Farmer Sad Quotes

That night, it rained on the other dogs, who slept outside in the cold barn, which leaked. But the little dog snuggled into a warm bed beside the fire, hugged by the farmer’s children, his belly full. And as he did, the dog sadly thought to himself, ‘I could not become a dragon. I am an utter and complete failure.’ The end.

Life is as sad as a glass of grenadine. ... It’s almost that. It is sad. But, at the same time, how a glass of grenadine sparkles!

Sometimes Mrs Farmer said it’s too cold for rain and that’s how Dad’s face looked. Too sad for tears.

I missed the sad things about growing old, when women no longer look at you, when wine makes you weep instead of laugh and makes your mouth sour with the taste of weakness, and every day is one day nearer death.

Stalin has died. The ardent heart of the great leader of progressive mankind has ceased to beat. This sad news has spread over Korean territory like lightning, inflicting a bitter blow to the hearts of millions of people. Korean People’s Army soldiers, workers, farmers, and students, as well as all residents of both South and North Korea, have heard the sad news with profound grief." – Kim Il Sung

I was woken by a shell-burst in the trench of sleep. Heart skipping, with eyes fighting light, my thoughts sprang up like a field of starlings startled by a farmer's gunshot, a thousand separate, autonomous specks that swirled into a single united black shape.

Little Joe was still behind him. Eli could feel it. He wanted to look back, but he couldn’t. The tears were too close. If he were Fancy, he’d turn around and kick and buck and moo and do just about anything to keep his calf near. But Eli wasn’t Fancy; he was a farmer.

When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom—goddammit!—herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon!—by God, yes! Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

She went to her room and curled into a ball of misery and decided that she would die of a broken heart. Minstrels would write songs about how she had turned her face to the wall and died of the false-heartedness of men. She could not quite make up her mind whether she wanted to be a ghost who would haunt the convent or not. It would be very satisfying to be a sad-eyed, beautiful ghost who drifted through the halls, gazing up at the moon and weeping silently, as a warning to other young women. On the other hand, she was still short and round-faced and sturdy, and there were very few ghost stories about short, sturdy women. Marra had not managed to be pale and willowy and consumptive at any point in eighteen years of life and did not think she could achieve it before she died. Possibly it would be better to just have songs made about her. The Sister Apothecary came to her, the nun who doctored all the residents of the convent for various ailments, and who compounded medicines and salves and treatments for the farmer’s wives who lived nearby. She studied Marra intensely for a few minutes. “It’s a man, is it?” she said finally. Marra grunted. It occurred to her about an hour earlier that she did not know how the minstrels would find out that she existed in order to write the sad songs in the first place, and her mind was somewhat occupied by this problem. Did you write them letters?

Most of what's known about religious practices in pre-Hispanic Mexico has come to us through a Catholic parish priest named Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, one of the few who ever became fluent in the Nahuatl language. He spent the 1620s writing his "Treatise on the Superstitions and Heathen Customs that Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain". He'd originally meant it to be something of a "field guide to the heathens" to help priests recognize and exterminate indigenous religious rites and their practitioners. In the process of his documentation, though, it's clear from his writings that Father Ruiz de Alarcón grew sympathetic. He was particularly fascinated with how Nahuatl people celebrated the sacred in ordinary objects, and encouraged living and spirit realities to meet up in the here and now. He noted that the concept of "death" as an ending did not exactly exist for them. When Aztec people left their bodies, they were presumed to be on an exciting trip through the ether. It wasn't something to cry about, except that the living still wanted to visit with them. People's sadness was not for the departed, but for themselves, and could be addressed through ritual visiting called Xantolo, an ordinary communion between the dead and the living. Mexican tradition still holds that Xantolo is always present in certain places and activities, including marigold fields, the cultivation of corn, the preparation of tamales and pan de muerto. Interestingly, farmers' markets are said to be loaded with Xantolo.

