Cattle Farmer Quotes

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It is said that water is for cattle and farmers, that milk is for children and blood for men.
Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz (St. Leibowitz, #1))
I am told by people all the time that they simply do not have time to read and listen to all the material they have purchased or subscribed to. But time is democratic and just. Everyone has the same amount. When I choose to read with my mid morning coffee break and you choose to blather about trivia with friends, when I choose to study for an hour sitting on my backyard deck at day's end but you choose to watch a TIVO'd American Idol episode, we reveal much. When someone says he does not have the time to apply himself to acquiring the know-how required to create sufficient value for his stated desires, he is a farmer surrounded by ripe fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and a herd of cattle on his own property who dies of starvation, unable to organize his time and discipline himself to eat.
Dan S. Kennedy
When the nettle is young, the leaves make excellent greens; when it grows old it has filaments and fibers like hemp and flax. Cloth made from the nettle is as good as that made from hemp. Chopped up, the nettle is good for poultry; pounded, it is good for horned cattle. The seed of the nettle mixed with the fodder of animals gives a luster to their skin; the root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow dye. It makes, however, excellent hay, as it can be cut twice in a season. And what does the nettle need? very little soil, no care, no culture; except that the seeds fall as fast as they ripen, and it is difficult to gather them; that is all. If we would take a little pains, the nettle would be useful; we neglect it, and it becomes harmful. Then we kill it. How much men are like the nettle! My friends, remember this, that there are no weeds, and no worthless men, there are only bad farmers.
Victor Hugo
Have you thought of doing it? Being a cattle farmer? If that's what it's called? I think we should do that, but replace cattle with bunnies and then we don't milk or eat the bunnies. We just let them multiply. Then we'll take over the world. Me the queen. You the king. Our bunnies the army nobody can defeat.
Katie McGarry (Chasing Impossible (Pushing the Limits, #5))
I tell you the truth - for a long, long time these farmers have worked like horses and cattle; and like horses and cattle they have died. The reason our religion has penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth is that it has given this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew. For the first time they have met men who treated them like human beings. It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts.
Shūsaku Endō (Silence)
Cattle did not have to be led to water. They came eagerly to the trough and drank while Almanzo pumped, then they hurried back to the warm barns, and each went to its own place. Each cow turned into her own stall and put her head between her own stanchions. They never made a mistake. Whether this was because they had more sense than horses, or because they had so little sense that they did everything by habit, Father did not know.
Laura Ingalls Wilder (Farmer Boy (Little House, #2))
I tell you the truth - for a long, long time these farmers have worked like horses and cattle; and like horses and cattle they have died. The reason our religion has penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth is that it has given to this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew. For the first time they have met men who treated them like human beings. It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts.
Shūsaku Endō (Silence)
When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom—goddammit!—herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon!—by God, yes! Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers
Edward Abbey (The Monkey Wrench Gang)
Following Homo sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep. Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries. The natural lifespan of wild chickens is about seven to twelve years, and of cattle about twenty to twenty-five years. In the wild, most chickens and cattle died long before that, but they still had a fair chance of living for a respectable number of years. In contrast, the vast majority of domesticated chickens and cattle are slaughtered at the age of between a few weeks and a few months, because this has always been the optimal slaughtering age from an economic perspective. (Why keep feeding a cock for three years if it has already reached its maximum weight after three months?) Egg-laying hens, dairy cows and draught animals are sometimes allowed to live for many years. But the price is subjugation to a way of life completely alien to their urges and desires. It’s reasonable to assume, for example, that bulls prefer to spend their days wandering over open prairies in the company of other bulls and cows rather than pulling carts and ploughshares under the yoke of a whip-wielding ape. In order for humans to turn bulls, horses, donkeys and camels into obedient draught animals, their natural instincts and social ties had to be broken, their aggression and sexuality contained, and their freedom of movement curtailed. Farmers developed techniques such as locking animals inside pens and cages, bridling them in harnesses and leashes, training them with whips and cattle prods, and mutilating them. The process of taming almost always involves the castration of males. This restrains male aggression and enables humans selectively to control the herd’s procreation.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
I am not a cowboy with a ranch and cattle, but I have this stable with some of the most beautiful horses in the world. I am not a farmer with a hundred-year-old farmhouse and acres of crops, but I have an island with acres of fertile land. I am not a mechanic with grease under my fingernails, but I know how to fix a flat tire. I am not your everyday average guy. I do not know if I can be one. But if you marry me, I will do my best to make your life as ordinary as you'd like.
Melissa McClone (Legenda Cincin (If The Ring Fits...))
It was William who would climb out of his carriage unafraid and help a farmer drive a herd of cattle or sheep across a road when necessary.
Lisa M. Prysock (To Find a Duchess)
He dug wells for a living and his customers were cattle ranchers and wheat farmers, which meant they were always about to go broke, except when they were rich.
