equals, working in a factory or scattered between the factories, the mines, and the offices, bereft forever of the feeling that work was a family affair, done within the household.” Economies prospered as families dissipated. In pursuit of further riches, the information age demands a more thoroughgoing surrender—less time for relationships, less time for children, more time for impersonal everything. Before our lives wither away into dust, we might ponder how much more prosperity human beings can possibly survive.

LOVE IS THE FIRST CHEMISTRY; WAR IS THE FIRST HISTORY; DISCOVERY IS THE FIRST GEOGRAPHY; NATURE IS THE FIRST LANGUAGE; AGRICULTURE IS THE FIRST SCIENCE; BUSINESS IS THE FIRST MATHEMATICS; CULTURE IS THE FIRST ZOOLOGY; LAW IS THE FIRST PHYSICS; MEDICINE IS THE FIRST BIOLOGY; ENGINEERING IS THE FIRST EDUCATION; RELIGION IS THE FIRST GOD

What then do we mean by "virgin"? It may help us to examine those ways in which we use the word which are not directly concerned with sex. We speak of a "virgin forest" as being one in which the powers of nature are untrammelled and untouched by man. But we can think of this from two diametrically opposite points of view. We can think of it either from the view of the agricultural pioneer, who would regard it as something to be destroyed and uprooted as soon as possible; or else we can think of it from the point of view of a nature lover who would regard the virgin forest with awe as a supreme manifestation of pregnant nature, and who would oppose all the most enlightened efforts of the agriculturalist or town­-builder to destroy its primitive beauty,—who would, in fact, treat it as inviolably holy. The one would represent "law and order" and the other ''nature". So that we have here two opposite principles, both valid, the law of man in apparently open conflict with the law of God. Yet it is the law of God, the untrammelled law of pregnant though as yet chaotic nature that we dub "virgin", and it is the reduction of that chaos which we call Law and Order. Thus in this sense the word "virgin" does not mean chastity but the reverse, the pregnancy of nature, free and uncontrolled, corresponding on the human plane to unmarried love, in contrast to controlled nature corresponding to married love, despite the fact that from the legal point of view sexual intercourse within the marriage bond is the only kind which is regarded as "chaste".

They—those experts who seem to know everything—say that online dating is the biggest change to the mating ritual in a millennium. Once upon a time, your dating pool was limited to a small group of say fifty-to-a-hundred-plus people. It was an intimate, if somewhat shallow pool—your neighborhood, town, school, church. The first big change was the rise of agriculture and the growth of cities and towns. The pool got bigger, but ways to connect remained somewhat consistent in that you had to meet someone somewhere, or through someone else you know. Close tie connections—family, friends, geography. Then, enter the internet and the rise of dating websites, and that pool grew to essentially everyone else in the world looking for—whatever. Sex. Love. The fulfillment of whatever other appetite, need, desire. Some might view this is as a positive thing—this new era of choice, of plenty. But the truth is that these loose tie connections are almost never lasting. There’s no social obligation to treat people well. You’re not going to find yourself sitting in the church pew next your Torch date’s grandmother on Sunday. So, when you’re done with someone, you can potentially discard him, and realistically expect to never see him or anyone he knows again.

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common -- not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to see them to us at the highest profit. It fragments the Creation and sets the fragments into conflict with one another. For the relief of the suffering that comes of this fragmentation and conflict, our economy proposes, not health, but vast "cures" that further centralize power and increase profits... Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health -- and create profitable diseases and dependencies -- by failing to see the direction connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause new problems.

When a family of grandparents, the sons and wives, their grandsons who may also be married, live together, perhaps under the same roof and sharing the same hearth and kitchen, it is important that its members should be compatible to the greatest possible degree. Suppose a young man from a rural area went to agricultural college in Ludhiana and somehow met a medical student who, it may be adduced, came from a well-to-do urban family with servants who did the cooking and cleaning. They fall in love and marry. She gives up her training, as would normally be expected, to live with her husband’s family where she is expected to cook, clean, help on the farm and perhaps even lay a cow dung floor. This may be an extreme example but hopefully it demonstrates the importance of arranged marriages in an extended family culture and the sense of marrying within the occupational group. Even in a less contrasting situation a girl has to fit in with her mother-in-law who rules the kitchen, and with existing and therefore senior sisters-in-law.

