Crop Failure Quotes

A person whose main difficulty is not crop failure but video breakdown has less need of the consolations and promises of religion.

The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine. Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934, and especially the spike in the spring of 1933, were not caused directly by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.

Most of us spend the first six days of the week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.” -Fred Allen

A few words explanatory of that famine may not be amiss to some of our readers. The staple food of the Irish peasantry was the potato; all other agricultural produce, grains and cattle, was sold to pay the landlord’s rent. The ordinary value of the potato crop was yearly approximately twenty million pounds in English money; in 1848, in the midst of the famine the value of agricultural produce in Ireland was £44,958,120. In that year the entire potato crop was a failure, and to that fact the famine is placidly attributed, yet those figures amply prove that there was food enough in the country to feed double the population, were the laws of capitalist society set aside, and human rights elevated to their proper position.

All such questions as, for instance,of the cause of failure of crops, of the adherence of certain tribes to their ancient belief, etc.--questions which, but for the convenient intervention of the official machine are not, and cannot be solved for ages--received full, unhesitating solution.

The cascade of toxins and debris generated by humans destabilizes nutrient return cycles, causing crop failure, global warming, climate change and, in a worst-case scenario, quickening the pace towards ecocatastrophes of our own making. As ecological disrupters, humans challenge the immune systems of our environment beyond their limits. The rule of nature is that when a species exceeds the carrying capacity of its host environment, its food chains collapse and diseases emerge to devastate the population of the threatening organism. I believe we can come into balance with nature using mycelium to regulate the flow of nutrients. The age of mycological medicine is upon us. Now is the time to ensure the future of our planet and our species by partnering, or running, with mycelium.

If God, who loves us, has given us an instruction manual, and we ignore the instructions, we have no right to complain because we are miserable and hurt. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of Christians who sow their wild oats and pray for a crop failure.

Uncommon success is found on the spiritual plane; you can't get there through common convention or following others. Hard work is not enough; many work slavishly-hard for little reward. Intelligence is insufficient; how many educated and brilliant people there are who fail utterly and completely. Goodness is not enough; how many meek and good souls are tilled into the earth like manure by demigods to fertilize their golden crops. There is something more — it is the unseen essential, and everyone has access to it.

The cascade of toxins and debris generated by humans destabilizes nutrient return cycles, causing crop failure, global warming, climate change and, in a worst-case scenario, quickening the pace towards ecocatastrophes of our own making. As ecological disrupters, humans challenge the immune systems of our environment beyond their limits. The rule of nature is that when a species exceeds the carrying capacity of its host environment, its food chains collapse and diseases emerge to devastate the population of the threatening organism.

In this sense many apparently immoral beliefs are actually factual errors based on incorrect causal theories. Today we hold that it is immoral to burn women as witches, but the reason our European ancestors in the Middle Ages strapped women on a pyre and torched them was because they believed that witches caused crop failures, weather anomalies, diseases, and various other maladies and misfortunes. Now that we have a scientific understanding of agriculture, climate, disease, and other causal vectors—including the role of chance—the witch theory of causality has fallen into disuse; what was a seemingly moral matter was actually a factual mistake.

Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make.

From Boko Haram to ISIS to the Taliban and militant Islamic groups in Pakistan, drought and crop failure have been linked to radicalization, and the effect may be especially pronounced amid ethnic strife: from 1980 to 2010, a 2016 study found, 23 percent of conflict in the world’s ethnically diverse countries began in months stamped by weather disaster.

I’ve given them that land, and they need to repay me somehow. It’s a fair bargain. The trees don’t take up all of the land, and they can grow crops on the rest. I didn’t force them to it; they took the bargain of their own volition. Any failure is laziness on their parts.” He shook his head and took another drink. “You sound like one of the Shardless. Save your pity for the unfortunate without choices.

As much as God loves his children, it is misplaced faith that asks him to prevent all pain in this life, especially the pain we created for ourselves. When we ask God to remove the natural consequences of our own behavior, we set ourselves up for disappointment and frustration. As a wise friend once said, "It is foolish to think you can sow your wild oats on Saturday and pray for crop failure on Sunday.

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.

It is evident that most of what we think of as our medieval ancestors’ barbaric practices were based on mistaken beliefs about how the laws of nature actually operate. If you—and everyone around you, including ecclesiastical and political authorities—truly believe that witches cause disease, crop failures, sickness, catastrophes, and accidents, then it is not only a rational act to burn witches, it is also a moral duty. This is what Voltaire meant when he wrote that people who believe absurdities are more likely to commit atrocities.

She had survived to age twenty-two with only the usual signs of wear: mild nutritional deficiencies, self-diagnosed anxious attachment style, self-diagnosed avoidant attachment style, stiff neck from excessive phone use. She googled things like “wildfires europe” and “heat wave crop failure famine” and “when will dublin underwater” and “will england fuck ireland over” and “will WHAT IS HAPPENING IN england fuck ireland over” and “why am i lonely” and “why do i hate existing” and “how many painkillers to die” and “how much carpet cleaner to die” and “why wont the government let me die.