T. Coraghessan Boyle (The Best American Short Stories 2015)
The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
Adults who could digest raw milk had an excellent source of food on the hoof. Cattle could go on turning grass into milk for years before they were slaughtered for beef. It has been proposed that lactase persistence was the genetic edge that allowed the dairy pastoralist Indo-Europeans to spread. Dairy farming produces five times as many calories per acre as raising cattle for slaughter.61 The protein and calcium of milk certainly build bones. Prehistoric dairy farmers tended to be taller than other farmers.62
Jean Manco (Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings)
We are duck farmers. We are The Overlooked. The most glamorous type of farmer is the cattle rancher, because they were made famous by cowboys. But people forget the humble duck farmer, and last time I checked, cows don’t lay eggs needed to bake superior cakes.
Jarod Kintz (World Farming Championship)
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.
Rachel Carson
the goddess knew that her daughter had been taken, and tore her hair into utter disorder, and repeatedly struck her breasts with the palms of both hands. With her daughter’s location a mystery still, she reproaches the whole earth as ungrateful, unworthy her gift of grain crops, and Sicily more than the others, where she has discovered the proof of her loss; and so it was here that her fierce hand shattered the earth-turning plows, here that the farmers and cattle perished alike, and here that she bade the plowed fields default on their trust by blighting the seeds in their keeping. Sicilian fertility, which had been everywhere famous, was given the lie when the crops died as they sprouted, now ruined by too much heat, and now by too heavy a rainfall; stars and winds harmed them, and the greedy birds devoured the seed as it was sown; the harvest of wheat was defeated by thorns and darnels and unappeasable grasses.
Ovid
In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches are the major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are responsible for up to a third of the clearing.) Fortunately, it is a relatively new practice, which means it has not yet had much time to cause damage. More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
Her father's old books were all she could command, and these she wore out with much reading. Inheriting his refined tastes, she found nothing to attract her in the society of the commonplace and often coarse people about her. She tried to like the buxom girls whose one ambition was to "get married," and whose only subjects of conversation were "smart bonnets" and "nice dresses." She tried to believe that the admiration and regard of the bluff young farmers was worth striving for; but when one well-to-do neighbor laid his acres at her feet, she found it impossible to accept for her life's companion a man whose soul was wrapped up in prize cattle and big turnips.
Louisa May Alcott (Work: A Story of Experience)
A behavior has occurred that is good, bad, or ambiguous. How have cultural factors stretching back to the origins of humans contributed to that behavior? And rustling cattle on a moonless night; or setting aside tending your cassava garden to raid your Amazonian neighbours; or building fortifications; or butchering every man, woman, and child in a village is irrelevant to that question. That's because all these study subjects are pastoralists, agriculturalists, or horticulturalists, lifestyles that emerged only in the last ten thousand to fourteen thousand years, after the domestication of plants and animals. In the context of hominin history stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, being a camel herder or farmer is nearly as newfangled as being a lobbyist advocating for legal rights for robots. For most of history, humans have been hunter-gatherers, a whole different kettle of fish.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
Summer, and hot. Full Earth had come to the land like a vampire lover that year, killing the land and the crops of the tenant farmers, turning the fields of the castle-city of Gilead white and sterile. In the west, some miles distant and near the borders that were the end of the civilized world, fighting had already begun. All reports were bad, and all of them paled to insignificance before the heat that rested over this place of the center. Cattle lolled empty-eyed in the pens of the stockyards. Pigs grunted lustlessly, unmindful of sows and sex and knives whetted for the coming fall. People whined about taxes and conscription, as they always did; but there was an apathy beneath the empty passion-play of politics. The center had frayed like a rag rug that had been washed and walked on and shaken and hung and dried. The thread that held the last jewel at the breast of the world was unraveling. Things were not holding together. The earth drew in its breath in the summer of the coming eclipse.
Stephen King (The Gunslinger)
14. A painting from an Egyptian grave, c.1200 BC: a pair of oxen ploughing a field. In the wild, cattle roamed as they pleased in herds with a complex social structure. The castrated and domesticated ox wasted away his life under the lash and in a narrow pen, labouring alone or in pairs in a way that suited neither its body nor its social and emotional needs. When an ox could no longer pull the plough, it was slaughtered. (Note the hunched position of the Egyptian farmer who, much like the ox, spent his life in hard labour oppressive to his body, his mind and his social relationships.)
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Adopt and rescue a pet from a local shelter. Support local and no-kill animal shelters. Plant a tree to honor someone you love. Be a developer — put up some birdhouses. Buy live, potted Christmas trees and replant them. Make sure you spend time with your animals each day. Save natural resources by recycling and buying recycled products. Drink tap water, or filter your own water at home. Whenever possible, limit your use of or do not use pesticides. If you eat seafood, make sustainable choices. Support your local farmers market. Get outside. Visit a park, volunteer, walk your dog, or ride your bike.
Atlantic Publishing Group Inc. (The Art of Small-Scale Farming with Dairy Cattle: A Little Book full of All the Information You Need)
I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry youeras too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixten inches of rain. And then the dry yars would come, and sometimes thre would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
A horse was hag-ridden. Its owners filled a bottle with its urine, stopped it with a cork, and buried it: the witch could not piece and died in agony. The air hummed with flies when the travellers approached the cattle - rich odors of dung and hay. They heard an ouzel's ringing tew tew tew; the peasants cupped their ears. Farmers tilled their small fields to the limit. Women carded and combed, clouted and washed, and peeled rushes as in Lynn. One woman became a man when he jumped over an irrigation ditch and his cunt dropped inside out: gender is the extent we go to in order to be loved. His mittens were made of rags.