The clear tendency of industrial agriculture has been to destroy any living thing that cannot be sold,

For Hmong, an additional layer of punishment was how life in the camps deprived them of their self-reliance. Officially, residents of Ban Vinai were not allowed to leave the camp. In the earlier years, some men and women made informal arrangements to work off-site, mostly as farm laborers. At no point, though, were they allowed to have their own farms: that would have taken land away from Thai farmers, and it might have encouraged the refugees to stay. While camp rations were meager, the cruelty of this prohibition was not the people’s hunger; it was that since before anyone’s memories began, agriculture had been the axis on which Hmong lives spun. Practically, farming designed how they spent each day. Societally, farming was the underpinning of their financial and cultural independence. Now it was gone. As if all the bones had been removed from a body, the structure of life had been taken away.

Breathe deep, baby girl, we won. Now life, though not exactly easier, is life all the time. Not chopped down into billable minutes, not narrowed into excuses to hurt and forget each other. I am writing you from the future to remind you to act on your belief, to live your life as a tribute to our victory and not as a stifling reaction to the past. I am here with so many people you love and their children and we are eating together and we are tired from full days of working and loving but never too tired to remember where we come from. Never exhausted past passion and writing. So, I am writing you now… Everybody eats. Everybody knows how to grow agriculturally, spiritually, physically, and intellectually…. We are more patient than we have ever been. And now

The plant loves disturbed places, especially agriculturally disturbed fields, and actively tries to colonize cultivated land. It is allelopathic (toxic to other plants) and can reduce domesticated crops up to 50 percent once it invades a planted field. It is considered highly noxious in scores of countries just for that reason. The plant has very few natural predators. I like it.

When Shi Qingluo, an agriculture expert, opened her eyes again after dying, she realised she had transmigrated as a farm girl in an ancient era. Her story started from when she was sold by her family, and was currently being forcibly taken away. She subdued evil with greater evil, and violence with greater violence, forcing the troublemakers to cry in defeat and ended up giving in to her. Then, she married off to another village. She became the wife of Scholar Xiao Hanzheng who was in a coma, and had just been abandoned by his extended family. Qingluo looked at Scholar Xiao’s frail mother, delicate younger sister, and obedient younger brother, and rubbed her chin out of satisfaction. From now on, they were all hers to protect. Since then, she took on the crucial role as the family’s breadwinner, led the family towards prosperity and accidentally became the nation’s wealthiest individual. Xiao Hanzheng woke up to find that his brother, who supposedly died from drowning, was alive and kicking. His sister was still at home. And their mother, who was supposedly eaten by wild beasts when she entered the forest in hopes of earning money to buy medicine, was still alive. More importantly, he even gained a capable wife after waking up. All of his immediate family members loved and relied on her. He looked at her and asked, “If you’re the breadwinner, what should I do?” His wife said, “You just have to look pretty, and earn a position in the government so that you can support me.” Xiao Hanzheng’s frozen heart suddenly came alive. “Sure!” Since then, he has worked hard in his career. He went from being an elementary scholar to a distinguished minister with great influence. He knew that from the moment he woke up, his wife was his saviour.

she approached the town of Pampa. This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept. No relief in any sense of the word. The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself. Dusty dead or dying halfheartedly planted trees floated by in Leila’s headlights. To her they were Texan and therefore lovely in their way.

Here are some tips to help you feed your family a healthy diet; they’ll save you money in the long run: 1. Skim Milk: skim milk has no empty calories, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture; serve that as alternative to whole milk or even 2%. 2. Extra Lean Ground Beef: extra lean ground beef also has no empty calories; regular ground beef gets about one quarter of its calories from fat. 3. Skinless Chicken Breast: A skinless chicken breast has no empty calories. Battered and fried chicken wings get almost 80 percent of their calories from fat. 4. Wheat Bread: Wheat bread, which should be a staple in virtually every home, has no empty calories; a croissant has almost 50 percent empty calories. 5. Junk Drinks: soda pop, beer, wine and distilled spirits all provide no nutritional value for their calories. Money spent here is simply wasted. 6. Toppings: Butter, margarine, cream cheese and whipped toppings are almost completely empty calories. 7. Water: water from the tap in America is generally safe to drink, virtually free and is the healthiest option for most people. 8. Eating at Home: At home, you have the opportunity to influence your family’s eating habits more than when you eat out. If you provide food they love to eat at home, you can save money by eating out less. If it’s healthy food at home,

Finn's love for seeds isn't going to instantly solve the onslaught of GMOs by giant chemical companies but it's a starting place. Ultimately, it's not about being against GMOs or against big, industrial agricultural chemicals; it's about being for what is good, and healthy, and right for us and the planet. If we do that, the bad stuff won't have a place.

