Crop Production Quotes

The great concerns of our time – climate change, natural resources, food production, water control and conservation, and human health – all boil down to the condition of the soil.

Higgledy piggledy, my black hen, She lays eggs for gentlemen. Gentlemen come every day To count what my black hen doth lay. If perchance she lays too many, They fine my hen a pretty penny; If perchance she fails to lay, The gentlemen a bonus pay. Mumbledy pumbledy, my red cow, She’s cooperating now. At first she didn’t understand That milk production must be planned; She didn’t understand at first She either had to plan or burst, But now the government reports She’s giving pints instead of quarts. Fiddle de dee, my next-door neighbors, They are giggling at their labors. First they plant the tiny seed, Then they water, then they weed, Then they hoe and prune and lop, They they raise a record crop, Then they laugh their sides asunder, And plow the whole caboodle under. Abracadabra, thus we learn The more you create, the less you earn. The less you earn, the more you’re given, The less you lead, the more you’re driven, The more destroyed, the more they feed, The more you pay, the more they need, The more you earn, the less you keep, And now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to take If the tax-collector hasn’t got it before I wake.

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a "scenic" area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has "outgrown

Be fruitful. God’s command in Genesis 1:28 is most often understood as referring to procreation, but filling the earth with people is only part of the meaning. The Hebrew word for fruitful means more than just sexual reproduction; it refers to being fruitful in either a literal or a figurative sense. Fruitfulness can be qualitative in nature as well as quantitative. Mankind has never had a problem being procreative—a current global population of over six billion is proof of that—but we do have a problem with being fruitful in the other ways God desires. Essentially, being fruitful means releasing our potential. Fruit is an end product. An apple tree may provide cool shade and be beautiful to look at, but until it produces apples it has not fulfilled its ultimate purpose. Apples contain the seeds of future apple trees and, therefore, future apples. However, apples also have something else to offer: a sweet and nourishing food to satisfy human physical hunger. In this sense, fruit has a greater purpose than simply reproducing; fruit exists to bless the world. Every person is born with a seed of greatness. God never tells us to go find seed; it is already within us. Inside each of us is the seed potential for a full forest—a bumper crop of fruit with which to bless the world. We each were endowed at birth with a unique gift, something we were born to do or become that no one else can achieve the way we can. God’s purpose is that we bear abundant fruit and release the blessings of our gift and potential to the world.

Doesn't the Federal Farm bill help out all these poor farmers? No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare ... It is this, rather than any improved efficiency or productiveness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by families. But those family-owned farms are the ones more likely to use sustainable techniques, protect the surrounding environment, maintain green spaces, use crop rotations and management for pest and weed controls, and apply fewer chemicals. In other words, they're doing exactly what 80 percent of U.S. consumers say we would prefer to support, while our tax dollars do the opposite.

In pursuit of making this quantity of food, agribusinesses have invested in a handful of high-yield crops and products,¶ typically grown or produced on land that should be tropical forest, using agrochemical inputs – fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, and lots and lots of fossil fuel of course. Supported by government subsidies, this approach has led to a global glut of commodity crop production, and declining food diversity.

Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20—25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.

People said this crop of youth was weak, but we knew differently. We knew they were so strong -- so much stronger than us, and equipped with better weapons, more effective tactics. They brought us to our knees with their softness, their consistent demand for the consideration of their feelings -- the way they could change all we thought would stay the same for the rest of our lives, be it stripping naked for male directors in undergraduate productions of The Bacchae, ignoring racist statements in supposedly great works of literature, or working for less when others were paid more. They had changed all that we hadn't been able to, and our defense was to call them soft.

We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die or hunger. The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets.

It is perennial crops, however, that offer the highest potential of any food production system to sequester carbon, especially when they are grown in diverse multilayered systems.

Unless you purposefully create spontaneity, your network will likely suffer the same fate as a garden that never experiences crop rotation—productivity will decrease.

We are swimming in land curses today. We have to be if we believe the Bible’s ethics and that God is consistent and just. It may be that we are so insulated from fluctuations in crop production and economics we do not realize it. Or it may be that we have become numb to the sin that’s everywhere present. But the Bible says we’re guilty, and the data shows it is happening.

Genetic engineering and such products as Monsanto’s “Terminator” seeds, which cannot reproduce, could conceivably give that company proprietary control over the food crops. Glyphosate-based

Many California farmers have transitioned from delicate crops like tomatoes to more robust nuts because they can be harvested mechanically. Overall agricultural employment in California fell by about 11 percent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, even as the total production of crops like almonds, which are compatible with automated farming techniques, has exploded.

self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers.

Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut--hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs--products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"--as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place. Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side. He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work. Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.

It’s the Law of Unintended Consequences, Art thinks as he watches the federales. Operation Condor was intended to cut the Sinaloan cancer out of Mexico, but what it did instead was spread it through the entire body. And you have to give the Sinaloans credit—their response to their little diaspora was pure genius. Somewhere along the line they figured out that their real product isn’t drugs, it’s the two-thousand-mile border they share with the United States, and their ability to move contraband across it. Land can be burned, crops can be poisoned, people can be displaced, but that border—that border isn’t going anywhere. A product that might be worth a few cents one inch on their side of the border is worth thousands just one inch on the other side.

Corn is at the core of modern agribusiness, the most important food crop in North America. In no other crop are the values of modern commercial agribusiness as thoroughly embedded. There is nothing we can do that is ultimately subversive - there is no act of gardening that is so profound a rebellion, there is no act of eating that is so potent a blow for food quality and food system sanity - as to take back the corn crop in our own backyards, and grow, breed, eat, and save seed of corn based upon an entirely different set of values.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that current food production can sustain world food needs even for the 8 billion people who are projected to inhabit the planet in 2030. This will hold even with anticipated increases in meat consumption, and without adding genetically modified crops.

The construction of castle arbours, monastic cloister gardens and Byzantine courtyards with trees and flowers attested to Western interest in the natural world. Paradise remained synonymous with perfect environments. In Anglo-Saxon, 'paradise' translated as 'meadow' or 'pasture'. Notions of a classical Golden Age, local legends, religion and romantic poetry all perpetuated the concept of nature as a refuge from society. For the nobility, nature signified a retreat for aesthetic pleasure and a venue for spiritual uplift. However, for the average medieval peasant, the organic world meant livestock rearing and crop production.

Although per capita income doubled during the half-century, not all sectors of society shared equally in this abundance. While both rich and poor enjoyed rising incomes, their inequality of wealth widened significantly. As the population began to move from farm to city, farmers increasingly specialized in the production of crops for the market rather than for home consumption. The manufacture of cloth, clothing, leather goods, tools, and other products shifted from home to shop and from shop to factory. In the process many women experienced a change in roles from producers to consumers with a consequent transition in status. Some craftsmen suffered debasement of their skills as the division of labor and power-driven machinery eroded the traditional handicraft methods of production and transformed them from self-employed artisans to wage laborers. The resulting potential for class conflict threatened the social fabric of this brave new republic.