The more dutifully scholars acknowledge that the concept of race belongs in the same category as geocentrism or witchcraft, the more blithely they invoke it as though it were both a coherent analytical category and a valid empirical datum. In place of Jefferson’s moment of impassioned truth-telling, his successors fall back on italics or quotation marks, typographical abbreviations for the trite formula, ‘race is a social construction.’ The formula is meant to spare those who invoke race in historical explanation the raised eyebrows that would greet someone who, studying a crop failure, proposed witchcraft as an independent variable. But identifying race as a social construction does nothing to solidify the intellectual ground on which it totters. The London Underground and the United States of America are social constructions; so are the evil eye and the calling of spirits from the vasty deep; and so are murder and genocide. All derive from the thoughts, plans, and actions of human beings living in human societies. Scholars who intone ‘social construction’ as a spell for the purification of race do not make clear—perhaps because they do not themselves realize—that race and racism belong to different families of social construction, and that neither belongs to the same family as the United States of America or the London Underground. Race belongs to the same family as the evil eye. Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide. Which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion, a superstition, or a hoax. It is a crime against humanity.

The most disastrous obstacle to labor unity in the 1850s was the reaction of native workers to the arrival of several million impoverished Irish and German laborers who came in a flood after European crop failures of the 1840s. These new immigrants provided cheap labour power for the growth of New England factories as well as armies of raw muscle for railroad expansion and coalfields. They were met by the universal hostility of a native working class which rioted against them, evicted them from workplaces, refused them admission into trade unions, and tried to exclude them from the franchise. Partly rooted in economic rivalries in the labour market, the Yankee-versus-immigrant polarization in the working class also reflected a profound cultural antagonism that would hinder the efforts at labor unity for more than a century.

In winter, everything dies, though preparations continue. The tasks of winter include: • Getting the financials in order; • Squaring accounts with lenders for last years’ crops and lining up next year’s money; • Repairing equipment and getting it ready for next year; • Preparing fields for the upcoming year; and • Reviewing the successes and failures of the past year and tweaking things to do everything better next year.

One of the big problems in North Korea was a fertilizer shortage. When the economy collapsed in the 1990s, the Soviet Union stopped sending fertilizer to us and our own factories stopped producing it. Whatever was donated from other countries couldn’t get to the farms because the transportation system had also broken down. This led to crop failures that made the famine even worse. So the government came up with a campaign to fill the fertilizer gap with a local and renewable source: human and animal waste. Every worker and schoolchild had a quota to fill. You can imagine what kind of problems this created for our families. Every member of the household had a daily assignment, so when we got up in the morning, it was like a war. My aunts were the most competitive. “Remember not to poop in school!” my aunt in Kowon told me every day. “Wait to do it here!” Whenever my aunt in Songnam-ri traveled away from home and had to poop somewhere else, she loudly complained that she didn’t have a plastic bag with her to save it. “Next time I’ll remember!” she would say. Thankfully, she never actually did this. The big effort to collect waste peaked in January, so it could be ready for growing season. Our bathrooms in North Korea were usually far away from the house, so you had to be careful that the neighbors didn’t steal from you at night. Some people would lock up their outhouses to keep the poop thieves away. At school the teachers would send us out into the streets to find poop and carry it back to class. So if we saw a dog pooping in the street, it was like gold. My uncle in Kowon had a big dog who made a big poop—and everyone in the family would fight over it. This is not something you see every day in the West.

it is precisely their genius for interpretation that puts religious leaders at a disadvantage when they compete against scientists. Scientists too know how to cut corners and twist the evidence, but in the end, the mark of science is the willingness to admit failure and try a different tack. That’s why scientists gradually learn how to grow better crops and make better medicines, whereas priests and gurus learn only how to make better excuses.

Accidental nuclear war between two superpowers may or may not happen in my lifetime, but if it does, it will obviously change everything. The climate change we're currently worrying about pales in comparison with nuclear winter, where a global dust cloud blocks sunlight for years, much like when an asteroid or supervolcano caused a mass extinction in the past. The 2008 economic turmoil was of course nothing compared to the resulting global crop failures, infrastructure collapse and mass starvation, with survivors succumbing to hungry armed gangs systematically pillaging from house to house. Do I expect to see this in my lifetime? I'd give it about 30%, putting it roughly on par with my getting cancer. Yet we devote way less attention and resources to reducing the risk of nuclear disaster than we do for cancer. And whereas humanity as a whole survives even if 30% get cancer, it's less obvious to what extent our civilization would survive a nuclear Armageddon. There are concrete and straightforward steps that can be taken to slash this risk, as spelled out in numerous reports by scientific organizations, but these never become major election issues and tend to get largely ignored.