The land's fruitfulness is the "natural" consequence of covenant faithfulness enacted on both sides, Israel's and God's. A productive land is a gift something like a child to a healthy marriage; in each case, thriving results from and witnesses to long-sustained faithfulness between two partners.

We all know the Lincoln of the Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address. We need to know the Lincoln of the Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society and of the Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, both talks in which he vents his favorite enthusiasms. We need to understand his thirst for economic and industrial development. We need to realize that he was a lawyer for corporations, a vigorous advocate of property rights, and a defender of an “elitist” economics against the unreflective populist bromides of his age. We need to focus on his love for the Founders as guides to the American future. We need to grapple with his ferocious ambition, personal and political.

Have you noticed that there are no local consumer electronics webs, run by earnest chaps with straggly beards called Hugo and Jake who are, ‘you know, just, like, trying to make a difference by cutting down the electronics miles on people’s phones in an attempt to save the planet’? Have you clocked that there is no such thing as an artisan mobile phone? This is because we understand that different parts of the world are better suited to different tasks. You don’t own a local phone because they make them better and cheaper in China, which is a very long way from where you are. Exactly the same applies to our food. Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Indiana – the entire US corn belt – grows so much of it because it has the right climate and the right soil to do so. Bemoaning industrial-scale agriculture in America on principle is about as sensible as criticizing China for making all those mobile phones. Which you wouldn’t do, because you bloody love your smartphone, don’t you, you dirty little digital warrior? And that sound is the penny suddenly dropping. Yes, you are absolutely right: this argument is going to kick ten tons of crap out of the local food movement. Have patience. We’ll get there.

But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.

Without taking use of ox or man, Or of creature as Mary desired, Without spinning thread of silk or of satin, Without sowing, without harrowing, without reaping, Without rowing, without games, without fishing, Without going to the hunting hill, Without trimming arrows on the Lord's Day, Without cleaning byre, without threshing corn, Without kiln, without mill on the Lord's Day. Whosoever would keep the Lord's Day, Even would it be to him and lasting, From setting of sun on Saturday Till rising of sun on Monday.17 Beltaine remained the central festival in the cycle of the agricultural pastoral year, the season of light, the time of growth. It was then that the sheep and cattle would be driven up to the summer pastures, the “shielings” in Scotland, the “hafods” in Wales. This was a virtual migration since these might be six or eight or even twelve or fourteen miles away, and it often meant crossing land that was rough and rugged or full of swamps, even sometimes having to swim across channels or rivers. The procession included the men carrying spades, ropes, and other things that might be needed to repair their summer huts, while the women carried the bedding, meal, and dairy utensils. As they went, there were songs to be sung on the journey, a dedicatory hymn to the Trinity and to the most familiar of the saints, Michael, Bride, and Columba, respectively the protector, the woman who knew about dairies, the guardian of their cattle—and, of course, to Mary herself, who on this occasion they address as mother of the White Lamb: Valiant Michael of the white steeds, Who subdued the Dragon of blood, For love of God, for pains of Mary's Son, Spread

Prince—young, handsome, idealistic—meets princess—beautiful, rich, going places. For two years of high school, they are together. Then the prince goes to study agriculture at Cornell and the princess ascends her ivy tower at Yale. For three more years, they defy the odds. They stay together. Love wins.

Nautical blue? Nah.” Her best friend, Chantal, used her fingertip to reveal the next set of colors. “Back in Chicago, with Lake Michigan nearby, maybe. But out here?” Her tone indicated just what she thought of the rural Illinois town. She tapped another hue on the swatch. “What you want here is cornflower blue.” Grinning, Simone shook her head. She’d missed joking around with Chantal. And nothing could dim her pride in the town’s agriculture. Their corn fed the nation. Lake Michigan was picturesque but cold and forbidding half the time.

All animal foods are inefficient. When you consider pasture and crops grown for feed, animals currently account for 77% of all the earth's agricultural land, but provide only 18% of our calories, and only 37% of our protein.