Those same three factors applied to human beings. Like bees, our ancestors were (1) territorial creatures with a fondness for defensible nests (such as caves) who (2) gave birth to needy offspring that required enormous amounts of care, which had to be given while (3) the group was under threat from neighboring groups. For hundreds of thousands of years, therefore, conditions were in place that pulled for the evolution of ultrasociality, and as a result, we are the only ultrasocial primate. The human lineage may have started off acting very much like chimps,48 but by the time our ancestors started walking out of Africa, they had become at least a little bit like bees. And much later, when some groups began planting crops and orchards, and then building granaries, storage sheds, fenced pastures, and permanent homes, they had an even steadier food supply that had to be defended even more vigorously. Like bees, humans began building ever more elaborate nests, and in just a few thousand years, a new kind of vehicle appeared on Earth—the city-state, able to raise walls and armies.49 City-states and, later, empires spread rapidly across Eurasia, North Africa, and Mesoamerica, changing many of the Earth’s ecosystems and allowing the total tonnage of human beings to shoot up from insignificance at the start of the Holocene (around twelve thousand years ago) to world domination today.50 As the colonial insects did to the other insects, we have pushed all other mammals to the margins, to extinction, or to servitude. The analogy to bees is not shallow or loose. Despite their many differences, human civilizations and beehives are both products of major transitions in evolutionary history. They are motorboats.

You see the impact of humans on Earth’s environment every day. We are trashing the place: There is plastic along our highways, the smell of a landfill, the carbonic acid (formed when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water) bleaching of coral reefs, the desertification of enormous areas of China and Africa (readily seen in satellite images), and a huge patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. All of these are direct evidence of our effect on our world. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate. Many people naïvely (and some, perhaps, deceptively) argue that loss of species is not that important. After all, we can see in the fossil record that about 99 percent of all the different kinds of living things that have ever lived here are gone forever, and we’re doing just fine today. What’s the big deal if we, as part of the ecosystem, kill off a great many more species of living things? We’ll just kill what we don’t need or notice. The problem with that idea is that although we can, in a sense, know what will become or what became of an individual species, we cannot be sure of what will happen to that species’ native ecosystem. We cannot predict the behavior of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However, we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity is a result of the process of evolution, and it is also a safety net that helps keep that process going. In order to pass our own genes into the future and enable our offspring to live long and prosper, we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.

To think of food as a weapon, or of a weapon as food, may give an illusory security and wealth to a few, but it strikes directly at the life of all. The concept of food-as-weapon is not surprisingly the doctrine of a Department of Agriculture that is being used as an instrument of foreign political and economic speculation. This militarizing of food is the greatest threat so far raised against the farmland and the farm communities of this country. If present attitudes continue, we may expect government policies that will encourage the destruction, by overuse, of farmland. This, of course, has already begun. To answer the official call for more production -- evidently to be used to bait or bribe foreign countries -- farmers are plowing their waterways and permanent pastures; lands that ought to remain in grass are being planted in row crops. Contour plowing, crop rotation, and other conservation measures seem to have gone out of favor or fashion in official circles and are practices less and less on the farm. This exclusive emphasis on production will accelerate the mechanization and chemicalization of farming, increase the price of land, increase overhead and operating costs, and thereby further diminish the farm population. Thus the tendency, if not the intention, of Mr. Butz confusion of farming and war, is to complete the deliverance of American agriculture into the hands of corporations.

Under conditions of extreme deprivation people will continue to grow crops that promise economic relief, and they will continue to trade in those crops and their products. The ultimate beneficiaries are neither the impoverished Afghan or Columbian peasant nor the street-corner pusher in the U.S. ghetto or on Vancouver’s skid row. The illegality of mind-altering substances enriches drug cartels, crime syndicates, and their corrupt enablers among politicians, government officials, judges, lawyers, and police officers around the world. If one set out deliberately to fashion a legal system designed to maximize and sustain the wealth of international drug criminals and their abettors, one could never dream up anything to improve upon the present one—except, perhaps, to add tobacco to the list of contraband substances. That way the traffickers and their allies could profit even more, although it’s unimaginable that their legally respectable counterparts—tax-hungry governments and the nicotine pushers in tobacco company boardrooms—would ever allow that to happen.

The world currently has two reasonably disturbing and disturbingly reasonable examples as to what this unraveling might look like: Zimbabwe and Venezuela. In both cases mismanagement par excellence destroyed the ability of both countries to produce their for-export goods—foodstuffs in the case of Zimbabwe, oil and oil products in the case of Venezuela—resulting in funds shortages so extreme, the ability of the countries to import largely collapsed. In Zimbabwe, the end result was more than a decade of negative economic growth, generating outcomes far worse than those of the Great Depression, with the bulk of the population reduced to subsistence farming. Venezuela wasn’t so . . . fortunate. It imported more than two-thirds of its foodstuffs before its economic collapse. Venezuelan oil production dropped so much, the country even lacks sufficient fuel to sow crops, contributing to the worst famine in the history of the Western Hemisphere. I don’t use these examples lightly. The word you are looking for to describe this outcome isn’t “deglobalize” or even “deindustrialize,” but instead “decivilize.

A good family farm produces more, in net terms, than the farm family consumes. The good farmer has secured enough land to grow crops and support his or her livestock. The extra production beyond the farm family’s own consumption can be sold and traded for other goods and services—TVs, clothes, books. Some countries are like good family farms, with more bio-capacity than what it takes, in net terms, to provide for their inhabitants. Compare this with a weekend hobby farm, with honeybees, a rabbit, and an apple tree, where most resources have to be bought from elsewhere. Presently 80% of the world population lives in countries that are like hobby farms. They consume more, in net terms, than what the ecosystems of their country can regenerate. The rest is imported or derives from unsustainable overuse of local fields and forests.

Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers. Self-organization

The rest goes to livestock or biofuels. The same is true for soy. We could simply repurpose that food, or repurpose that land to grow different crops. This all sounds very simple in principle but getting people to change behaviours is difficult. I don’t think that enough people will make this change based on the ethical pull alone. If we’re to change how people eat across the world we’re going to need some new, tasty, meat-like products

We cannot predict the behavior of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However, we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity

Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more advanced technology, more complex political organization, and more epidemic diseases with which to infect other peoples.

Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.

It’s how much space exists between the cars. The same is true for the tasks you work on throughout the day. It’s difficult to be productive when you try to cram as much into your day as possible, because you’ll inevitably create a mental logjam as unexpected tasks crop up. By simplifying how much you take on, you create more attentional space around your high-return activities, so you can focus on them much more deeply. Tasks are the cars on the productivity superhighway.*

No wonder that progress was so slow within the ancient empires. Anything of value—land, crops, livestock, buildings, even children—could be arbitrarily seized, and as the Chinese iron magnates learned, it often was. Worse yet, the tyrannical empires invested little of the wealth they extracted to increase production. They consumed it instead—often in various forms of display. The Egyptian pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Taj Mahal were all built as beautiful monuments to repressive rule;

Some Southerners effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacture of textiles, iron, and other industrial products. Nevertheless, no other American region contained so many white farmers who merely subsisted on their own produce. The “typical” white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops.

Segways are a classic example of this phenomenon. You've seen them on occasion in malls or in airports, looking something like an old-fashioned lawn mower gone vertical, ridden around by someone in a security professional's uniform. Kind of dorky looking, but don't kid yourself. The gyroscopic balance control is fabulous, and the control movements once mastered are graceful. The hope was these devices would become a universal transport mechanism. Why didn't that happen? In a word: stairs. Stairs are pesky little devils that crop up everywhere, and Segways do not handle them well at all. That's what we call a showstopper.