Robert Glück (Margery Kempe)
In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence's own life would soon be, in a wink of earth's tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sherry horrible and disgusting. All fleshy acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy--the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem.
John Updike (In the Beauty of the Lilies)
In 1993, the FDA granted approval to Monsanto for its genetically engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), brand-named Posilac, for use by the nation’s dairy farmers. It increases milk production by about 10 percent over a cow’s life cycle. It’s the largest-selling cattle pharmaceutical in the United States. But Posilac has always been controversial. More and more cancer specialists are apprehensive, because it may increase the risk for breast, colon, and prostate cancers in humans. Unless the milk you’re drinking is clearly marked “organic” or “rBGH free,” it probably contains this hormone. Incidentally, Posilac is banned in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan. This should tell us something.
Vani Hari (The Food Babe Way: Break Free from the Hidden Toxins in Your Food and Lose Weight, Look Years Younger, and Get Healthy in Just 21 Days!)
For example, measles virus is most closely related to the virus causing rinderpest. That nasty epidemic disease affects cattle and many wild cud-chewing mammals, but not humans. Measles in turn doesn’t afflict cattle. The close similarity of the measles virus to the rinderpest virus suggests that the latter transferred from cattle to humans and then evolved into the measles virus by changing its properties to adapt to us. That transfer is not at all surprising, considering that many peasant farmers live and sleep close to cows and their feces, urine, breath, sores, and blood. Our intimacy with cattle has been going on for the 9,000 years since we domesticated them—ample time for the rinderpest virus to discover us nearby. As
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
Other men might deride farmers-turned-soldiers. Not he. Farmers knew what they were fighting for; farmers were used to death and killing, for they did it every autumn when they killed the cattle and swine that would feed them through the winter. The average citydweller might never see meat that was not already rendered into its component parts; the farmer had raised that “meat” from a baby, and had resisted his children’s efforts to name it and make a pet of it. Killing a cow was easier than killing a man? Not when the farmer had delivered the cow as a calf, had agonized over its illnesses, had called it to its food every day for all of its life, brought it all unaware into the killing shed, and stared into its eyes before killing it. Whereas the man he faced was a stranger, was hidden in his helm, and wanted to kill him. Then wanted to take his land, his goods, and his women. A farmer would have no difficulty in making the decision to kill a man.
Mercedes Lackey (Exile's Honor (Alberich's Tale, #1))
We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens. The chief duty of a king is to perform the rites of praise and placation as they should be performed, to observe care and ceremony and so understand and make known the will of the powers that are greater than we are. It is the king who tells the farmer when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, when the cattle should go up to the hills and when they should return to the valleys, as he learns these things from his experience and his service at the altars of earth and sky. In the same way it is the mother of the family who tells her household when to rise, what work to do, what food to prepare and cook, and when to sit to eat it, having learned these things from her experience and her service at the altars of her Lares and Penates. So peace is maintained and things go well, in the kingdom and in the house. Both Aeneas and I had grown up in this responsibility, and it was dear to us both.
Ursula K. Le Guin (Lavinia)
March 4 The Salt of the Earth Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.—Colossians 4:6 I grew up out in the country of east Tennessee, and our neighbors were dairy farmers. I remember the cows gathering around the salt-lick, a huge block of salt hung on a post about as high as the cattle’s mouth. They not only craved the salt, they needed it. All of us need a certain amount of salt in our bodies. This verse reminds me of a salt-lick. Just as all creatures crave salt, all people crave words of blessing and encouragement. Salt adds flavor. As Christians, our conversation should be flavored with words that bless the lives of others —words that compliment, build up, comfort, express kindness. Salt also preserves against corruption. The things we do and say can be a witness to others to bring them to the Lord; perhaps to bring them back to Him and help them remain faithful. In Matthew 5:13, Jesus tells his disciples that they are the salt of the earth, but warns them that if the salt loses its flavor, it is of no good to anyone. In Bible time, the salt they used was sea salt which was mixed with impurities. Those impurities caused the salt to lose its flavor. I have a friend who works for Morton Salt Company. He says their salt is 100% sodium chloride. It will never lose its flavor, because it is pure. You are the salt of the earth. Don’t let the impurities of the world cause you to lose your flavor!
The writers of Encouraging.com (God Moments: A Year in the Word)
The economy of the three countries was of course dependent on local conditions. In most places agriculture was the backbone of the economy, but the life of a Danish farmer was very different from that of a farmer in northern Scandinavia, where crops were much less important and people’s livelihood (mainly sheep and cattle) was often heavily supplemented by fishing and hunting reindeer, elk, birds and animals for their pelts. Seals, walruses and whales were also hunted, and natural resources such as iron deposits, or certain types of stone suitable for making cooking-pots, whetstones and querns, were another source of wealth.