Maybe my ex-wife was right about meat. I tried to picture a life of soybean cheeseburgers, chile no carne, and hot dogs made out of seaweed. I’d rather die. All of a sudden I felt love and warmth for the Department of Agriculture.

DAVID NORRIS: But my God, as I said years ago, they’ve blessed bombs, agricultural implements and goldfish. And how do they know the goldfish aren’t lesbians? With goldfish it’s impossible to tell! … I think it’s terribly mean. Why couldn’t they give some kind of blessing to two people who love each other? If they’re prepared to bless bombs that blow people apart, and goldfish – whose sexuality is questionable – and tractors? Jesus! It’s so stupid.

Such an attitude does not come from technique or technology. It does not come from education; in more than two decades in universities I have rarely seen it. It does not come even from principle. It comes from a passion that is culturally prepared—a passion for excellence and order that is handed down to young people by older people whom they respect and love. When we destroy the possibility of that succession, we will have gone far toward destroying ourselves.

The biblical King David was also a sacred shepherd. His sensual and ecstatic songs of earthly love, so untypical of the Bible, derive from the ancient love rites of the shepherd king and the Goddess—her Canaanite names were Asherah, Astarte, Ashtoreth. The settled people of the Old Testament, like everyone else in the Near East, practiced Goddess worship. The Old Testament is the record of the conquest and massacre of these Neolithic people by the nomadic Hebrews, followers of a Sky God, who then set up their biblical God in the place of the ancient Goddess. The biblical Hebrews were a nomadic pastoral and patriarchal people, tribes of sheepherders and warriors who invaded land belonging to the matriarchal Canaanites. Both Hebrews and Canaanites were Semitic people. The Canaanites lived in agricultural communities and worshiped the orgiastic-ecstatic Moon Mother Astarte. As Old Testament stories relate, the Hebrews sacked, burned, and destroyed village after village belonging to the Canaanites, massacring or enslaving the people—a series of brutal invasions and slaughters described typically by theologians and preachers as “a spiritual victory.” In this way the Hebrews established themselves on the land, along with the worship of their Sky-and-Thunder God Yahweh (Jehovah), calling themselves his “chosen people.” Yahweh’s male prophets and priests, however, despite their political victory over the Canaanites, had to carry on a continuous struggle and fulmination against their own people, who kept “backsliding” into worship of the Great Mother, the Goddess of all their Near Eastern neighbors. For she had originally been the Goddess of the Hebrews themselves. This constant fight against matriarchal religion and custom is the primary theme of the Old Testament. It begins in Genesis, with the takeover of the Goddess’s Garden of Immortality by a male God, and the inversion of all her sacred symbols—tree, serpent, moon-fruit, woman—into icons of evil. Of the two sons of Eve and Adam, Cain was made the “evil brother” because he chose settled agriculture (matriarchal)—the “good brother” Abel was a nomadic pastoralist (patriarchal). The war against the Goddess is carried on by the prophets’ rantings against the “golden calf,” the “brazen serpents,” the “great harlot” and “Whore of Babylon” (the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar), against enchantresses, pythonic diviners, and those who practice witchcraft. It is in the prophets’ war against the Canaanite worship of “stone idols”—the Triple Moon Goddess worshiped as three horned pillars, or menhirs. One of her shrines was on Mount Sinai, which means “Mountain of the Moon.” Moses was commanded by “the Lord” to go forth and destroy these “idols”—who all had breasts. We are told monotheism began with the Jews, that it was the great “spiritual invention” of the religious leader Moses. This is not so. The worship of one God, like everything else in religion, began with the worship of the Goddess. Her universality has been duly noted by everyone who has ever studied the matter. “Monotheism, once thought to have been the invention of Moses or Akhnaton, was worldwide in the prehistoric and early historic world,” i.e., throughout the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. As E. O. James wrote in The Cult of the Mother Goddess, “It seems that Evans was correct when he affirmed that it was a ‘monotheism in which the female form of divinity was supreme.” The original monotheism of the Goddess is perhaps most clearly shown by the fact that, in Elizabeth Gould Davis’s words, “Almighty Yahweh, the god of Moses and the later Hebrews, was originally a goddess.” His name, Iahu ’anat, derives from that of the Sumerian Goddess Inanna.