The history of human communities and world development highlights the extent to which migration has been an engine of social progress. By viewing our collective past through the lens of migration, we can appreciate how the movement of people across cultural frontiers has brought about the globalized and integrated world we inhabit today. . . . As people moved they have encountered new environments and cultures that compel them to adapt and innovate novel ways of doing things. The development of belief systems and technologies, the spread of crops and production methods, have often arisen out of the experiences of, or encounters with, migrants.

At about ten in the morning toward the end of September, I stood below the hill on which the mansion Monticello was a-building. All was confusion. A large forge manned (or rather boy-ed) by a dozen black children was turning out nails. The apostle of the agrarian life gaily admitted to now being a wholesale manufacturer. “I have no choice,” said Jefferson who greeted me at the smithy. “The crops pay for re-building the house. The nails pay for groceries. I calculate at my present rate of production I shall be out of debt in four years.” I complimented him. I too have had my nail manufactories which were to get me out of debt. But somehow the nails never do the trick.

Dreams either compensate for the lopsidedness of our conscious view or complement its lacunae. Fairy tales, because they are also mostly unsophisticated products of the storyteller’s unconscious, do the same. Like dreams, they help to keep our conscious attitude in a healthy balance, and have therefore a healing function. As the conscious religious views of Western Europe in the past two thousand years have not given enough expression of the feminine principle, we can expect to find an especially rich crop of archetypal feminine figures in fairy tales giving expression to the neglected feminine principle. We can also expect to retrieve from them quite a few lost goddesses of pagan antiquity.

If you have to wear a hazmat suit to raise crops, why would you ever eat them? If you’re afraid of getting that crap on your skin, how much more insane would it be to put it in your mouth! Seriously? I often wonder, and I wish someone would research it if they haven’t already, whether the CEOs of Monsanto, Dupont, etc., eat GMO products and feed them to their families, or if they send out their ‘personal shoppers’ to the local farmer’s market to bring home fresh, organic produce every week? I suspect the latter. I’m quite sure they all have reverse osmosis water systems in their mansions. Let me put it bluntly, if I haven’t been clear so far. The day the CEO of Monsanto guzzles a gallon of Roundup, is the day I’ll consider buying their products, maybe.

Despite all technical change in the advanced countries, to this day India, with a much smaller cultivated area than the US, produces annually a larger total tonnage of cereals, root crops, oil crops, sugar crops, fruits and vegetables. The precise figures are 858 million tonnes in India and 676 million tonnes in the US in 2007, the latest year for which the data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation is available. As for China, its even more intensive cultivation, developed over centuries, and consequent high land productivity were legendary; Britain’s agricultural yields at that time, properly measured over the same production period, were pathetic in comparison. By 2007 China produced 1,308 million tonnes from an area substantially less than that of India and of the US.

As the highest value and supreme dominant in the psychic hierarchy, the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the self, and everything that happens to the God-image has an effect on the latter. Any uncertainty about the God-image causes a profound uneasiness in the self, for which reason the question is generally ignored because of its painfulness. But that does not mean that it remains unasked in the unconscious. What is more, it is answered by views and beliefs like materialism, atheism, and similar substitutes, which spread like epidemics. They crop up wherever and whenever one waits in vain for the legitimate answer. The ersatz product represses the real question into the unconscious and destroys the continuity of historical tradition which is the hallmark of civilization. The result is bewilderment and confusion.

Archaeological studies have documented how beginning around four thousand years ago, a new culture spread out of the region at the border of Nigeria and Cameroon in west-central Africa. People from this culture lived at the boundary of the forest and expanding savanna and developed a highly productive set of crops that was capable of supporting dense populations.15 By about twenty-five hundred years ago they had spread as far as Lake Victoria in eastern Africa and mastered iron toolmaking technology,16 and by around seventeen hundred years ago they had reached southern Africa.17 The consequence of this expansion is that the great majority of people in eastern, central, and southern Africa speak Bantu languages, which are most diverse today in present-day Cameroon, consistent with the theory that proto-Bantu languages originated there and were spread by the culture that also

For every one member of the elite, thousands more were illiterate and impoverished subsistence farmers. After the ‘collapse of civilisation’, many of them moved elsewhere, and some may have died, but for the most part their lives probably did not change much. They went on growing crops. Those people were your ancestors and mine—not the palace-dwellers, but the peasants. Our rich and complex international networks of production and distribution have come to an end before, but here we are, you and I, and here is humanity. What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?

It turns out that the eastern U.S. founder crops were four plants domesticated in the period 2500–1500 B.C., a full 6,000 years after wheat and barley domestication in the Fertile Crescent. A local species of squash provided small containers, as well as yielding edible seeds. The remaining three founders were grown solely for their edible seeds (sunflower, a daisy relative called sumpweed, and a distant relative of spinach called goosefoot). But four seed crops and a container fall far short of a complete food production package. For 2,000 years those founder crops served only as minor dietary supplements while eastern U.S. Native Americans continued to depend mainly on wild foods, especially wild mammals and waterbirds, fish, shellfish, and nuts. Farming did not supply a major part of their diet until the period 500–200 B.C., after three more seed crops (knotweed, maygrass, and little barley) had been brought into cultivation. A

The second jump resulted from our adoption of a sedentary lifestyle, which happened at different times in different parts of the world, as early as 13,000 years ago in some areas and not even today in others. For the most part, that adoption was linked to our adoption of food production, which required us to remain close to our crops, orchards, and stored food surpluses. Sedentary living was decisive for the history of technology, because it enabled people to accumulate nonportable possessions. Nomadic hunter-gatherers are limited to technology that can be carried. If you move often and lack vehicles or draft animals, you confine your possessions to babies, weapons, and a bare minimum of other absolute necessities small enough to carry. You can’t be burdened with pottery and printing presses as you shift camp. That practical difficulty probably explains the tantalizingly early appearance of some technologies, followed by a long delay in their further development.

The world’s most celebrated religions teach people that the world around us, our environment, is sacred. A diet rooted in anymal products is exponentially more harmful to the earth than is a plant-based diet. Seventy percent more land must be cultivated in order to raise anymals for food than would be necessary for a vegan diet. This means that 70 percent more land is taken away from natural ecosystems to produce flesh, nursing milk, and bird’s reproductive eggs for consumption, and this land that is necessary for a diet rich in anymal products will be sprayed with pesticides and earth-damaging fertilizers. These additional crops—70 percent more—also need to be irrigated, using exponentially more water. Anymals exploited by food industries also drink millions of gallons of water and drop millions of tons of manure. Finally, raising animals for flesh contributes significantly to carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, and methane—global climate change.

A peasant who has harvested twenty sacks of wheat, which he with his family proposes to consume, deems himself twice as rich as if he had harvested only ten; likewise a housewife who has spun fifty yards of linen believes that she is twice as rich as if she had spun but twentyfive. Relatively to the household, both are right; looked at in their external relations, they may be utterly mistaken. If the crop of wheat is double throughout the whole country, twenty sacks will sell for less than ten would have sold for if it had been but half as great; so, under similar circumstances, fifty yards of linen will be worth less than twenty-five: so that value decreases as the production of utility increases, and a producer may arrive at poverty by continually enriching himself. And this seems unalterable, inasmuch as there is no way of escape except all the products of industry become infinite in quantity, like air and light, which is absurd. God of my reason! Jean Jacques would have said: it is not the economists who are irrational; it is political economy itself which is false to its definitions. Mentita est iniquitas sibi.