Although the life-changing power of positive thinking is available to all, some people experience difficulty in making it work. This is because of some strange psychological barrier that stands between them and the full use of positive thinking? One that keeps cropping up, is simply that they do not want it to work. They do not want to succeed. Actually, they are afraid to succeed. It’s easier to wallow in self-pity. So, we create our own failure, and when a suggestion ( such as positive thinking) comes along that will help overcome that failure, we subconsciously see to it that the suggestion doesn’t work, and so we

Contempt for causes, for consequences and for reality. Whenever an evil chance event a sudden storm or a crop failure or a plague strikes a community, the suspicion is aroused that custom has been offended in some way or that new practices now have to be devised to propitiate a new demonic power and caprice. This species of suspicion and reflection is thus a direct avoidance of any investigation of the real natural causes of the phenomenon: it takes the demonic cause for granted. This is one spring of the perversity of the human intellect which we have inherited: and the other spring arises close beside it, in that the real natural consequences of an action are, equally on principle, accorded far less attention than the supernatural (the so-called punishments and mercies administered by the divinity). Certain ablutions are, for example, prescribed at certain times: one bathes, not so as to get clean, but because it is prescribed. One learns to avoid, not the real consequences of uncleanliness, but the supposed displeasure of the gods at the neglect of an ablution. Under the pressure of superstitious fear one suspects there must be very much more to this washing away of uncleanliness, one interprets a second and third meaning into it, one spoils one's sense for reality and one's pleasure in it, and in the end accords reality a value only insofar as it is capable of being a symbol. Thus, under the spell of the morality of custom, man despises first the causes, secondly the consequences, thirdly reality, and weaves all his higher feelings (of reverence, of sublimity, of pride, of gratitude, of love) into an imaginary world: the so-called higher world. And the consequences are perceptible even today: wherever a man's feelings are exalted, that imaginary world is involved in some way. It is a sad fact, but for the moment the man of science has to be suspicious of all higher feelings, so greatly are they nourished by delusion and nonsense. It is not that they are thus in themselves, or must always remain thus: but of all the gradual purifications awaiting mankind, the purification of the higher feelings will certainly be one of the most gradual.

Of the 200,000 wild plant species, only a few thousand are eaten by humans, and just a few hundred of these have been more or less domesticated. Even of these several hundred crops, most provide minor supplements to our diet and would not by themselves have sufficed to support the rise of civilizations. A mere dozen species account for over 80 percent of the modern world’s annual tonnage of all crops. Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc, and sweet potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana. Cereal crops alone now account for more than half of the calories consumed by the world’s human populations. With so few major crops in the world, all of them domesticated thousands of years ago, it’s less surprising that many areas of the world had no wild native plants at all of outstanding potential. Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating.

In 1917 the government had closed the Winnipeg Grain Exchange and created a single Wheat Board to market grain. Farmers grumbled and then rejoiced as prices soared to a record $3.15 a bushel. After the 1919 crop, the Wheat Board dissolved and free enterprise returned. Earlier rural grumbles salved the politicians’ consciences; faith in the market did the rest. Despite serious crop failure after years of declining prairie productivity, wheat prices plummeted 45 per cent in two years. Farmers who had invested in land, machinery, and comforts in the confidence of high prices now had strong reasons for lamentation.

My earliest memory of the famine and the humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia included the reports of the drought and crop failure.

rains failed, there were crop failures, people starved. STUDENT: What’s that? CLIMATOS: It means that people died because they had no food. STUDENT: What? CLIMATOS: Yes, incredible as it may seem, they had nothing to eat,

One key to African growth is what happens to commodity prices. Many African countries have long been and are still dependent on exports of “primary” commodities, mostly unprocessed minerals or agricultural crops. Botswana exports diamonds; South Africa, gold and diamonds; Nigeria and Angola, oil; Niger, uranium; Kenya, coffee; Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, cocoa; Senegal, groundnuts; and so on. The world prices of primary commodities are notoriously volatile, with huge price increases in response to crop failures or increases in world demand and equally dramatic price collapses, none of which are easily predictable.

A peasant—a small landowner—resides on a small plot of privately owned lands, and engages in subsistence farming.25 As his margins of profit are slim, he can go into debt for any number of reasons: personal illness, crop failure, taxation, or the monopoly of resources by the state or private elite. His first line of recourse is to procure a loan, which he can only get at high interest. The high interest renders him insolvent, so he is forced to sell or deliver family members into debt-slavery, to pay off the debt (see 2 Kgs 4:1–7; Neh 5:1–13). When this does not secure the means to pay off the debt, he has to resort to relinquishing or selling his own land (Neh 5:1–13)—his means of production—and, finally, to selling himself. Thus, he is compelled to enter the service of the state or some arrangement of feudal sharecropping for the landowning elite.26

In the Middle Ages it was a lot more fun to blame things like crop failure or redheads on witches, then set mouthy old women or cats on fire to try to fix the problem. The real reason for famine was in fact more complicated, and involved meteorology and low temperatures and fungal infections and whatnot. But an angry, starving mob didn’t understand explanations about wheat blights half as well as they understood “evil sorcerers” standing right across from them, ready to be skewered with pitchforks.