West couldn't simply leave the man like this, he didn't have it in him. "Goodman Heath," he said as he approached, and the peasant looked up at him, surprised. He fumbled for his hat and made to rise, muttering apologies. "No, please, don't get up." West sat down on the bench. He stared at his feet, unable to look the man in the eye. There was an awkward silence. "I have a friend who sits on the Commission for Land and Agriculture. There might be something he can do for you…" He trailed off, embarrassed, squinting up the corridor. The farmer gave a sad smile. "I'd be right grateful for anything you could do." "Yes, yes, of course, I'll do what I can." It would do no good whatsoever, and they both knew it. West grimaced and bit his lip. "You'd better take this," and he pressed his purse into the peasant's limp, calloused fingers. Heath looked at him, mouth slightly open. West gave a quick, awkward smile then got to his feet. He was very keen to be off. "Sir!" called Goodman Heath after him, but West was already hurrying down the corridor, and he didn't look back.

I've been fighting to defend who I am all my life. I'm tired. I just don't know how to go on anymore. This is the only way I can think of I can still be me and survive. I just don't know any other way". Theresa sat back in her chair. "I'm a woman, Jess. I love you because you're a woman, too. I made up my mind when I was growing up that I was not going to betray my desire by resigning to marrying a dirt farmer or the boy at the service station. Do you understand?" I shook my head sadly. "Do you wish I wasn't a butch?" She smiled. "No, I love your butchness. I just don't want to be some man's wife, even if that man's a woman.

God often uses failure to make us useful. When Jesus called the disciples, He did not go out and find the most qualified and successful people. He found the most willing, and He found them in the workplace. He found a fisherman, a tax collector, and a farmer. The Hebrews knew that failure was a part of maturing in God. The Greeks used failure as a reason for disqualification. Sadly, in the Church, we often treat one another in this way. This is not God's way. We need to understand that failing does not make us failures. It makes us experienced. It makes us more prepared to be useful in God's Kingdom -- if we have learned from it. And that is the most important ingredient for what God wants in His children.

Sprout looked through the wide-open door, focusing on the world outside. It had been a while since she’d had an appetite. She had no desire to lay another egg. Her heart emptied of feeling every time the farmer’s wife took her eggs. The pride she felt when she laid one was replaced by sadness. She was exhausted after a full year of this. She couldn’t so much as touch her own eggs, not even with the tip of her foot. And she didn’t know what happened to them after the farmer’s wife carried them in her basket out of the coop.

It’s about to rain forks and knives,” Winterborne reported, water drops glittering on his hair and the shoulders of his coat. He reached for a glass of champagne from a silver tray on the table, and raised it in Tom’s direction. “Good luck it is, for the wedding day.” “Why is that, exactly?” Tom asked, disgruntled. “A wet knot is harder to untie,” Winterborne said. “The marriage bond will be tight and long lasting.” Ethan Ransom volunteered, “Mam always said rain on a wedding day washed away the sadness of the past.” “Not only are superstitions irrational,” Tom said, “they’re inconvenient. If you believe in one, you have to believe them all, which necessitates a thousand pointless rituals.” Not being allowed to see the bride before the ceremony, for example. He hadn’t had so much as a glimpse of Cassandra that morning, and he was chafing to find out how she was feeling, if she’d slept well, if there was something she needed. West came into the room with his arms full of folded umbrellas. Justin, dressed in a little velveteen suit, was at his heels. “Aren’t you supposed to be upstairs in the nursery with your little brother?” St. Vincent asked his five-year-old nephew. “Dad needed my help,” Justin said self-importantly, bringing an umbrella to him. “We’re about to have a soaker,” West said briskly. “We’ll have to take everyone out to the chapel as soon as possible, before the ground turns to mud. Don’t open one of these indoors: It’s bad luck.” “I didn’t think you were superstitious,” Tom protested. “You believe in science.” West grinned at him. “I’m a farmer, Severin. When it comes to superstitions, farmers lead the pack. Incidentally, the locals say rain on the wedding day means fertility.” Devon commented dryly, “To a Hampshireman, nearly everything is a sign of fertility. It’s a preoccupation around here.” “What’s fertility?” Justin asked. In the sudden silence, all gazes went to West, who asked defensively, “Why is everyone looking at me?” “As Justin’s new father,” St. Vincent replied, making no effort to hide his enjoyment, “that question is in your province.” West looked down into Justin’s expectant face. “Let’s ask your mother later,” he suggested. The child looked mildly concerned. “Don’t you know, Dad?