There are hundreds of examples of highly functioning commons around the world today. Some have been around for centuries, others have risen in response to economic and environmental crises, and still others have been inspired by the distributive bias of digital networks. From the seed-sharing commons of India to the Potato Park of Peru, indigenous populations have been maintaining their lands and managing biodiversity through a highly articulated set of rules about sharing and preservation. From informal rationing of parking spaces in Boston to Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) for software, new commons are serving to reinstate the value of land and labor, as well as the ability of people to manage them better than markets can. In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commoning, studied what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest. Managing a fixed supply of minerals is different from managing a replenishing supply of timber. Finally, size and place matter. It’s easier for a town to manage its water supply than for the planet to establish water-sharing rules.78 In short, a commons must be bound by people, place, and rules. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, it’s not an anything-goes race to the bottom. It is simply a recognition of boundaries and limits. It’s pooled, multifaceted investment in pursuit of sustainable production. It is also an affront to the limitless expansion sought by pure capital. If anything, the notion of a commons’ becoming “enclosed” by privatization is a misnomer: privatizing a commons breaks the boundaries that protected its land and labor from pure market forces. For instance, the open-source seed-sharing networks of India promote biodiversity and fertilizer-free practices among farmers who can’t afford Western pesticides.79 They have sustained themselves over many generations by developing and adhering to a complex set of rules about how seed species are preserved, as well as how to mix crops on soil to recycle its nutrients over centuries of growing. Today, they are in battle with corporations claiming patents on these heirloom seeds and indigenous plants. So it’s not the seed commons that have been enclosed by the market at all; rather, the many-generations-old boundaries have been penetrated and dissolved by disingenuously argued free-market principles.

In ancient agricultural societies, most religions revolved not around metaphysical questions and the afterlife, but around the very mundane issue of increasing agricultural output. Thus the Old Testament God never promises any rewards or punishments after death. He instead tells the people of Israel that ‘If you carefully observe the commands that I’m giving you [. . .] then I will send rain on the land in its season [. . .] and you’ll gather grain, wine, and oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your livestock, and you’ll eat and be satisfied. Be careful! Otherwise, your hearts will deceive you and you will turn away to serve other gods and worship them. The wrath of God will burn against you so that he will restrain the heavens and it won’t rain. The ground won’t yield its produce and you’ll be swiftly destroyed from the good land that the Lord is about to give you’ (Deuteronomy 11:13–17). Scientists today can do much better than the Old Testament God. Thanks to artificial fertilisers, industrial insecticides and genetically modified crops, agricultural production nowadays outstrips the highest expectations ancient farmers had of their gods. And the parched state of Israel no longer fears that some angry deity will restrain the heavens and stop all rain – for the Israelis have recently built a huge desalination plant on the shores of the Mediterranean, so they can now get all their drinking water from the sea.

Bush’s description of how basic research provides the seed corn for practical inventions became known as the “linear model of innovation.” Although subsequent waves of science historians sought to debunk the linear model for ignoring the complex interplay between theoretical research and practical applications, it had a popular appeal as well as an underlying truth. The war, Bush wrote, had made it “clear beyond all doubt” that basic science—discovering the fundamentals of nuclear physics, lasers, computer science, radar—“is absolutely essential to national security.” It was also, he added, crucial for America’s economic security. “New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.” By the end of his report, Bush had reached poetic heights in extolling the practical payoffs of basic scientific research: “Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”9 Based on this report, Congress established the National Science Foundation.

Traveling on, the shaft of his light reached now a great, dully shining oblong, and he stopped, surprised. Then, through the glass sides, he saw bright shapes of fish wheel in schools down the opaque water, startled by the illumination. Coming at last, and so suddenly, on life like his own, Mr. Lecky moved closer. The fixed flood of his light enveloped these small fish dimly, glowed back on him. They came sliding, drifting, mouths in motion, gills rippling, up the light, against the glass. Their senseless round eyes stared at Mr. Lecky. Idling with great grace, the extravagant products of selective breeding - fringetails, Korean, calico - passed, swayed about, came languidly back. Moving faster, stub-finned, crop-tailed danios from the Malabar coast appeared, hovered, taking the light on their fat flanks, now spotted, now iridescent pearl or opal. Seeing so many of them, so eager and attentive, Mr. Lecky felt an unexpected compunction. He was their only proprietor; and soon, trapped unnaturally here in the big tank, they would starve to death. His light went back to a counter he had just passed, showing him again the half-noticed packages - food for birds and pet animals, food, too, for fish. Returning to the tank, his light found many of the fish still waiting, the rest rushing back. He went and took a package, tore the top off, and poured the contents onto the rectangle of open water. It would perhaps postpone the time when, having eaten each other, the sick remainder must die anyway.

Undoubtedly, my dear Dick. Just note the progress of events: consider the migrations of races, and you will arrive at the same conclusion assuredly. Asia was the first nurse of the world, was she not? For about four thousand years she travailed, she grew pregnant, she produced, and then, when stones began to cover the soil where the golden harvests sung by Homer had flourished, her children abandoned her exhausted and barren bosom. You next see them precipitating themselves upon young and vigorous Europe, which has nourished them for the last two thousand years. But already her fertility is beginning to die out; her productive powers are diminishing every day. Those new diseases that annually attack the products of the soil, those defective crops, those insufficient resources, are all signs of a vitality that is rapidly wearing out and of an approaching exhaustion. Thus, we already see the millions rushing to the luxuriant bosom of America, as a source of help, not inexhaustible indeed, but not yet exhausted. In its turn, that new continent will grow old; its virgin forests will fall before the axe of industry, and its soil will become weak through having too fully produced what had been demanded of it. Where two harvests bloomed every year, hardly one will be gathered from a soil completely drained of its strength. Then, Africa will be there to offer to new races the treasures that for centuries have been accumulating in her breast. Those climates now so fatal to strangers will be purified by cultivation and by drainage of the soil, and those scattered water supplies will be gathered into one common bed to form an artery of navigation. Then this country over which we are now passing, more fertile, richer, and fuller of vitality than the rest, will become some grand realm where more astonishing discoveries than steam and electricity will be brought to light.