Else Roesdahl (The Vikings)
How to Tell the Truth and Get in Trouble I am a fourth-generation dairy farmer and cattle rancher. I grew up on a dairy farm in Montana, and I ran a feedlot operation there for twenty years. I know firsthand how cattle are raised and how meat is produced in this country. Today I am president of the International Vegetarian Union. Sure, I used to enjoy my steaks as much as the next guy. But if you knew what I know about what goes into them and what they can do to you, you’d probably be a vegetarian like me. And, believe it or not, as a pure vegetarian now who consumes no animal products at all, I can tell you that these days I enjoy eating more than ever. If you’re a meat-eater in America, you have a right to know that you have something in common with most of the cows you’ve eaten. They’ve eaten meat, too.
Howard F. Lyman (Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat)
Roosevelt secured passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which levied a new tax on agricultural processors and used the revenue to supervise the wholesale destruction of valuable crops and cattle. Federal agents oversaw the ugly spectacle of perfectly good fields of cotton, wheat, and corn being plowed under. Healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs by the millions were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. Even if the AAA had helped farmers by curtailing supplies and raising prices, it could have done so only by hurting millions of others who had to pay those prices or make do with less to eat. Perhaps
Lawrence W. Reed (Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism)
Cattle and metal treasure were the main forms of wealth in ancient Ireland—metal because it was rare, and cattle because they were useful. Cattle provided milk to drink and to make into cheese, and hide and meat after they were dead. If a king demanded tribute from his subjects, it would probably be in the form of cattle—in fact, a wealthy farmer was called a bóiare, or “lord of cows.” In the famous poem Táin Bó Cuailnge, a major war starts because Queen Mebd discovers that her husband has one more bull than she does. Celtic chieftains spent quite a bit of their energy stealing cattle from one another. They even had a special word for this activity, táin. (Cattle raiding wasn’t just an amusement for the ancient Irish; modern Irish people were stealing one another’s cattle well into the twentieth century.)
Ryan Hackney (101 Things You Didn't Know About Irish History: The People, Places, Culture, and Tradition of the Emerald Isle)
Hillary came onto the national scene after using her husband’s cronies to steal $100,000 from the cattle futures market after a paltry $1,000 investment. I say steal unapologetically, given that statisticians report than any of us would have had a 31 trillion to 1 chance to replicate Hillary’s investment savvy. Not satisfied by rigging a system that cattlemen and farmers must assume is transparent and honest, Mrs. Clinton — of raise-taxes-for-the-public-good fame — then shorted the government in the reporting of some of her profits and was caught doing it.
Anonymous
Raised in privilege, Robert Moses was always cushioned from real life; from the age of nine, he slept in a custom-made bed and was served dinner prepared by the family’s cook on fine china. As Parks Commissioner, he swindled Long Island farmers and homeowners out of their land to build his parkways—essentially cattle chutes that skirted the properties of the rich, allowing those well-off enough to own a car to get to beaches disfigured by vast parking lots. He cut the city off from its waterfront with expressways built to the river’s edge, and the parks he built were covered with concrete rather than grass, leaving the city grayer, not greener, than it had been before. The ambient racism of the time hardly excuses his shocking contempt for minorities: of the 255 new playgrounds he built in the 1930s, only one was in Harlem. (Physically separated from the city by wrought-iron monkeys.) In the decade after the Second World War, he caused 320,000 people to be evicted from their homes; his cheap, sterile projects became vertical ghettos that fomented civic decay for decades. If some of his more insane schemes had been realized—a highway through the sixth floor of the Empire State Building, the Lower Manhattan Expressway through today’s SoHo, the Battery Bridge whose approaches would have eliminated Castle Clinton and Battery Park—New York as we know it would be nearly uninhabitable. There is a name for what Robert Moses was engaged in: class warfare, waged not with armored vehicles and napalm, but with bulldozers and concrete.
Taras Grescoe
The closer to the city, the higher the price of land. A farm that’s worth $2,000 an acre for growing food or raising cattle can be worth 20 times that (it goes up with each zoning upgrade) when it’s subdivided. A developer can make more money from turning an acre of farmland into housing than a farmer could make from a lifetime of selling produce off that acre. Combine this financial bonanza with dwindling incomes for aging farmers, and the pressure to get rid of near-urban farmlands is firmly in place.
Peter Ladner (The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities)
was not ethical in 1947 for scientists to use Africans as bait. That was progress. White farmers in some parts of colonial Africa protected their cattle from tsetse fly diseases by paying “fly boys.” Tsetse flies hatch near rivers and are attracted to dark colors—including black skin. Young men—the fly boys—would stand shirtless in riverside brush, slapping dead every fly that landed on them. At day’s end, they were paid a bounty per fly. The risk they took was that tsetses carry the parasite for sleeping sickness, a human disease that leads to a horrible death. It
Donald G. McNeil (Zika: The Emerging Epidemic)
The dark ages are obscure but they were not weird. Magicians there were, to be sure, and miracles. In the flickering firelight of the winter hearth, mead songs were sung of dragons and ring-givers, of fell deeds and famine, of portents and vengeful gods. Strange omens in the sky were thought to foretell evil times. But in a world where the fates seemed to govern by whimsy and caprice, belief in sympathetic magic, superstition and making offerings to spirits was not much more irrational than believing in paper money: trust is an expedient currency. There were charms to ward of dwarfs, water-elf disease and swarms of bees; farmers recited spells against cattle thieves and women knew of potions to make men more - or less - virile. Soothsayers, poets and those who remembered the genealogies of kings were held in high regard. The past was an immense source of wonder and inspiration, of fear and foretelling.