If Bob envies Alice, he derives unhappiness from the difference between Alice’s well-being and his own; the greater the difference, the more unhappy he is. Conversely, if Alice is proud of her superiority over Bob, she derives happiness not just from her own intrinsic well-being but also from the fact that it is higher than Bob’s. It is easy to show that, in a mathematical sense, pride and envy work in roughly the same way as sadism; they lead Alice and Bob to derive happiness purely from reducing each other’s well-being, because a reduction in Bob’s well-being increases Alice’s pride, while a reduction in Alice’s well-being reduces Bob’s envy.31 Jeffrey Sachs, the renowned development economist, once told me a story that illustrated the power of these kinds of preferences in people’s thinking. He was in Bangladesh soon after a major flood had devastated one region of the country. He was speaking to a farmer who had lost his house, his fields, all his animals, and one of his children. “I’m so sorry—you must be terribly sad,” Sachs ventured. “Not at all,” replied the farmer. “I’m pretty happy because my damned neighbor has lost his wife and all his children too!

XVIII TO HIS LADY                Beloved beauty who inspires             love from afar, your face concealed             except when your celestial image             stirs my heart in sleep, or in the fields         5  where light and nature’s laughter             shine more lovely;             was it maybe you who blessed             the innocent age called golden,             and do you now, blithe spirit,       10  soar among men? Or does the miser, fate,             who hides you from us save you for the future?                No hope of seeing you alive             remains for me now,             except when, naked and alone,       15  my soul will go down a new street             to an unfamiliar home. Already, at the dawning             of my dark, uncertain day,             I imagined you a fellow traveler             on this parched ground. But no thing on earth       20  compares with you; and if someone             who had a face like yours resembled you             in word and deed, still she would be less lovely.                In spite of all the suffering             that fate assigned to human life,       25  if there was anyone on earth             who truly loved you as my thought portrays you,             this life for him would be a joy.             And I see clearly how your love             would still inspire me to seek praise and virtue,       30  the way I used to in my early years.             Though heaven gave no comfort for our suffering,             still mortal life with you would be             like what in heaven becomes divinity.                In the valleys, where you hear       35  the weary farmer singing             and I sit and mourn             my youth’s illusions leaving me;             and on the hills where I turn back             and lament my lost desires,       40  my life’s lost hope, I think of you             and start to shake. In this sad age             and sickly atmosphere, I try             to keep your noble look in mind;             without the real thing, I enjoy the image.       45     Whether you are the one and only             eternal idea that eternal wisdom             disdains to see arrayed in sensible form,             to know the pains of mournful life             in transitory dress;       50  or if in the supernal spheres another earth             from among unnumbered worlds receives you,             and a near star lovelier than the Sun             warms you and you breathe benigner ether,             from here, where years are both ill-starred and brief,       55  accept this hymn from your unnoticed lover.

The sensor did not seem to be restricted to my mother's food, and there was so much to sort through, a torrent of information, but with George there, sitting in the fading warmth of the filtered afternoon springtime sun spilling through the kitchen windows, making me buttered toast which I ate happily, light and good with his concentration and gentle focus, I could begin to think about the layers. The bread distributor, the bread factory, the wheat, the farmer. The butter, which had a dreary tang to it. When I checked the package, I read that it came from a big farm in Wisconsin. The cream held a thinness, a kind of metallic bumper aftertaste. The milk- weary. All of those parts distant, crowded, like the far-off sound of an airplane, or a car parking, all hovering in the background, foregrounded by the state of the maker of the food.