In Andhra, farmers fear Naidu’s land pool will sink their fortunes Prasad Nichenametla,Hindustan Times | 480 words The state festival tag added colour to Sankranti in Andhra Pradesh this time. But the hue of happiness was missing in 29 villages along river Krishna in Guntur district. The villagers knew it was their last Sankranti, a harvest festival celebrated to seek agricultural prosperity. For in two months, more than 30,000 acres of fertile farmland would be acquired for a brand new capital planned in collaboration with Singapore. The Nara Chandrababu Naidu government went about the capital project by setting aside the Centre’s land acquisition act and drawing up a compensation package for land-owning and tenant farmers and labourers. Many are opposed to it, and are not keen on snapping their centuries-old bond with their land and livelihood. In Penumaka village, Nageshwara Rao, 50, fears the future as he does not possess a tenancy certificate that could have brought some relief under the compensation package. “The entire village is against land-pooling but we hear the government is adamant,” Rao says, referring to municipal minister P Narayana’s alleged assertion that land would be taken with or without the farmers’ consent. Narayana is supervising the land-pooling process. “Naidu says he would give us Rs 50,000 per year in lieu of annual crops. We earn that much in a month here,” villager Meka Koti Reddy says. To drive home the point, locals in Undavalli village nearby have put up a board asking officials to keep off their lands that produce three crops a year. Unlike other parts of Andhra Pradesh, the water-rich land here is highly productive yielding 200 varieties of crops. Some farmers are also suspicious about the compensation because Naidu is yet to deliver on the loan-waiver promise. They are now weighing legal options besides seeking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to retain their land. While the villagers opposing land-pooling are allegedly being backed by Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress Party, those belonging to the Kamma community — the support base for Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party — are said to be cooperative.  It is also believed that Naidu chose this location over others suggested by experts to primarily benefit the Kamma industrialists who own large swathes of land in Krishna and Guntur districts. But even the pro-project villagers cannot help feel insecure. “We are clueless about where our developed area would be. What if the project is not executed within Naidu’s tenure? Is there a legal recourse?” Idupulapati Rambabu of Mandadam says. This is despite Naidu’s assurance on January 1 at nearby Thulluru, where he launched the land-pooling process, asking farmers to give land without any apprehension. He said the deal in its present form would make them richer than him in a decade. “We are not building a mere city but a hub of economic activity loaded with superior infrastructure that is aimed at generating wealth. This would be a win-win situation for all,” Naidu tells HT. As of now, villages like Nelapadu struggling with low soil fertility seem to be winning from the package.

The burdens of government were so greatly reduced by the barbarian conquests that an opening was created for the poor to obtain freehold property and keep it. Some of the agri deserti, or deserted farms abandoned by owners fleeing predatory taxation in the final years of the Roman Empire, were brought back into production. Notwithstanding the rude circumstances of the time and the fact that crop yields were ridiculously low by modern standards, the Dark Ages were a period of relative prosperity for Europe’s smallholders.

the U. S. Government once formed an Abaca Production and Sales bureau to take over the growing of hemp in four Central American countries, on the theory that hemp, which is used for the manufacture of rope, was vitally strategic. But this government-produced hemp was of such inferior quality that it couldn’t be sold, even to the Government’s own rope factory. To get out of its embarrassment, Abaca Production and Sales sold the worthless hemp to another Government agency, the Strategic Stockpile. The hemp was then stored, at taxpayers’ expense, in specially built warehouses. Each year the previour year’s crop was shoveled out and destroyed to make room to store the new crop. Total loss to the taxpayers averaged $3 million a year.

People didn’t start farming because it was individually better for them. To the contrary, it was probably less productive than hunting and gathering, at least initially, and only worked when mixed with foraging. As populations increasingly relied on farming, archaeological studies reveal that the less nutritious diets derived from cereals and other crops produced people who were shorter, sicker, and more likely to die young. However, the effects of sedentism and the productivity of unskilled (young) labor were such that farmers reproduced more quickly than did mobile hunter-gatherers. With the “right” set of institutions, farmers could spread across the landscape like an epidemic, driving out or assimilating any hunter-gatherers in their path. Thus, early farming spread not because rational individuals prefer to farm, but because farming communities with particular institutions beat mobile hunter-gatherer populations in intergroup competition.

In a meta-analysis of 86 different biochar treatments on a range of soil and crop types, Verheijen et al. (2010) reported a grand mean of 10 percent increase in plant productivity.

Growing crops through chemical processes can be explained through science, but what end they are used for does not come under the domain of science. Chemistry can help in increasing productivity of food crops as well as making chemical weapons. Abortion of a baby without putting life of mother at risk can be explained through biology, but science does not answer whether it is right or wrong. Weapons of mass destruction can be made through knowledge of disciplines like nuclear physics, but using this knowledge to decimate entire human population in a city or country is a decision whose correctness or incorrectness cannot be judged or answered from science.

When you encounter detractors, you might react with fear. What keeps smart, imaginative people from pursuing their potentially impactful ideas? Lack of time and resources? When I informally polled our community, they told me about their fears. Fear shuts people down—regardless of their profession or station in life—from achieving their potential, especially if they haven’t worked out their devotion muscle enough and learned to manage uncertainty. Fear crops up when you start to believe other people’s opinions of you more than you believe in your genius and the potential impact of your own ideas.

One emergent principle might be that deleterious elements should be concentrated. Concentrating people in cities is good. Concentrating energy waste products like nuclear spent fuel in casks is an improvement over distributing the greenhouse gases from spent coal and oil in the atmosphere. Concentrating our sources of food and fiber into high-yield agriculture, tree plantations, and mariculture frees up more wildland and wild ocean to carry out their expert Gaian tasks.

What's wrong with it? Socialism eliminates (or severely limits) the right to private property, and denies the individual's reward for his labors proportionate to the amount of effort he puts into his work. For example, I may save my money, and buy two cows. And I work hard to feed these cows. They grow healthy and provide me with an abundance of dairy products; yet, if the man on the next farm just sits around all day, listens to music, reads books and practices his golf swing, socialist theory decrees that I am obliged to give him half of my milk products. If my neighbors knows that, why should he get up from the easy chair, and begin to improve his crops, and to save money, and to scrimp and sweat so that he can develop healthy cows which produce a lot of milk? Socialism, therefore, discourages initiative and does not provide sufficient incentive for industriousness. Welfare rolls do not diminish under Socialism; they grow. They grow, even though there are available jobs, because the easy availability of welfare makes it easier to live off the state than to work in a lower-paying job.

In 2000, GE soybeans were legal in Argentina but outlawed in Brazil. The difference in productivity was so obvious that Brazilian farmers smuggled the seeds across the border, until their government relented and legalized GE agriculture.

Perhaps the most extreme case is Mumbai, with 17 million people more densely packed than anywhere else in the world. The city is half slum, yet it generates one sixth of India’s gross domestic product.

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.

The inaugural issue of Harijan was dated 11 February 1933. Gandhi wrote as many as seven pieces, on various aspects of the problem of untouchability. One related to the growing divergence between him and Dr B.R. Ambedkar. When they met on 4 February, Gandhi had asked him for a message for the first issue of Harijan. Ambedkar complied, but in characteristically blunt terms. This was his message: ‘The outcaste is a bye-product of the caste system. There will be outcastes so long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system. Nothing can help to save Hinduism....except the purging of the Hindu faith of this odious and vicious dogma.’ Gandhi was unnerved by the message. For, it struck at the root of his own idealized conception of varnashramadharma, the division of labour according to caste. He wanted untouchability to go, he wanted all occupations to have the same value—for a Bhangi to have the same status as a Brahmin—but he wasn’t yet prepared to let go of the idea of varna altogether. Gandhi printed Ambedkar’s message, with an explanation and response of his own, ten times the length. He accepted that the caste system ‘has its limitations and its defects, but there is nothing sinful about it, as there is about untouchability, and, if it is a bye-product of the caste system it is only in the same sense as an ugly growth is of a body, or weeds of the crop.... It is an excess to be removed, if the whole system is not to perish. Untouchability is the product, therefore, not of the caste system, but of the distinction of high and low that has crept into Hinduism and is corroding it.’ Gandhi ended by asking for all reformers to come together on a common platform. Whether they believed in varnashrama (as he did) or rejected caste altogether (as Ambedkar did), 'the opposition to untouchability is common to both. Therefore, the present joint fight is restricted to the removal of untouchability, and I would invite Dr. Ambedkar and those who think with him to throw themselves, heart and soul, into the campaign against the monster of untouchability. It is highly likely at the end of it we shall find that there is nothing to fight against in varnashrama. If, however, varnashrama even then looks like an ugly thing, the whole of Hindu society will fight it.