Max Adams (The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria)
It was announced, to awe and insult, that the subsidy for every head of EU cattle was more, per day, than the income of three Mexican farmers.
Raj Patel (Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated)
It hated humankind. Yet, the creature remembered when ancient ones left blood stained shrines in its honor. Its greedy eyes watched the peasants, sacrificing precious cattle, in the hope of immunity from its deadly wrath. The creature could recall dairy offerings on cottage steps, left in hope, that it would not invade the sanctity of the mortal homes to steal wailing newborn infants from their cradles. It listened to desperate prayers of farmers as they begged for their pitiful crops. When anglers sprinkled salt upon their fishing nets to satiate its thirst. The creature and its kind spread the killing frosts that foretold of harsh winters. It traversed the heat of the summer skies, voiding the air of moisture during the drought filled months. It burned those feeble little dwellings the people called churches.
Jaime Allison Parker (Storms In the Distant North)
In addition to the devastating ravages of capitalism, rural England in late Victorian times suffered a series of terrible natural calamities. In 1865–6 and 1877 outbreaks of cattle plague (rinderpest) and pleuropneumonia were so severe that the government had to restrict the movement of cattle and pay compensation to the owners of slaughtered beasts to check the spread of infection.8 A run of wet seasons from 1878 to 1882 produced an epidemic of liver-rot in sheep in Somerset, north Dorset and the Lincolnshire marshes – 4 million sheep were lost in the period.9 The floods caused wipe-out for many arable farmers. Foot-and-mouth disease raged, out of control, through British livestock from 1881 to 1883. Wheat and wool – the two staples of English and Welsh prosperity since the Middle Ages – fell into the hands of overseas markets.10
A.N. Wilson (The Victorians)
In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches are the major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are responsible for up to a third of the clearing.)
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker calculates the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies, arriving at an alarming 14 per cent. This figure appeared in respected journals like Science and was endlessly regurgitated by newspapers and on TV. When other scientists took a look at his source material, however, they discovered that Pinker mixed up some things. This may get a little technical, but we need to understand where he went wrong. The question we want to answer is: which peoples still hunting and gathering today are representative of how humans lived 50,000 years ago? After all, we were nomads for 95 per cent of human history, roving the world in small, relatively egalitarian groups. Pinker chose to focus almost exclusively on hybrid cultures. These are people who hunt and gather, but who also ride horses or live together in settlements or engage in farming on the side. Now these activities are all relatively recent. Humans didn’t start farming until 10,000 years ago and horses weren’t domesticated until 5,000 years ago. If you want to figure out how our distant ancestors lived 50,000 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from people who keep horses and tend vegetable plots. But even if we get on board with Pinker’s methods, the data is problematic. According to the psychologist, 30 per cent of deaths among the Aché in Paraguay (tribe 1 on his list) and 21 per cent of deaths among the Hiwi in Venezuela and Colombia (tribe 3) are attributable to warfare. These people are out for blood, it would seem. The anthropologist Douglas Fry was sceptical, however. Reviewing the original sources, he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorised as Aché ‘war mortality’ actually concerned a tribe member listed as ‘shot by Paraguayan’. The Aché were in fact not killing each other, but being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’, reads the original source, whereas they themselves ‘desire a peaceful relationship with their more powerful neighbors’. It was the same with the Hiwi. All the men, women and children enumerated by Pinker as war deaths were murdered in 1968 by local cattle ranchers.40 There go the iron-clad homicide rates. Far from habitually slaughtering one another, these nomadic foragers were the victims of ‘civilised’ farmers wielding advanced weaponry. ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion.
Rutger Bregman (Humankind: A Hopeful History)
Collective fines were imposed on the affected areas. Tribesmen were hit where it hurt most: their cattle were impounded. In February 1973, all facilities–shops, clinics, schools, churches, businesses and mills–were shut down in the Chiweshe TTL. Other areas were also ‘closed’ while the Rhodesian army swept them. ‘Inform on the guerrillas or your schools and shops will stay shut’ was the message. Although intelligence began to improve, these collective measures embittered the peasant farmers. Even
Paul Moorcraft (The Rhodesian War: A Military History)
A farmer slaughters his cattle because he must eat to survive, but he also protects the herd from thieves and predators. If you leave the pen, the wolves will find you, child.
Rachel Vincent (The Stars Never Rise (The Stars Never Rise, #1))
evolution of the lactase persistence allele, and it locates it in an area engulfing Slovakia, with Poland to the north and Hungary to the south. This fits with the archaeology, and the residues found in those Hungarian and Polish farmyard digs. At 7,500 years ago, these people were farmers with structured garden farms, where they grew wheat, peas, lentils, and millet. They husbanded cattle, swine, and goats, and occasionally hunted boar and deer on top of their agrarian lifestyle. They used flint and wooden tools, but not metal, and used earthenware vases, jugs, and pots with lined designs, from which we derive their name: Linear Pottery people.