Carl Hirschmann – Holden’s investment partner in the Mount Kenya Safari Club – was more than a Swiss banker as he was described in social registers. His diversified portfolio included machine tools, hotel industry, tourism, transportation, agriculture and real estate.

I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents’ money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here, what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, booklearned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes, the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis, the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets, strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments, ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant gunfire?

Nobody imagined what was really in store, but already in the 1920s almost everyone knew deep down that there was no future for the Jews either with Stalin or in Poland or anywhere in Eastern Europe, and so the pull of Palestine became stronger and stronger. Not with everyone, naturally. The religious Jews were very much against it, and so were the Bundists, the Yiddishists, the Communists, and the assimilated Jews who thought they were already more Polish than Paderewski or Wojciechowski. But many ordinary Jews in Rovno in the 1920s were keen that their children should learn Hebrew and go to Tarbuth. Those who had enough money sent their children to study in Haifa, at the Technion, or at the Tel Aviv gymnasium, or the agricultural colleges in Palestine, and the echoes that came back to us from the Land were simply wonderful—the young people were just waiting, when would your turn come? Meanwhile everyone read newspapers in Hebrew, argued, sang songs from the Land of Israel, recited Bialik and Tchernikhowsky, split up into rival factions and parties, ran up uniforms and banners, there was a kind of tremendous excitement about everything national. It was very similar to what you see here today with the Palestinians, only without their penchant for bloodshed. Among us Jews you hardly see such nationalism nowadays.

Our comrades in the textile industry have increased their production more than seventy-five percent.” Now they could show their delight, even though they could not hold hands or kiss, and everybody knew that there was nothing personal and selfish in the way they smiled at each other, that the light in their eyes and the tenderness of their smiles were due to the increase of the production rate of the textile workers and to the general economic growth of the country. There were no more private little worlds in China. He went on telling her all the good news, for it would be embarrassing to sit there in silence. There were many other things he wished to say, and above all he wanted to take her in his arms; he wanted that more than anything else in life, almost as much as he wanted the prosperity and freedom of Chinese people. It was time for him to go now, but he could not tear himself away and he sat there rather stiffly, with the red-star peaked cap on his knees and his shaved head exposed, trying to think of something more to say, some of those things that make a girl happy. “The figures show that we have raised both our industrial and agricultural output by ten percent this year.” This was a good excuse, and she took his hand in both of hers and pressed it lovingly. The doctors smiled, the nurses smiled and the patients smiled, sharing their happiness. He was the youngest general in the People’s Army, and though he had come to see his girl, he was addressing all of them and sharing his presence with them. She held his hand as long as she could without making it appear personal, and then he saw tears in her eyes, but it was all right, nobody could see them.

Parties are the basis of international government. Brewing beer wasn’t the sole focus of agriculture. But because it was so well loved and such a status symbol, producing enough of it was of major importance to the state, such as it was 14,000 years ago.

If there is a small silver lining to my continued unemployment, it is that I have increased my hours at the farmers' market, where I am surrounded by people who love growing and making food as much as I love eating, reading, and writing about it. Every market brings with it a new sensory adventure: the toothsome crunch of Rick's millet muffins, the brazen tang of his sourdough, the sharp and herbaceous scent of his cheddar dill scones. Instead of trying to force a food connection like I did at The Morning Show, I now live and breathe an agricultural smorgasbord on an almost daily basis, poring over luscious apples and lumpy, bumpy squash and fat loaves of buttery brioche. In a strange way, despite the meager pay, I finally feel as if I'm where I belong.

In agriculture the equation of invested input against gross yield is all: it does not matter if individual plants fail to thrive or die so long as the cost of saving them is greater than the cost of losing them…. This does not apply to the careful gardener whose labour is not costed, but a labour of love. He wants each of his plants to thrive, and he can treat each one individually. Indeed he can grow a hundred different plants in his garden and differentiate his treatment of each, pruning his roses, but not his sweet peas. Gardening rather than agriculture is the analogy for education.