The twelve-factor developer resists the urge to use different backing services between development and production, even when adapters theoretically abstract away any differences in backing services. Differences between backing services mean that tiny incompatibilities crop up, causing code that worked and passed tests in development or staging to fail in production. These types of errors create friction that disincentivizes continuous deployment. The cost of this friction and the subsequent dampening of continuous deployment is extremely high when considered in aggregate over the lifetime of an application.

Of course, if the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs says that marketing channels decline over time, the other strategy is to embrace new marketing ideas early. Every three to five years, there seems to be a rapid explosion of new media formats and platforms to experiment with. Most recently, with the rise of TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, and other forms of highly scaled visual media, there is a new crop of startups going to market with influencers and streamers. Similarly, new B2B startups have started to embrace referral programs, memes, emojis, video clips, and other tactics previously reserved for consumer products. The landscape is constantly changing, with new product and platforms emerging every few years, opening up opportunities for marketers to jump in before others do.

The task of raising cane in the fields of Saint Domingue and harvesting the lush crops of the island fell on the backs of the Enlightenment’s greatest and most productive laboring class—African slaves. After decimating the native population, Europeans imported around half a million slaves from the coasts of Africa to this tiny island over the course of just a few decades. In the process of ripping these men and women from their native homes and transporting them by force to a New World where most died within seven years,

Land of Sugar The incredibly fertile lands and stable, warm climate of Hawaiʻi proved to be ideal for the growth of sugarcane, which would eventually lead to the dominance of sugarcane over Hawaiian agriculture and sugar exports’ iron-clad hold on the Hawaiian economy and overseas interests. Beginning in the 1820s onward, sugar plantations cropped up on the islands of Oʻahu, Maui, Kauaʻi, Molokaʻi, Lanaʻi, and the Big Island of Hawaiʻi itself. Over the next one hundred years, sugar production from Hawaiʻi would grow from under fifty thousand tons of sugarcane to well over half a million tons. This had several effects. The first was a huge influx of immigrant labor to help cope with the demands of a rising sector, especially since growing, harvesting, and processing sugarcane was a labor-intensive process. Tens of thousands of laborers were contracted from Japan, China, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Korea. Hawaiʻi’s population swelled by over 300,000 people over this time and resulted in the percentage of Native Hawaiians dropping to about 10 percent of the total population by the 1900s. It

In the early 1900s, Soviet agronomist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov discovered a strange phenomenon: weeds in crop fields sometimes begin to look like the crop themselves. Original rye plants, he realized, looked nothing like the plump grain that by then was a staple crop in Russia. It was a scraggly, inedible weed. Rye, he realized, had performed an incredible trick of mimicry. Early wheat farmers, weeding by hand, pulled out and discarded the rye-weed to keep their planted crops healthy. So, to survive, a few rye plants took on a form more similar to wheat. Farmers still extricated the pesky rye, when they could spot it. This selective pressure molded the rye to evolve to trick a farmer’s discerning eye. In this case, only the best impressionists survived. Eventually, the rye became so excellent a mimic that it became a crop itself. “Vavilovian mimicry” is now a basic fact of agriculture.* Oats are a product of the same process; they also got their start mimicking wheat. In rice paddies, the weed known as barnyard grass is indistinguishable from the rice at the seedling stage. Recent genetic analysis found that this weed began to change its architecture to match the rice about a thousand years ago, when rice cultivation in Asia was well underway. In lentil fields, common vetch is a ubiquitous weed that masterfully redesigned its previously spherical seeds to be the same flat, round disc shape as lentils themselves. In that case, the plant needed not to trick a farmer’s eye but rather make itself impossible to eliminate from the mechanical threshing process. Winnowing machines simply could not tell the difference between a vetch and a lentil. Weed genomicist Scott McElroy argues that modern herbicide-resistant plants are actually just engaging in Vavilovian mimicry at the biochemical level; they are mimicking the crop plants that have been conveniently engineered to tolerate the herbicide.

We reap what we sow. A stingy planter gets a stingy crop. A lavish planter gets a lavish crop.

Someone in the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” 14But He said to him, “Man, who appointed Me a judge or arbitrator over you?” 15Then He said to them, “Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.” 16And He told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man was very productive. 17And he began reasoning to himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?’ 18Then he said, ‘This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.” ’ 20But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?’ 21So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

Just as the subsistence of the laborers who built the Pyramids was drawn not from a previously boarded stock, but from the constantly recurring crops of the Nile Valley; just as a modern government when it undertakes a great work of years does not appropriate to it wealth already produced, but wealth yet to be produced, which is taken from producers in taxes as the work progresses; so it is that the subsistence of the laborers engaged in production which does not directly yield subsistence comes from the production of subsistence in which others are simultaneously engaged.

For the dangers of an economy absolutely dominated by a single staple crop were as clear in the seventeenth century as they are nowadays. Dependence on one primary product leaves the producers at the mercy of the market, with its recurring gluts and lowered prices, and its recurring shortage of money. Primary producers are normally at the mercy of their customers anyway: but if they have diversified their products they can at least hope to live off the sales of the others when the sales of one – say, cocoa – have declined, in volume or in value. To

Indeed, in many agricultural regions — including northern China, southern India (as well as the Punjab), Mexico, the western United States, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere — water may be much more of a constraint to future food production than land, crop yield potential, or most other factors. Developing and distributing technologies and practices that improve water management is critical to sustaining the food production capability we now have, much less increasing it for the future. Water-short Israel is a front-runner in making its agricultural economy more water-efficient. Its current agricultural output could probably not have been achieved without steady advances in water management — including highly efficient drip irrigation, automated systems that apply water only when crops need it, and the setting of water allocations based on predetermined optimum water applications for each crop. The nation’s success is notable: between 1951 and 1990, Israeli farmers reduced the amount of water applied to each hectare of cropland by 36 percent. This allowed the irrigated area to more than triple with only a doubling of irrigation water use.37 Whether

Between 1978 and 1983, the entire basis of the agricultural economy was changed by the adoption of the “household responsibility system.” The origins of this shift lay in a village in Anhui province, where a group of farmers got together in secret and signed an agreement to dissolve their collective and divide up their farmland into individual plots. This innovation rapidly spread, and the province’s party secretary, Wan Li, realized he was facing a powerful popular revolt against an immiserating system. Rather than crush it, he decided to promote this land-to-the-tiller reform. The party secretary of Sichuan province, Zhao Ziyang, made a similar decision. At the national level, the December 1978 party plenum that launched the reform era raised agricultural prices and gave a blessing to rural collectives experimenting with different ways of management, but it still condemned private farming. By 1980, however, Zhao Ziyang had become premier and Wan Li was vice premier in charge of agriculture policy. Together they rammed through a national policy to disband the communes and return to family farming. By the end of 1982 virtually all agricultural collectives were gone, and family farmers had been assigned rights to cultivate individual plots of land. The effect on agricultural output and farm incomes was spectacular. By 1984 grain output was over 400 million tons, a third higher than it had been just six years before; production of oilseeds and cotton sustained annual growth rates of 15 percent; and meat production was growing by 10 percent a year. Rural per capita income more than doubled between 1979 and 1984. Per capita cash savings by rural families rose from essentially zero in 1979 to 300 renminbi (Rmb) by 1989. Rapid gains in agricultural output and incomes continued throughout the 1980s, as farmers continued to diversify their crops and apply new technologies that increased yields. Use of chemical fertilizer, which had risen gradually in the 1970s, tripled between 1978 and 1990. So did the use of farm machinery, notably pumps, small tractors, and food processing equipment.3