Adam Rutherford (A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes)
Food animals also get antibiotics for “growth promotion,” a metabolically mysterious process that has made possible the entire high-volume, low-margin business of industrial-scale farming. Since the 1950s, when two pharma company scientists discovered that feeding chicks the waste products from drug manufacturing made them put on weight much faster, many U.S. farmers have been giving tiny doses of antibiotics to cattle, swine, and poultry.34
Maryn McKenna (Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA)
I LIVE IN A part of the country that at one time a good farmer could take some pleasure in looking at. When I first became aware of it, in the 1940s, the better land, at least, was generally well farmed. The farms were mostly small and were highly diversified, producing cattle, sheep, and hogs, tobacco, corn, and the small grains; nearly all the farmers milked a few cows for home use and to market milk or cream. Nearly every farm household maintained a garden, kept a flock of poultry, and fattened its own meat hogs. There was also an extensive “support system” for agriculture: Every community had its blacksmith shop, shops that repaired harness and machinery, and stores that dealt in farm equipment and supplies. Now the country is not well farmed, and driving through it has become a depressing experience. Some good small farmers remain, and their farms stand out in the landscape like jewels. But they are few and far between, and they are getting fewer every year. The buildings and other improvements of the old farming are everywhere in decay or have vanished altogether. The produce of the country is increasingly specialized. The small dairies are gone. Most of the sheep flocks are gone, and so are most of the enterprises of the old household economy. There is less livestock and more cash-grain farming. When cash-grain farming comes in, the fences go, the livestock goes, erosion increases, and the fields become weedy. Like
Wendell Berry (Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food)
Along with such worthies as Almond L. Bliss, Archimedes Stevenson, Alton F. Pratt, Dusenberry J. Furman, and Deacon Ransom Todd, he was one of several hundred individuals profiled in the 1888 commemorative volume Portrait and Biographical Album of Lenawee County, Mich. That publication extoled him as a “valuable citizen” who had become known throughout the locality as a stock breeder, first of short-horn cattle, later of Shropshire fine-wool sheep and Poland-China hogs. His prize bull, Garfield—a “fine, well-proportioned animal”—was the envy of neighboring farmers.3 In addition to his business pursuits, he served in a number of official capacities, including township drain commissioner. He was a pillar of his church, St. Dominic in the township of Clinton.4
Harold Schechter (Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer)
The missionary then told his congregation how after the Lord had instructed Adam and Eve to care for the Garden of Eden they were seduced by the serpent into committing mortal sin, as a result of which the Almighty “cursed the ground” and banished the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve to a life of toil in the fields. This particular Bible story made more sense to the Ju/’hoansi than many others the missionaries told them—and not just because they all knew what it meant to be tempted to sleep with people they knew they shouldn’t. In it they saw a parable of their own recent history. All the old Ju/’hoansi at Skoonheid remembered when this land was their sole domain and when they lived exclusively by hunting for wild animals and gathering wild fruits, tubers, and vegetables. They recalled that back then, like Eden, their desert environment was eternally (if temperamentally) provident and almost always gave them enough to eat on the basis of a few, often spontaneous, hours’ effort. Some now speculated that it must have been as a result of some similar mortal sin on their part that, starting in the 1920s, first a trickle then a flood of white farmers and colonial police arrived in the Kalahari with their horses, guns, water pumps, barbed wire, cattle, and strange laws, and claimed all this land for themselves.
James Suzman (Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots)
On another occasion, Kehoe purchased eight steers from a neighbor and pastured them in a field of wet clover, violating one of the cardinal rules of animal husbandry as laid out in Dr. C. D. Smead’s standard text Common Sense Treatment of Farm Animals: “All farmers should avoid turning cattle in fresh wet clover or alfalfa when they are hungry.”7 The predictable result of Kehoe’s heedless act was that two of the animals died from ruminal tympany, more commonly known as cattle bloat. After skinning the beasts and selling the hides, Kehoe returned to the seller and demanded “half of what he lost on the steers.” The man very naturally refused, knowing that the animals he’d sold were healthy. A brooding Kehoe, convinced he had been defrauded, stopped speaking to the neighbor.8
Harold Schechter (Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer)
Government grants for cattle farmers are a great way to grow your business. Grantees receive money to help with expenses such as feeding, water, and hay production.
Allen Marks
Still more striking, the people who built Stonehenge were not farmers, or not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: abandoning the cultivation of cereals and returning, from around 3300 BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people – with its own Woodhenge – in winter, but largely empty and abandoned in summer. The builders of Stonehenge seem to have been neither foragers nor herders, but something in between.41 All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foragers who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way.
David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
But the cat was out of the bag; in response to draconian tactics, in an unprecedented show of solidarity, farmers began to organize across caste lines, with Jat and Thakur landowners joining forces with cattle-rearing Gujars and the poor, uncompensated Jatav and Dalit workers who farm their lands.