We loved the wide-open west. Our explorations of the numinous Canadian landscape fed the songs, and our souls. We caught the west in the last of its wild state. Many of the songs I wrote in the seventies reflect our travels through the great expanse of the Canadian prairies, across the Rocky Mountains, to the moisture-rich West Coast. Space was everywhere, and there is space in the songs. Everything wasn’t a tourist trap yet, clear-cutting was not so evident, and agribusiness hadn’t completely killed off the family farm. In the first couple of years that Kitty, Aroo, and I travelled westward from Ontario, we were practically the only road campers out there. Seldom did we run across anyone else travelling the way we were. The prairies were full of abandoned old farmhouses—no families to be seen—harbingers of the reversion to feudal agricultural economics. All around the land still looked wild. Our journeys offered at least the illusion of freedom, as well as a deep sense of the land as Divine creation. Soon, though, we were seeing the spaces fill up with scabrous industrial sites, hotels, housing developments, shopping opportunities. We’d watch like gawkers at a train wreck as the land was eaten up before our eyes by inevitable human expansion and greed. There were ever more rules about where you could park your camper. It was the tail end of an epoch when the land was open and it, and we, could breathe freely. That will never come again.

If you’re pressed for time, you can get it delivered! In many cities, you can get a lovely, bountiful box of organic produce delivered to your home or office. Google “Farm Box” or “CSA Box” (it stands for “Community-Supported Agriculture”) to see the options in your area. Also, Google “Sherry Strong.” She’s a wonderful friend of mine, and she has a wonderful program called “How to eat organic for $70 a week or less.” Check it out. Make this happen for yourself. Your body is worth

Mendel died in 1884, not long after the church-state imbroglio; his nurse found him stiff and upright on his sofa, his heart and kidneys having failed. We know this because Mendel feared being buried alive and had demanded a precautionary autopsy. But in one sense, Mendel’s fretting over a premature burial proved prophetic. Just eleven scientists cited his now-classic paper on inheritance in the thirty-five years after his death. And those that did (mostly agricultural scientists) saw his experiments as mildly interesting lessons for breeding peas, not universal statements on heredity. Scientists had indeed buried Mendel’s theories too soon.

... Why come kick the table over? Couldn't he have just pulled up a chair with the rest of us?" "Some men just need to own everything." The voice was so quiet that it took Bobby a moment to realize that Clarissa had spoken. She was still making Ketchup art with her french fries and not looking at any of them. "What's that Peaches?" Amos said. ... "This sounds like personal experience." Bobby said cutting him off. "What are you thinking, Clare?" "...By owning and controlling a share in [ the rice growers' companies] my father was in a position to dictate policy to the Ganymede Agricultural Union. It meant, in terms Ganymede food production, he couldn't be ignored by the local government." "What did he use that for?" Bobby asjed. "Nothing," Clarissa responded with a delicate wave of one hand, " but he had it. He owned an important piece of Ganymede. A thing he hadn't conjtrioled before. And some men just need to own everything, everything that they lay their eyes that they don't posses, it's like a sliver in their finger." Clarissa pushed her soggy fries away and smiled at them all. "my father could be the kindest, most genrous, and loving man, right up until he wanted something and you wouldn't give it to him. I don't know why I think this, but Duarte feels the same. These are men that will mercilessly punish anyone who won't comply , but with tears in their eyes and begging them to tell you why you made them do it.

I soon learned, however, that my services would be required on stage that evening. Mrs. Grace Merriweather had composed an original pageant entitled Maycomb County: Ad Astra Per Aspera, and I was to be a ham. She thought it would be adorable if some of the children were costumed to represent the county's agricultural products: Cecil Jacobs would be dressed up to look like a cow; Agnes Boone would make a lovely butterbean, another child would be a peanut, and on down the line until Mrs. Merriweather's imagination and the supply of children were exhausted.

Aside from including several of Irving’s recipes in her book, they shared a number of overlapping themes: foremost among them was the idea that they were recording recipes rooted in a way of life that was on the verge of disappearing. In Honey from a Weed, Patience likened the endeavor to that of a musicologist who records old songs. It was an apt analogy: Just a few years before she and Irving took their trip to Lecce in 1958, American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and the Italian anthropologist Diego Carpitella had traveled through the south of Italy, including Puglia, recording folk songs. They started out in Martano, not far from Santa Maria di Leuca, and traveled north, documenting the songs of agricultural workers, shepherds, and peasants. In the text accompanying the recordings Lomax wrote, “It was a mythic time. None of us suspected that that world—made of music, songs, poverty, joy, desperation, custom, violence, injustice, love, dialect, and poetry, formed over the course of millennia—would be swept away in a couple of years . . . by the voodoo of ‘progress.’” Federman, Adam. Fasting and Feasting . Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

A farmer walks with a potential investor when he sees a lovely sheep in the yard, except that he has a wooden leg. The buyer questions, "Why the wooden leg?" The farmer responds, "That sheep is so clever, I let it take the children to school." "Good, so why the wooden leg?" "The sheep is so wise it has a certificate in gardening and agriculture." "Incredible! But why the stupid wood leg?" "Well, once you have a sheep that clever, you would not eat it at once!