But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in eight hundred years—that is, since the years between 1146 and 1151. Eight hundred years! If we were just talking about another decade of this or, worse, a decade of the type of heat we were seeing in the summer of 2012, the results would be catastrophic. But climate scientists believe it will keep getting hotter. If so even drought-resistant plants will die, reservoir levels will continue to fall, crop production will drop. Worse, as vegetation withers, it will no longer be able to absorb carbon dioxide, further exacerbating climate change. And now to this precarious and combustible mix we have decided to add fracking. We have chosen to do this not with caution but on a massive scale, and to do it right next to our precious rivers, right smack in the middle of aquifers. We go into these places and use, mixed with the millions of gallons of water, a secret recipe of chemicals, many of them poisonous to humans, which we then force into fissures of rock with high-powered blasts to flush out the fuel we are seeking. The man in the bar had warned about earthquakes, but fracking is, in essence, a small seismic event, designed to blast out minerals. We have decided to inject poisons into the ground, then shake that ground, in a region where potable water is more precious than gold. But not, we have decided, more precious than oil. One thing is crystal clear. Though fracking is unproven technology, we are not treating it that way. Instead we are conducting a vast experiment all over the country, from the hills of Pennsylvania to the deserts of Utah. Since we are moving into unfamiliar territory you would think, if we were wise, that we would carefully monitor any and all results. We are not. When people in the fracked area complain that their water is fizzling out of their taps in a foamy mix, smelling of petroleum, the companies are quick to offer other water sources, like cisterns, but not quick, of course, to question the enterprise itself. In fact, the corporate response to the contaminated water supplies and groundwater has been consistent. They tell the landowners and anyone else who complains that they are concerned but that they will not slow down until there is conclusive proof that what they are doing is dangerous and poses a health risk. This is standard operating procedure in today’s world, but it is also, to anyone with a dollop of common sense, an ass-backwards way of doing things. “Despite the troubles people are having, we’ll keep going full-speed ahead until someone proves to us the trouble is real,” they tell us. Never, “Maybe we should slow down until we learn the facts.

We live in a society in which mediocrity is the norm. Many people do as little as they can to get by. They don’t take pride in their work or in who they are. If somebody is watching, they may perform one way, but when nobody is watching they’ll cut corners and take the easy way out. If you are not careful, you can be pulled into this same mentality where you think it’s okay to show up late to work, to look less than your best, or to give less than your best. But God doesn’t bless mediocrity. God blesses excellence. I have observed that the fifth undeniable quality of a winner is a commitment to excellence. When you have a spirit of excellence, you do your best whether anyone is watching or not. You go the extra mile. You do more than you have to. Other people may complain about their jobs. They may go around looking sloppy and cutting corners. Don’t sink to that level. Everyone else may be slacking off at work, compromising in school, letting their lawns go, but here’s the key: You are not everyone else. You are a cut above. You are called to excellence. God wants you to set the highest standard. You should be the model employee for your company. Your boss and your supervisors should be able to say to the new hires, “Watch him. Learn from her. Pick up the same habits. Develop the same skills. This person is the cream of the crop, always on time, great attitude, doing more than what is required.” When you have an excellent spirit like that, you will not only see promotion and increase, but you are honoring God. Some people think, “Let me go to church to honor God. Let me read my Bible to honor God.” And yes, that’s true, but it honors God just as much to get to work on time. It honors God to be productive. It honors God to look good each day. When you are excellent, your life gives praise to God. That’s one of the best witnesses you can have. Some people will never go to church. They never listen to a sermon. They’re not reading the Bible. Instead, they’re reading your life. They’re watching how you live. Now, don’t be sloppy. When you leave the house, whether you’re wearing shorts or a three-piece suit, make sure you look the best you possibly can. You’re representing the almighty God. When you go to work, don’t slack off, and don’t give a halfhearted effort. Give it your all. Do your job to the best of your ability. You should be so full of excellence that other people want what you have. When you’re a person of excellence, you do more than necessary. You don’t just meet the minimum requirements; you go the extra mile. That phrase comes from the Bible. Jesus said it in Matthew 5:41--“If a soldier demands you carry his gear one mile, carry it two miles.” In those days Roman soldiers were permitted by law to require someone else to carry their armor.

With the advent of controlled-environment agriculture it had become nearly impossible for individual farm families to compete economically with the mass-production greenhouses, so in most of the United States it was relatively easy for a young couple to purchase an old farm property and cultivate the soil, not for cash crops, but simply to live independently.

...how could he explain how long ago he had given up the idea of thought, the point at which he first understood the way things were and knew that any sense we had of existence was merely a reminder of the incomprehensible futility of existence, a futility that would repeat itself ad infinitum, to the end of time and that, no, it wasn't a matter of chance and its extraordinary, inexhaustible, triumphant, unconquerable power working to bring matters to birth or annihilation, but rather the matter of a shadowy demonic purpose, something embedded deep in the heart of things, in the texture of the relationship between things, the stench of whose purpose filled every atom, that it was a curse, a form of damnation, that the world was the product of scorn, and God help the sanity of those who called themselves thinkers, which was why he no longer thought, had learned not to think any more, not that this led anywhere, of course, because wherever he looked, whichever way he turned, there was that all-pervasive stench, the stench that was there because the last word, the word that comprehended the knowledge that futility and scorn, replete with purpose, was coextensive with the world, was the world, was something of which he had to be conscious, an eternity of futility and scorn that obtained in each and every second of life for those who had set out as thinkers, futility because as soon as you abandoned thought and tried simply to look at things, thought cropped up again in a new form, a form from which, in other words, there was no escape whatever man thought or did not think, because he remained the prisoner of thought either way, and his nose was deeply pained by the stench of it, so what could he do except console himself with the thought that events simply followed their own natural course...

The theme of his life’s work was his effort to bridge this gap. The way to do it was simply to refuse to see anything in isolation. Everything, as he saw it, existed within a context, outside of which it was unintelligible. Moreover, every problem existed within a context, outside of which it was unsolvable. Agriculture, thus, cannot be understood or its problems solved without respect to context. The same applied even to an individual plant or crop. And this respect for context properly set the standard and determined the methodology of agricultural science: The basis of research was obviously to be investigation directed to the whole existence of a selected crop, namely, “the plant itself in relation to the soil in which it grows, to the conditions of village agriculture under which it is cultivated, and with reference to the economic uses of the product”; in other words research was to be integral, never fragmented. 11 If nothing exists in isolation, then all problems are circumstantial; no problem resides, or can be solved, in anybody’s department. A disease was, thus, a symptom of a larger disorder.