The most disastrous obstacle to labor unity in the 1850s was the reaction of native workers to the arrival of several million impoverished Irish and German laborers who came in a flood after European crop failures of the 1840s. These new immigrants provided cheap labour-power for the growth of New England factories as well as armies of raw muscle for railroad expansion and coalfields. They were met by the universal hostility of a native working class which rioted against them, evicted them from workplaces, refused them admission into trade unions, and tried to exclude them from the franchise. Partly rooted in economic rivalries in the labour market, the Yankee-versus-immigrant polarization in the working class also reflected a profound cultural antagonism that would hinder the efforts at labor unity for more than a century.

Pages 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a laborer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labor was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty laborer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…

Whatever strategy we choose though, reframing remains an endeavor fraught with failure. The path to reframing has no reliable signposts, no straightforward cognitive processes, no dependable schedules. A new frame may crop up in a sudden rush or after years of plodding. And there is no guarantee of success at all.

These things were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not also a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.

Beans are a roof over your stomach. Beans are a warm cloak against economic cold. Only one thing could threaten the lives and happiness of the family of the Señora Teresina Cortez; that was a failure of the bean crop.

God overlooks so much in us. If the Holy Spirit convicted us of every sin, every day, every time, we would be miserable people. But He is longsuffering toward us and delights to show mercy. He does not overwhelm us with correction and commands, but gently leads us and chastens us. This kind of discipline "yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness" (Heb. 12:11), but the mother who whips her child with her tongue day in and day out will yield a crop of bitterness and resentment and probably rebellion as well. We want our children to enjoy their family, their time at home, their time around the table. "But surely every little failure need not be censured," says Matthew Henry. If they are berated and accused and constantly corrected, their lives will be a grief to them, not a joy. They should receive lots of love, encouragement, and praise, not just correction.

Of course, in those days everything was new. Death was Death, of course, but the rest were really just Localized Crop Failure, Scuffles, and Spots.

My mother had said, “Hunger, disease, war, warming—these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.” She looked around the table. “You’re all here with me in Shenzhen, trying to do your part to solve crop failure, which might be a step toward solving hunger and famine. Trying to be part of the solution.” She leaned forward, suddenly energized. “If more people were like us, imagine what we could accomplish. New crops to feed the millions going hungry. Stopping pandemics from raging across our world. Ending most disease and all poverty and all war. No more mass extinctions. Clean, renewable, limitless energy. Spreading into the solar system.” Twenty years later, as the hot water beat down on my back, I felt a chill run through me. “So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked. “Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.

In 1938, in a desperate effort to stop the Japanese advance in North China, Chiang ordered that the dikes of the Yellow River, not for nothing known as China’s Sorrow, be broken. This only delayed the Japanese advance while it created an inundation of the vast North China plain, with two or three feet of water sweeping over whole counties in several provinces. The flooding caused widespread crop failure such that at the worst of it ten thousand starving people each day were gathering in major cities seeking relief. In the end, 800,000 people died either directly of flooding or of starvation. In 1945, five million refugees were still in the places they had fled to.

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d

I love the story about the old farmer, ragged and barefooted, who sat on the steps of his tumbledown shack, chewing on a stem of grass. A passerby stopped and asked if he might have a drink of water. Wishing to be sociable, the stranger engaged the farmer in some conversation. “How is your cotton crop this year?” “Ain’t got none,” replied the farmer. “Didn’t you plant any cotton?” asked the passerby. “Nope,” said the farmer, “’fraid of boll weevils.” “Well,” asked the newcomer, “how’s your corn doing?” “Didn’t plant none,” replied the farmer, “’fraid there wasn’t going to be enough rain.” “Well,” asked the inquisitive stranger, “what did you plant?” “Nothing,” said the farmer, “I just played it safe.” A lot of well-intentioned people live by the philosophy of this farmer, and never risk upsetting the apple cart. They would prefer to “play it safe.” These people will never know the thrill of victory, because to win a victory one must risk a failure. C.

Anger is the agro-chemical that makes the weeds of failure to germinate and compete with your crops of success. Don’t apply it.

WASHINGTON had not paid his taxes for two years when he went as a delegate to attend the convention that made the Constitution of the United States. 1 Ford's edition of "The Federalist" says the " Father of his Country " was temporarily embarrassed, not by the failure of his crops, but by his inability to sell what he had raised. Whatever the reason, Washington had a great deal of property upon which to pay taxes. In the one sense that he was the richest man in America, he was the Rockefeller of his day. The schedule of property attached to his will footed up $530,-ooo. In Virginia alone he owned " more than 35,000 acres,'* valued at $200,000; "in Maryland, 1,119 acres, at $9,828; in Pennsylvania, 234 acres, at $1,404; in New York, about 1,000 acres, at $6,000; in the Northwest Territory, 3,051 acres, at $15,255; in Kentucky, 5,000 acres, at $10,000; property in Washington at $19,-132; in Alexandria, at $4,000; in Winchester, at $400; at Bath, $800; in government securities, $6,246; shares in the Potomac Company, $10,666; shares in the James River Company, $500; stock in the Bank of Columbia, $6,800; stock in the Bank of Alexandria, $1,000;

For the first time, I understood the ancients' need to find explanations for why things happen. It's a quintessential human imperative. Random is not emotionally satisfying. Therefore, lightning was the bolt from an angry god. Crop failure was punishment for failing to honor the gods with a fatted calf. The plague happened because you took the Lord's name in vain or coveted your neighbor's wife. Going to church regularly and praying could forestall illness. And on and on.