By highlighting what she learned from Jimmy on these cross-country trips, Grace was affirming the political wisdom that he derived from his background and experiences that differed from hers—namely, his rural upbringing, experiences riding freight trains, and many years as an autoworker. She was also asserting the significance of their divergent backgrounds for their relationship. 63 Decades later, after they had made many more such trips over many years, she reinforced this point with a telling description of their trips: “Traveling along the highway, I would have my head in a book, while he was pointing out the cows and sheep, counting the freight cars and trying to figure out what they were carrying based on his knowledge of industry and agriculture in the region.” And this, she said, reflected not just their divergent personal styles but also their differing political styles: “My approach to political questions came more from books, his from experience.” 64 This duality of books and experience may have been exaggerated—theoretical concepts informed Jimmy’s political practice more than the statement would suggest—but it captures the complementary and cumulative nature of their collaboration. Combining their respective approaches to the politics that they engaged together, Grace and Jimmy could learn from each other, influence each other’s thinking, and grow together. This mutual growth came to be a crucial dynamic of their intellectual and political partnership, and this is what Grace was coming to see, and reporting to C. L. R. in their 1957 correspondence, as she weighed the decision to join him in London for several months.

October 14, 1954 in Washington, D.C. seemed like a day like any other, until we were dismissed from school early because the teacher said there was a bad storm coming. The sky was turning quite dark as we hurried home. “Grandma, why did the teacher tell us to go straight home?” Grandma was trying to remain her calm self, but I know how much storms terrified her. Argentina has the most severe lightning and tornadoes in the world. She was leaning against the kitchen counter in the corner to steady herself. She always said she would love to go hide in a closet during thunderstorms. “It’s a hurricane they’ve named Hazel. Your mom will be home soon, I hope. She is out getting more food and supplies like candles and batteries in case we lose power and have no light. We’re so lucky to have a gas stove so we can still cook.” Dad came home early from his job with the Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland and Mom made it home just before the winds started. Dad chided Mom, and lessened the tension with, “Now don’t be getting any notion of taking a bath, Eva Beat-rice, there is no time for that!” Dad liked to change the pronunciation of her middle name, Beatrice, to Beatrice when he was teasing her. Mom always ran the water and took a bath during every storm. Dad always said, “Someday you’ll be flying through the air in the bathtub and they’ll find you blocks away!

When we first started dating, he introduced me to all his friends and colleagues as his little firecracker. That's what he started calling me after our third date, when he brought me to a Redskins party at his friend Eric's place. Eric had decided to make buffalo chili, but, in what became clear to both me and everyone else at the party, he had no idea what he was doing. Two hours into the party, after all of us had blown through the bags of tortilla chips and pretzels, Eric was still chopping red peppers. Determined not to let a room of fifteen people go hungry, I rolled up my sleeves, marched into the kitchen, and grabbed my knife. "Okay, Bobby Flay," I said as I wielded my knife. "Time to get this show on the road." I chopped and minced and crushed at rapid-fire speed, and in no time, dinner was served. "Get a load of this firecracker," Eric said as he watched me work my magic. After that, the name sort of stuck. For a while, the nickname seemed like a good thing. Every time I would rail against fad diets or champion the importance of sustainable agriculture or lament the lack of food options in inner cities, Adam would laugh and say, "That's my little firecracker." He made me feel special, as if I were a vital part of his life. His parents were the only people from whom he seemed to hide me, and though it bothered me a little, I understood. I was the anti-Sandy. That's what made me attractive. But he hasn't called me his little firecracker in what feels like months now, and lately I feel as if he's hiding me from everyone. When did this little firecracker become a grenade?

For we must farm or die. In undertaking farming we undertake a responsibility covering the whole life cycle. We can break it or keep it whole. We have broken it, but there is yet time to mend it; perhaps only just time.