Deepti Kapoor (Age of Vice)
Why do we continue to accept scarcity as given, treating it as the central organizing principle of our economics, policymaking, city planning, and personal ethics? Why do we continue to act like the farmer who, upon learning that his dog is lying on a pile of hay meant for cattle to eat and baring his teeth when the cows come near, chooses to drop their rations, feeding them with what scraps he can snatch from the edge of the pile? Why don’t we just move the dog?
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
I want you to give me a straight answer," Declan said. "Are you even thinking about going to college?" "No." It was satisfying and terrible to say it out loud, a trigger pulled, the explosion over within a second. Ronan looked around for bodies. Declan swayed; the bullet have clearly at least grazed him near a vital organ. With effort, he got the arterial spray under control. "Yeah, I figured. So the endgame is making this a career for you, isn't it?" This was not, in fact, what Ronan wanted. Although he wanted to be free to dream, and free to live at the Barns, he did not want to dream in order to be able to live at the Barns. He wanted to be left alone to repair all of the buildings, to raise his father's cattle from their supernatural sleep, to populate the fields with new animals to be eaten and sold, and to turn the very rearmost field into a giant mudslick suitable for driving cars around in circles. This, to Ronan, represented a romantic ideal that he would do much to achieve. He wasn't sure how to tell his brother this in a persuasive, unembarrassing way, though, so he'd said, in an unfriendly way, "I was actually thinkin' of being a farmer." "Ronan, for fuck's sake," Declan said. "Can we have a serious conversation for once?" Ronan flipped him the bird with swift proficiency.
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4))
I want you to give me a straight answer," Declan said. "Are you even thinking about going to college?" "No." It was satisfying and terrible to say it out loud, a trigger pulled, the explosion over within a second. Ronan looked around for bodies. Declan swayed; the bullet have clearly at least grazed him near a vital organ. With effort, he got the arterial spray under control. "Yeah, I figured. So the endgame is making this a career for you, isn't it?" This was not, in fact, what Ronan wanted. Although he wanted to be free to dream, and free to live at the Barns, he did not want to dream in order to be able to live at the Barns. He wanted to be left alone to repair all of the buildings, to raise his father's cattle from their supernatural sleep, to populate the fields with new animals to be eaten and sold, and to turn the very rearmost field into a giant mudslick suitable for driving cars around in circles. This, to Ronan, represented a romantic ideal that he would do much to achieve. He wasn't sure how to tell his brother this in a persuasive, unembarrassing way, though, so he'd said, in an unfriendly way, "I was actually thinkin' of being a farmer." "Ronan, for fuck's sake," Declan said. "Can we have a serious conversation for one?" Ronan flipped him the bird with swift proficiency.
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4))
I want you to give me a straight answer," Declan said. "Are you even thinking about going to college?" "No." It was satisfying and terrible to say it out loud, a trigger pulled, the explosion over within a second. Ronan looked around for bodies. Declan swayed; the bullet had clearly at least grazed him near a vital organ. With effort, he got the arterial spray under control. "Yeah, I figured. So the endgame is making this a career for you, isn't it?" This was not, in fact, what Ronan wanted. Although he wanted to be free to dream, and free to live at the Barns, he did not want to dream in order to be able to live at the Barns. He wanted to be left alone to repair all of the buildings, to raise his father's cattle from their supernatural sleep, to populate the fields with new animals to be eaten and sold, and to turn the very rearmost field into a giant mudslick suitable for driving cars around in circles. This, to Ronan, represented a romantic ideal that he would do much to achieve. He wasn't sure how to tell his brother this in a persuasive, unembarrassing way, though, so he'd said, in an unfriendly way, "I was actually thinkin' of being a farmer." "Ronan, for fuck's sake," Declan said. "Can we have a serious conversation for once?" Ronan flipped him the bird with swift proficiency.
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4))
Australian farmers whinge in cycles. When they’re not moaning about insufficient drought assistance, they’re demanding subsidised scuba gear for their cattle. This is because Australia doesn’t have regular seasons like other continents. Instead it has El Niño and La Niña, which are Spanish for shitty weather.
David Hunt (Girt (The Unauthorised History of Australia #1))
The theory of sport-as-sacrifice, argued convincingly by University of Illinois classics professor David Sansone in a provocative monograph, Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport, is that human beings developed sacrifice as a cosmic pay-it-forward strategy: you give something up so that your people can have that same thing in the future. When this ritual developed among hunter-gatherers, it involved the sacrifice of a hunted animal, so that there would be more animals to hunt in the future. In this ritual, two things were sacrificed. One was the animal. The other was the energy of the hunt, because it took a lot of work to kill that animal and haul it back home. When hunter-gatherers became farmers, they kept the ritual of blood sacrifice. They had animals—cattle, sheep, and goats—at the ready. They didn’t have to hunt them. But the fullness of the ritual was defeated by this very convenience. “It is not only that the life of the beast must be ‘taken’ in order for the hunter to survive,” Sansone notes. “The hunter must give of his own energy in order to get.”2 It was at this point that athletics, things like footraces, became associated with religious festivals. The animal was sacrificed, and the race—the energy of the hunt—was laid down alongside it. The energy of the hunt, the element that was missing from the sacrifice of a domestic animal, morphed and evolved into athletic ritual.