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

Farming also increasingly became an important part of the steppe economy, with crops being planted across the Lower Volga region, which included ‘many tilled fields and orchards’.16 Archaeological evidence from the Crimea from this period attests to farming of wheat, millet and rye on a substantial scale.17 Hazelnuts, falcons and swords were some of the other products sold to the markets to the south.18 So too were wax and honey; the latter was thought to provide resistance to the cold.

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.

Under certain circumstances slavery has some obvious advantages. In the cultivation of crops like sugar, cotton and tobacco, where the cost of production is appreciably reduced on larger units, the slaveowner, with his large-scale production and his organized slave gang, can make more profitable use of the land than the small farmer or peasant proprietor.

Crop rotation and contour plowing require no additional capital equipment and would contribute significantly to productivity. By raising grain storage bins a few inches above ground, a large amount of grain spoilage could be avoided. Although such changes may sound trivial to people of advanced nations, the resulting gains in productivity might mean the difference between subsistence and starvation in some poverty-ridden nations.

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE? “The canal system of this country is being threatened by the spread of a new form of transportation known as ’railroads’ and the federal government must preserve the canals. . . . If canal boats are supplanted by ’railroads,’ serious unemployment will result. Captains, cooks, drivers, hostlers, repairmen, and lock tenders will be left without means of livelihood, not to mention the numerous farmers now employed growing hay for the horses. . . . As you may well know, Mr. President, ’railroad’ carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by ’engines’ which, in addition to endanging life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.” The above communication was from Martin Van Buren, then governor of New York, to President Andrew Jackson on January 21, 1829. In 1832 Van Buren was elected vice president of the United States under Andrew Jackson’s second term. In 1836 Van Buren was elected president of the United States. It is also interesting that the first railroad into Washington, DC, was completed in time to bring visitors from Philadelphia and New York to Van Buren’s inauguration. Sources: Janet E. Lapp, “Ride the Horse in the Direction It’s Going,” American Salesman, October 1998, pp. 26–29; and The World Book Encyclopedia, Volume 20 (Chicago: World Book—Childcraft International, Inc.), 1979, p. 214. 2

Some of the key pillars of Nasser's project proved greatly lacking. The public sector evolved into a Soviet-style system of sterile thinking, a deathbed for talent, a site of mediocre resource allocation, inefficiency, suffocating bureaucracy, waste and decrepit management; in no way could it support lasting economic development in the country. Many of Nasser's detractors argue that land reform precipitated a dramatic retreat of Egyptian agribusiness: that the replacement of sophisticated, well-capitalized large landowners by low-skilled and poor peasants resulted in lower quality products, no concern for the long-term subsistence of the land, poor marketing of strategic Egyptian crops such as cotton and a continued erosion of links to

The conventional method would be to stimulate the crop by the addition of factory-made and imported fertilizers such as sulphate of ammonia. There are weighty objections to such a course. [...] Increased crops would indeed be obtained for a few years, but at what a cost -- lowered soil fertility, lowered production, inferior quality, diseases of crops, of animals, and of the population, and finally diseases of the soil itself, such as soil erosion and a desert of alkali land! To place in the hands of the cultivator such a means of temporarily increasing his crops would be more than a mere error of judgement: it would be a crime.

They are the ones who first appreciate the architecture of your product and why it therefore has a competitive advantage over the current crop of products established in the marketplace. They are the ones who will spend hours trying to get products to work that, in all conscience, never should have been shipped in the first place. They will forgive ghastly documentation, horrendously slow performance, ludicrous omissions in functionality, and bizarrely obtuse methods of invoking some needed function—all in the name of moving technology forward. They

Fredericksburgh, whence there is a railway to Richmond. The tract of country through which it takes its course was once productive; but the soil has been exhausted by the system of employing a great amount of slave labour in forcing crops, without strengthening the land: and it is now little better than a sandy desert overgrown with trees. Dreary and uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart to find anything on which one of the curses of this horrible institution has fallen; and had greater pleasure in contemplating the withered ground, than the richest and most thriving cultivation in the same place could possibly have afforded me. In this district, as in all others where slavery sits brooding, (I have frequently heard this admitted, even by those who are its warmest advocates:) there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which is inseparable from the system. The barns and outhouses are mouldering away; the sheds are patched and half roofless; the log cabins (built in Virginia with external chimneys made of clay or wood) are squalid in the last degree. There is no look of decent comfort anywhere. The miserable stations by the railway side, the great wild wood-yards, whence the engine is supplied with fuel; the negro children rolling on the ground before the cabin doors, with dogs and pigs; the biped beasts of burden slinking past: gloom and dejection are upon them all.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about 85 per cent of the population of India lived in its villages. Both peasants and landed elites were involved in agricultural production and claimed r i g h t s t o a s h a r e o f t h e p r o d u c e . T h i s c r e a t e d r e l a t i o n s h i p s o f c o o p e r a t i o n , c o m p e t i t i o n a n d conflict among them. The sum of these agrarian relationships made up rural society. At the same time agencies from outside also entered into the rural world. Most important among these was the Mughal state, which der ived the bulk of its income from agricultural production. Agents of the state – revenue assessors, collectors, record keepers – sought to control rural society so as to ensure that cultivation took place and the s t a t e g o t i t s r e g u l a r s h a r e o f t a x e s f r o m t h e produce. Since many crops were grown for sale, trade, money and markets entered the villages and linked the agricultural areas with the towns.

According to one theory, fermentation was the whole reason the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution took off in the first place. Alcohol wasn’t a fun by-product of growing crops; crops were a handy offshoot of making alcohol!

Plus, it’s far more productive and satisfying to prove the people who believed in you right than it is to prove the people who did not wrong…Naysayers will always crop up in your life. Take care to forget their names as quickly as possible. Don’t doubt yourself; doubt the people who doubt you.

The Coast peoples were hunters and gatherers. The land and sea around them was so rich in food that they did not need to cultivate crops. Their only domesticated animals were dogs, used mainly for deer hunting or for fibers: one woolly breed of dogs was kept in pens and sheared twice a year. Anthropologists once considered cultures so heavily dependent upon naturally occurring products for their sustenance to be primitive in comparison to those based on agriculture, yet therein lay an anomaly. The environment yielded such a surplus of natural resources that Coast Indians had no trouble feeding themselves and finding enough leisure time to improve and elaborate their material culture and to conduct a lively trade. At the same time they developed a highly stratified and class-conscious social structure atypical of other North American maritime hunting and gathering groups.

By examining these settlers’ decisions about agricultural, architectural, and cultural policy, Cronon demonstrates persuasively that one of their primary goals was in fact “to reproduce the mosaic of the Old World in the American environment.”10 Indigenous fauna and flora were to be replaced by European imports; cows, pigs, and horses to supplant beavers, bears, and buffalo; and wheat and rye to substitute for maize and acorns. Despite the fact that these decisions were detrimental to the health of these settlers (European architecture was ill-suited to the American climate, and native foods were far more productive than imported grain crops), they perversely insisted upon this doomed experiment of re-creating Europe in America. This fear of “Americanness” thus was paradoxically linked with the earliest phases of European expansion into the New World.

The products of these women’s economic investment—the people they owned—including the wages enslaved people earned when hired out to others, the cash crops they cultivated, picked, and packed for shipment, and the babies they nursed, were fundamental to the nation’s economic growth and to American capitalism.