The world is huge,” muttered the witcher. “We can find room. There’s enough space.” “The world is huge,” repeated the elf. “That’s true, human. But you have changed this world. At first, you used force to change it. You treated it as you treat anything that falls into your hands. Now it looks as if the world has started to fit in with you. It’s given way to you. It’s given in.” Geralt didn’t reply. “Torque spoke the truth,” continued Filavandrel. “Yes, we are starving. Yes, we are threatened with annihilation. The sun shines differently, the air is different, water is not as it used to be. The things we used to eat, made use of, are dying, diminishing, deteriorating. We never cultivated the land. Unlike you humans, we never tore at it with hoes and ploughs. To you, the earth pays a bloody tribute. It bestowed gifts on us. You tear the earth’s treasures from it by force. For us, the earth gave birth and blossomed because it loved us.

Sometimes in the evening, around sunset, the colors of Via Appia are those of Tuscany. I learned of that northern region when I was very young, still a child. First in a travel guidebook. And then during a school trip. It was a civilization contemporary with Rome that has now disappeared. I wish I knew how to tell you about the beauty of that region, where that civilization and that philosophy occurred in a lovely and fleeting coincidence. I wish I could tell you about the simplicity of their existence, their geography, the color of their eyes, of their climates, their agriculture, their pastures, their skies.” (A pause.) “You see, it would be like your smile, but lost, untraceable after it occurs. Like your body, but vanished; like a love, but without you or me. And so how can one say? How can one not love?

The beneficiary of this regime of specialists ought to be the happiest of mortals —or so we are expected to believe. All of his vital concerns are in the hands of certified experts. He is a certified expert himself and as such he earns more money in a year than all his great-grandparents put together. Between stints at his job he has nothing to do but mow his lawn with a sit-down lawn mower, or watch other certified experts on television. At suppertime he may eat a tray of ready-prepared food, which he and his wife (also a certified expert) procure at the cost only of money, transportation, and the pushing of a button. For a few minutes between supper and sleep he may catch a glimpse of his children, who since breakfast have been in the care of education experts, basketball or marching-band experts, or perhaps legal experts. The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride. For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad, he is overweight, his health is poor. His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons. There is a fair chance that he will die of suffocation. He suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as other people’s. He wishes that he had been born sooner, or later. He does not know why his children are the way they are. He does not understand what they say. He does not care much and does not know why he does not care. He does not know what his wife wants or what he wants. Certain advertisements and pictures in magazines make him suspect that he is basically unattractive. He feels that all his possessions are under threat of pillage. He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility companies failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children ran away, if he should be found to be incurably ill. And for these anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts, who in turn consult certified experts about their anxieties. It is rarely considered that this average citizen 1s anxious because he ought to be because he still has some gumption that he has not yet given up in deference to the experts. He ought to be anxious, because he is helpless. That he is dependent upon so many specialists, the beneficiary of so much expert help, can only mean that he is a captive, a potential victim. If he lives by the competence of so many other people, then he lives also by their indulgence; his own will and his own reasons to live are made subordinate to the mere tolerance of everybody else. He has one chance to live what he conceives to be his life: his own small specialty within a delicate, tense, everywhere-strained system of specialties. From a public point of view, the specialist system is a failure because, though everything is done by an expert, very little is done well. Our typical industrial or professional product is both ingenious and shoddy. The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself. In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists

Several years ago I argued with a friend of mine that we might make money by marketing some inferior lambs. My friend thought for a minute and then he said, “I’m in the business of producing good lambs, and I’m not going to sell any other kind.” He also said that he kept the weeds out of his crops for the same reason that he washed his face. The human race has survived by that attitude, It can survive only by that attitude — though the farmers who have it have not been much acknowledged or much rewarded. Such an attitude does not come from technique or technology. It does not come from education; in more than two decades in universities I have rarely seen it. It does not come even from principle. It comes from a passion that is culturally prepared —a passion for excellence and order that is handed down to young people by older people whom they respect and love. When we destroy the possibility of that succession, we will have gone far toward destroying ourselves.

All human culture is narcissistic: being based in the violent negation and exclusion of all other forms of animal life, it collapses into toxic self-love. It thus inevitably destroys its own object, too, i.e. itself, because genuine love requires an Other.

significant difference between the economic systems of the North and South was not in industry versus agriculture but in motivation. The free Yankee worked to better himself. The Southern slave worked to keep from being punished. That difference was slowly rotting the South from the inside.