While trying to understand Cambodia, foreign writers sometimes fall into glib stereotypes and generalizations. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French writers routinely characterized the people as “obedient and lazy.” These people liked to note that Cambodians would plant just enough rice to feed their families and then go home. If fertilizer or a hybrid rice seed allowed them to double the size of their crop, they would grow only half as much. Philip Short, the British author, made the same point, concluding that “the perception of indolence has become part of the country’s self image, an explanation for its failure to keep up with its neighbors.” Michael

Don’t you know?” he asked with a great show of incredulity. “This is the latest scientific method. It can produce more.” I hadn’t planted rice seedlings before, but I knew what every Japanese kid learned in elementary school. If you plant rice seedlings too close together, they crowd one another out and can’t produce a decent crop. Rice Growing 101, if you like. But then I thought, This guy can’t be an amateur. He must know something I don’t. Maybe they’ve discovered something new. So I carried on. Needless to say, the crop was a miserable failure. I often wonder how many people starved as a result of that idiotic policy.

We've got a special on Cutwell's Shield of Passion ointment. Provides your wild oats while guaranteeing a crop failure, if you know what i mean

Consider the strategy of any typical early chartered corporation. In 1602, the Dutch Crown sanctioned the United East India Company to conquer territory and exploit resources in the Pacific. The Company’s scheme was to acquire lands in Indonesia by lending money to cultivators and then dispossessing them when they failed to make payments. This was made easier by trade policies that guaranteed the farmers’ failure. The Company got the Dutch to prohibit cultivation of the most profitable export crops—like cloves—on land not already under Dutch ownership. Loans failed, and more collateral in the form of land passed into Company hands. Indonesians lost access to the most fertile land, and were ultimately forced to buy their rice from United East India at the artificially inflated, monopoly-supported prices. The local economy was devastated as more land and labor were surrendered to the corporation. As

In the 1940s military and scientific personnel chose the Pajarito Plateau to site Project Y (or Site Y) of the secret Manhattan Project, where scientists would develop the atomic bomb. My grandmother’s family and other Nuevomexicanas/os and Tewa people were forcibly dispossessed of their ranches and sacred land on the Pajarito Plateau with inequitable or no compensation. Beginning in the 1940s, Lab personnel directed Valley vecinos2 to bury contaminated everything in the Los Alamos canyon and nearby along the Rio Grande. The soil and the water that Nuevomexicanas/os once used to irrigate crops is now polluted with toxic chemicals and remnants of nuclear materials.3 Cancer, thyroid disease, and unexplained organ failure, among other illnesses, now plague our community.

Understanding Financial Risks and Companies Mitigate them? Financial risks are the possible threats, losses and debts corporations face during setting up policies and seeking new business opportunities. Financial risks lead to negative implications for the corporations that can lead to loss of financial assets, liabilities and capital. Mitigation of risks and their avoidance in the early stages of product deployment, strategy-planning and other vital phases is top-priority for financial advisors and managers. Here's how to mitigate risks in financial corporates:- ● Keeping track of Business Operations Evaluating existing business operations in the corporations will provide a holistic view of the movement of cash-flows, utilisation of financial assets, and avoiding debts and losses. ● Stocking up Emergency Funds Just as families maintain an emergency fund for dealing with uncertainties, the same goes for large corporates. Coping with uncertainty such as the ongoing pandemic is a valuable lesson that has taught businesses to maintain emergency funds to avoid economic lapses. ● Taking Data-Backed Decisions Senior financial advisors and managers must take well-reformed decisions backed by data insights. Data-based technologies such as data analytics, science, and others provide resourceful insights about various economic activities and help single out the anomalies and avoid risks. Enrolling for a course in finance through a reputed university can help young aspiring financial risk advisors understand different ways of mitigating risks and threats. The IIM risk management course provides meaningful insights into the other risks involved in corporations. What are the Financial Risks Involved in Corporations? Amongst the several roles and responsibilities undertaken by the financial management sector, identifying and analysing the volatile financial risks. Financial risk management is the pinnacle of the financial world and incorporates the following risks:- ● Market Risk Market risk refers to the threats that emerge due to corporational work-flows, operational setup and work-systems. Various financial risks include- an economic recession, interest rate fluctuations, natural calamities and others. Market risks are also known as "systematic risk" and need to be dealt with appropriately. When there are significant changes in market rates, these risks emerge and lead to economic losses. ● Credit Risk Credit risk is amongst the common threats that organisations face in the current financial scenarios. This risk emerges when a corporation provides credit to its borrower, and there are lapses while receiving owned principal and interest. Credit risk arises when a borrower falters to make the payment owed to them. ● Liquidity Risk Liquidity risk crops up when investors, business ventures and large organisations cannot meet their debt compulsions in the short run. Liquidity risk emerges when a particular financial asset, security or economic proposition can't be traded in the market. ● Operational Risk Operational risk arises due to financial losses resulting from employee's mistakes, failures in implementing policies, reforms and other procedures. Key Takeaway The various financial risks discussed above help professionals learn the different risks, threats and losses. Enrolling for a course in finance assists learners understand the different risks. Moreover, pursuing the IIM risk management course can expose professionals to the scope of international financial management in India and other key concepts.

Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Quoting page 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…

The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century give us the starkest examples of such insanity. Stalin persecuted genetics researchers in the 1930s and ostentatiously praised the scientist Trofim Lysenko when he claimed that genetics was a “bourgeois perversion” and geneticists were “saboteurs”. The resulting crop failures killed millions. For an encore, Stalin ordered the killing of the statistician in charge of the 1937 census, Olimpiy Kvitkin. Kvitkin’s crime was that his census revealed a fall in population as a result of that famine. Telling that truth could not be forgiven. In May, the great crop scientist Yuan Longping died at the age of 90. He led the research effort to develop the hybrid rice crops that now feed billions of people. Yet in 1966, he too came very close to being killed as a counter-revolutionary during China’s cultural revolution. In western democracies we do things differently. Governments do not execute scientists; they sideline them. Late last year, Undark magazine interviewed eight former US government scientists who had left their posts in frustration or protest at the obstacles placed in their way under the presidency of Donald Trump. Then there are the random acts of hostility on the street and the death threats on social media. I have seen Twitter posts demanding that certain statisticians be silenced or hunted down and destroyed, sometimes for doing no more than publishing graphs of Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations. Even when this remains at the level of ugly intimidation, it is horrible to hear about and must be far worse to experience. It is not something we should expect a civil servant, a vaccine researcher or a journalist to have to endure. And it would be complacent to believe that the threats are always empty.

We were back at Agra about the middle of July. There had been no rainfall at Agra, which had a very dry climate. We were here over eighteen months before a spot of rain fell. Then it came down in sheets for nine or ten hours. Another twelve months passed by without a drop falling and then it rained again for about the same time. In spite of this absence of rain there was plenty of fresh water in Barracks: the bricked wells outside the bungalows supplied all that was needed. The natives living around Agra also depended on bricked wells for their water, and these had in some places been sunk and lined by the Government. But the agricultural natives had to water their crops from their primitive unlined wells, and if these caved in or went dry, as they often did, their crops would be ruined. The failure of these wells was one of the chief causes of the famine of 1906.

The challenge and the solution were described in memorable terms in September 1898 by William Crookes, a chemist and a physicist, in his presidential address on wheat delivered at the British Association’s annual meeting in Bristol. The most quoted sentence from his presentation was that “all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat,” and he estimated that the rising demand would bring a global wheat supply shortfall as soon as 1930. But he also identified the most effective solution and its most important component: increased crop fertilization and higher applications of nitrogen, the macronutrient that most often limits wheat (and indeed all cereal) yields. Crookes correctly observed that neither the animal manures nor the planting of green manures (alfalfa, clover) could meet future needs, and that the supply of the era’s only important inorganic fertilizer, Chilean nitrates mined in the desert of Atacama, was obviously limited. What was needed was to tap the unlimited supply of atmospheric nitrogen, to change the inert molecule (N2) that forms nearly 80 percent of air’s mass into a reactive compound (preferably ammonia, NH3) that could be assimilated by crops and supply the macronutrient guaranteeing higher yields.

Their benefits are indisputable: I have calculated that no less than 40 percent of the global population receive their dietary protein (directly from crops and indirectly from animal foodstuffs) from harvests that got nitrogen from the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia; in China, the share is about 50 percent.

Like nearly all beneficial inventions, however, this admirable solution has its drawbacks. To begin with, more than half of the applied nitrogen does not end up in crops but escapes through different routes (volatilization, leaching, erosion, bacterial conversion to nitrous oxide) into the environment. The global average for the share of nitrogen applications eventually ending up in harvested crops is now below 50 percent, and in China’s intensive rice farming the share is only about a third.

The widespread adoption of crop cultivation was predicated on the invention of numerous farm tools. The domestication of horses for riding started with bits and bridles (stirrups and saddles came much later). Draft animals required many specific designs for their harnessing to plows, carts, or wagons—collars, reins, traces, bellybands for horses, yokes for oxen.