J.C. Herz (Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness)
What did it say about my grandparents' cattle farm, selling calves for seventy cents a pound live weight, but buying back steaks for ten dollars?
Forrest Pritchard (Gaining Ground: A Story Of Farmers' Markets, Local Food, And Saving The Family Farm)
Why do we continue to act like the farmer who, upon learning that his dog is lying on a pile of hay meant for cattle to eat and baring his teeth when the cows come near, chooses to drop their rations, feeding them with what scraps he can catch from the edge of the pile? Why don't we just move the dog?
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
Everyone who has a farmer or a rancher in their family knows they live out of their pickups. Everything important can be found in the cab, including wallets, bills to pay, cattle and seed records. The console is littered with dusty little notes about things that need to be done, jotted down on whatever may be handy---food wrappers, scrap paper, or cardboard from a tool package.
Kristi Noem (Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland)
This predator is a parasite, and like the ants of the acacia, we have become drunk with its potion. We have become as the roach injected by the wasp - calmly trapped in her burrow, being slowly consumed for our energy in the darkness of our own ignorance. The farmers are among us: we are their cattle and they are hungry
Dennis Nappi (I Am Human, Food for the Archons: Humanities Psychic Connection, Simulated Realities, Parallel Worlds, and the Manipulation of Mankind…)
Creation Myth I'm the great-grandson of a sheep farmer, child of sumacs, trash trees shedding their ancient scales. I'm drawn from fair grass on the north end, my molecules spat from coal and cattle, the Indiana dusk. I'm notes scrawled on freezer paper, the one looped oven mitt Aunt Bev crocheted while the baby lay feverish in its crib. I rise from a day gone thin as Cousin Ceily, who wore her cancer wigs to church. I come from boys unfastening in the 4-H bathroom, the stink of urinal cakes, dirty hands that scratched an itch. I breathe in arc welders and air compressors. I breathe out milk leaking from nurse cows, Uncle Jake's spoiled old bitches. I'm run through with moths and meth labs, a child of the KKK, men who lynched Tom Shipp from a split oak in Marion, August 1930. My cells carry his shadow swaying over uncut grass. They carry my second third cousin cheering in the back. I rise from aphids in honeysuckle, egg yolks flecked with blood. Born one humid summer night, my body hums like a black cricket, transmitting August across the fields. I sing till my throat bleeds. I smoke like a pan of scorched sugar. I'll never forget the miracle of firecrackers, freezer meat, murky gray lemonade. I'm born to thunder in the veins, a child of form, a rusted gasket ring, some disenchanted thing, the promise of a worm.
Bruce Snider (Fruit (Volume 1) (Wisconsin Poetry Series))
When collected, the simulations plot a map showing the highest chance of the evolution of the lactase persistence allele, and it locates it in an area engulfing Slovakia, with Poland to the north and Hungary to the south. This fits with the archaeology, and the residues found in those Hungarian and Polish farmyard digs. At 7,500 years ago, these people were farmers with structured garden farms, where they grew wheat, peas, lentils, and millet. They husbanded cattle, swine, and goats, and occasionally hunted boar and deer on top of their agrarian lifestyle.
Adam Rutherford (A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes)
Farmer’s Responsibility Circle - RC 1.    He would believe in God and grow foodstuff. 2.    First 5% he would offer to God. 3.    To maintain continuity he would preserve 15% towards the next crop. 4.    Next 15% would be reserved for his cattle and other animals 5. Self-consumption 25% 6.    35% set aside for his future (Retirement plan) 7. 5% towards charity.
R. Subramanya (Awaken The Millionaire Within: 21 Powerful Money Secrets)
Von Thünen’s abstract principles had strikingly concrete geographical consequences. A series of concentric agricultural zones would form around the town, each of which would support radically different farming activities. Nearest the town would be a zone producing crops so heavy, bulky, or perishable that no farmer living farther away could afford to ship them to market. Orchards, vegetable gardens, and dairies would dominate this first zone and raise the price of land—its “rent”—so high that less valuable crops would not be profitable there. Farther out, landowners in the second zone would devote themselves to intensive forestry, supplying the town with lumber and fuel. Beyond the forest, farmers would practice ever more extensive forms of agriculture, raising grain crops on lands where rents fell—along with labor and capital investment—the farther out from town one went. This was the zone of wheat farming. Finally, distance from the city would raise transport costs so high that no grain crop could pay for its movement to market. Beyond that point, landowners would use their property for raising cattle and other livestock, thereby creating a zone of even more extensive land use, with still lower inputs of labor and capital. Land rents would steadily fall as one moved out from the urban market until they theoretically reached zero, where no one would buy land for any price, because nothing it might produce could pay the prohibitive cost of getting to market.
William Cronon (Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West)
The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place, A green stone lying sideways in a ditch, Or any common sight, the transfigured face Of a beauty that the world did not touch.
John Connell (The Farmer's Son: Calving Season on a Family Farm)