Under the model of original monotheism we can draw three basic inferences. Figure 1.4. Decay of religions First, there is one decisive change—the move away from monotheism. This change has to be seen as a falling away, perhaps best understood as decay or corruption. Human beings turn away from God to something else: other gods, spirits, nature, even themselves. Apparently the God of the sky seemed too remote. In times of personal crises—a sick child, crop failure, marital problems—people believed that they needed more immediate help. Invoking the aid of fetishes or spirits seemed more potent. Thus God receded behind other spiritual powers. In biblical terms people worshiped the creation instead of the Creator. Second, there is no clear pattern in which this departure typically takes place. Monotheism could turn into henotheism, polytheism or animism. But one thing is certain: as monotheism was left behind, ritual and magic increased. This is not to say these elements do not occur within a fairly stable monotheistic context (of course they do!). However, once human beings abandon faith in one almighty, all-knowing God, the role that they play in attempting to find their own way in a world apparently dominated by spiritual forces becomes far more central, leading to an increase in spiritual manipulation techniques, such as magic and ritual. Third, once monotheism is abandoned, change usually continues to occur. Again, there is no mandatory sequence in which things rearrange themselves, but an increase in ritual and magic is most likely to be a part of it. Every once in a while throughout history, reform movements have called a culture back to a renewed awareness of God. Zoroastrianism and Islam are clear examples of such events. When they happen, even though there may be initial enthusiasm, chances are that there will also be an increase in tension between the idealists who are promoting the return to monotheism and those who do not feel free to give up their traditional faiths. This phenomenon may give rise to a serious tension between the ideal version of the religion and how its adherents actually practice it (they usually cling to rituals and veneration of spirits). In contrast to the neat pyramid associated with the evolutionary view (fig. 1.1), monotheism carries the liability of a tendency toward magic and ritual (fig. 1.3).

Other known alternatives included vapor-phase cracked refinery liquids, benzene blends, and gasoline from naphthenic crudes (containing little or no wax). Why did GM, well aware of these realities, decide not only to pursue just the TEL route but also to claim (despite its own correct understanding) that there were no available alternatives: “So far as we know at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these results”? Several factors help to explain the choice. The ethanol route would have required a mass-scale development of a new industry dedicated to an automotive fuel additive that could not be controlled by GM. Moreover, as already noted, the preferable option, producing ethanol from cellulosic waste (crop residues, wood) rather than from food crops, was too expensive to be practical.

As the substitution progressed, the average BTEX share rose from 22 percent to 33 percent of volume by 1990, and up to 50 percent in premium gasolines. This led to new health concerns, and the EPA eventually set the BTEX limit at 25–28 percent of gasoline volume, but concerns about the mixture’s health effects remain. Fortunately, there are no worrisome adverse effects caused by burning a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, and crop-derived ethanol (in the US overwhelmingly from corn, in Brazil from sugar cane) became the leading antiknocking additive. The rise of US ethanol began in earnest in 2005 when the Energy Policy Act set the minimum volumes of biofuels to be blended with transportation fuels, and in 2020 blends of 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent ethanol (known as E10) accounted for more than 95 percent of all fuel used by the country’s gasoline vehicles.

This history of DDT use makes it clear that the trajectory of its rise and fall has some obvious similarity to the ascent and eventual demise of leaded gasoline but that the overall cumulative impact of the insecticide’s large-scale and decades-long use is much harder to assess. Leaded gasoline did enable higher combustion efficiencies but there is little doubt that the health benefits resulting from reduced automotive emissions were far outweighed by the introduction of a known and persistent neurotoxin into the environment. In contrast, DDT’s indisputably positive role in eliminating malaria from many countries and reducing its burdens in others could have been even more positive had we not resorted to massive spraying of crops, which burdened the environment with a persistent pollutant and led to the widespread rise of DDT/DDE tolerance among targeted insects.

More important, that much-admired post-1970 ascent of electronic architecture and performance has no counterpart in nearly all other aspects of our lives: rapid exponential growth has not marked the advances in either fundamental economic activities on which modern civilization depends for its survival—ranging from crop yields to efficiency gains in energy uses, from transportation speeds to the ability to design and complete large engineering projects—or the critical determinants of health and quality of life, including the rate of new drug discoveries and gains in longevity.

Oh, they told me everything. About their families and crops, their animals, their failures and triumphs, the weather, their first time with a woman, how many shekels or denarii their neighbors still owed them or they owed their neighbors. What a blessing it was when a cloud crossed the sun. They talked about weakness and temptation and evil. And they talked about their hopes.

Wall Street professionals know that acting on "inside" tips will break a man more quickly than famine, pestilence, crop failures, political readjustments or what might be called normal accidents. There is no asphalt boulevard to success in Wall Street or anywhere else. Why additionally block traffic?

tn Heb “and it will become a pasture for cattle and a trampling place for sheep.” sn At this point one is able to summarize the content of the “sign” (vv. 14-15) as follows: A young woman known to be present when Isaiah delivered this message to Ahaz (perhaps a member of the royal family or the prophetess mentioned in 8:3) would soon give birth to a boy whom the mother would name Immanuel, “God is with us.” Eventually Immanuel would be forced to eat sour milk and honey, which would enable him to make correct moral decisions. How would this situation come about and how would it constitute a sign? Before this situation developed, the Israelites and Syrians would be defeated. But then the Lord would usher in a period of time unlike any since the division of the kingdom almost 200 years before. The Assyrians would overrun the land, destroy the crops, and force the people to subsist on goats’ milk and honey. At that time, as the people saw Immanuel eating his sour milk and honey, the Davidic family would be forced to acknowledge that God was indeed with them. He was present with them in the Syrian-Israelite crisis, fully capable of rescuing them, but he was also present with them in judgment, disciplining them for their lack of trust. The moral of the story is quite clear: Failure to appropriate God’s promises by faith can turn potential blessing into disciplinary judgment.

Daniel Mas Masumoto: The blade slices into the soil. My muscles tense and push the shovel into the moist ground. Dark and damp, the sweet warm smell of wet earth…I can’t count the thousands of shovelfuls of earth I have moved in my life. But I like to think of the thousands that lie in my future, if I am fortunate. Spring irrigation brings life to the orchards and vineyards. Peaches ripen and the scent of bloom lingers in the air…I guide the water into my fields in an act of renewal, I think of Paul, a farmer and oil painter friend. He enjoys experimenting with green, capturing the subtle nuances of a fresh leaf or the thriving growth of mid-spring or the weak yellow green of a cover crop on bad soil… Paul knows his paintings work when the farmers gravitate toward a few, attracted by the colors, and begin talking about his greens. The true green of a field has depth, like the mysterious colors of a clear by deep lake. Each shade has meaning we interpret differently. Paul says farmers are his best art critics, we know more of greens than anyone else. I’ve lost raisin crops, peach harvests, whole trees and vines. I’ve lost money, my time, and my labor. I’ve lost my temper, my patience, and, at time, hope. Most of the time, it’s due to things beyond my control, like the weather, market prices, or insects or disease. Ironically, the moment I step off my farm I enter a world where it seems that everything, life and nature, is regulated and managed. Homes are built to insulate families from the outside weather. People work in climate controlled environments designed to minimize the impact of weather. In America, a lack of control means failure…I’ve abandoned my attempts to control and compete with nature, but letting go has been a challenge. I’m trying to listen to my farm. Before I had not reason to hear the sounds of nature. The sole strategy of conventional farming seems to be dominance. Now, with each passing week, I venture into fields full of life and change, clinging to a belief in my work and a hope that it’s working.

It was still not too late to begin, but Jeeter did not have a mule, and he did not have the credit to purchase seed-cotton and guano at the stores. Up until this year, he had lived in the hope that something would happen at the last moment to provide a mule and credit, but now it seemed to him that there was no use hoping for anything any more. He could still look forward to the following year when he could perhaps raise a crop of cotton, but it was an anticipation not so keen as it once had been. He had felt himself sink lower and lower, his condition fall further and further, year after year, until now his trust in God and the land was at the stage where further disappointment might easily cause him to lose his mind and reason. He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION: More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book, Path of the Eclipse, I ran across references to the Year of the Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. 535-36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses—just the sort of event to set the speculative juices, flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice age—which indeed occurred—at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa; this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java—Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands—and opened the Sundra Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. 535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. It had been heralded by many months of regional instability, earthquakes, and drastic variations in ocean temperatures in and around what was becoming the Sundra Strait, making the shipping lanes more treacherous than they had been in the past. Many ships' captains reported dangerous sailing in and around Indonesia, and over time, merchant ships avoided the region. ¶ In April, following the eruption, the ash from the volcano had spread all around the world, and disaster followed after it, impacting global weather patterns and lowering the average temperatures sufficiently to keep crops from growing in most of Asia and Europe, as well as large portions of Africa and Americas. Although every part of the world was affected, there were regions that bore more of the brunt of the tragedy than others. Many of the nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppes were driven out of their traditional grazing lands when their herds began to die because of lack of food as the grasslands became arid plains, and their struggle to find new pastureland was made much more difficult by the impact of the colder weather; the significant westward migration from Central Asia began as an attempt to find grass for their herds. In China and Tibet, the snow that continued to fall all the way into June and July was yellow due to the high levels of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the eruption site, actual flakes of sulfur fell from the sky, burning people, animals, and fields alike and contaminating wells, springs, and rivers; the devastation of the Indonesian Islands was calamitous, with tens of thousands of people killed in tsunamis spawned by the eruption, by gaseous emanations, and by sulfur contamination, records of which still exist in the royal archives of the Srivijava Empire, which comprised most of modern Indonesia. For months afterward, the remains of humans, animals, trees, sea-life, and buildings washed up on the shores of what are now Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, China, and India.