First, when all investors were doing the same thing, he would actively seek to do the opposite. The word stockbrokers use for this approach is contrarian. Everyone wants to be one, but no one is, for the sad reason that most investors are scared of looking foolish. Investors do not fear losing money as much as they fear solitude, by which I mean taking risks that others avoid. When they are caught losing money alone, they have no excuse for their mistake, and most investors, like most people, need excuses. They are, strangely enough, happy to stand on the edge of a precipice as long as they are joined by a few thousand others. But when a market is widely regarded to be in a bad way, even if the problems are illusory, many investors get out. A good example of this was the crisis at the U.S. Farm Credit Corporation. It looked for a moment as if Farm Credit might go bankrupt. Investors stampeded out of Farm Credit bonds because having been warned of the possibility of accident, they couldn’t be seen in the vicinity without endangering their reputations. In an age when failure isn’t allowed, when the U.S. government had rescued firms as remote from the national interest as Chrysler and the Continental Illinois Bank, there was no chance the government would allow the Farm Credit bank to default. The thought of not bailing out an eighty-billion-dollar institution that lent money to America’s distressed farmers was absurd. Institutional investors knew this. That is the point. The people selling Farm Credit bonds for less than they were worth weren’t necessarily stupid. They simply could not be seen holding them. Since Alexander wasn’t constrained by appearances, he sought to exploit people who were.

Your Eve was wise, John. She knew that Paradise would make her mad, if she were to live forever with Adam and know no other thing but strawberries and tigers and rivers of milk. She knew they would tire of these things, and each other. They would grow to hate every fruit, every stone, every creature they touched. Yet where could they go to find any new thing? It takes strength to live in Paradise and not collapse under the weight of it. It is every day a trial. And so Eve gave her lover the gift of time, time to the timeless, so that they could grasp at happiness. ... And this is what Queen Abir gave to us, her apple in the garden, her wisdom--without which we might all have leapt into the Rimal in a century. The rite bears her name still. For she knew the alchemy of demarcation far better than any clock, and decreed that every third century husbands and wives should separate, customs should shift and parchmenters become architects, architects farmers of geese and monkeys, Kings should become fishermen, and fishermen become players of scenes. Mothers and fathers should leave their children and go forth to get other sons and daughters, or to get none if that was their wish. On the roads of Pentexore folk might meet who were once famous lovers, or a mother and child of uncommon devotion--and they would laugh, and remember, but call each other by new names, and begin again as friends, or sisters, or lovers, or enemies. And some time hence all things would be tossed up into the air once more and land in some other pattern. If not for this, how fastened, how frozen we would be, bound to one self, forever a mother, forever a child. We anticipate this refurbishing of the world like children at a holiday. We never know what we will be, who we will love in our new, brave life, how deeply we will wish and yearn and hope for who knows what impossible thing! Well, we anticipate it. There is fear too, and grief. There is shaking, and a worry deep in the bone. Only the Oinokha remains herself for all time--that is her sacrifice for us. There is sadness in all this, of course--and poets with long elegant noses have sung ballads full of tears that break at one blow the hearts of a flock of passing crows! But even the most ardent lover or doting father has only two hundred years to wait until he may try again at the wheel of the world, and perhaps the wheel will return his wife or his son to him. Perhaps not. Wheels, and worlds, are cruel. Time to the timeless, apples to those who live without hunger. There is nothing so sweet and so bitter, nothing so fine and so sharp.

I will invest my heart's desire and the work of my hands in things that will outlive me. Although it grieves me that houses are burning, I have fallen in love with freedom regardless, and the entitlement of a woman to get a move on, equipped with boots that fit and opinions that might matter. The treasures I carry closest to my heart are things I can't own: the curve of a five-year-old's forehead in profile, and the vulnerable expectation in the hand that reaches for mine as we cross the street. The wake-up call of birds in a forest. The intensity of the light fifteen minutes before the end of day; the color wash of a sunset on mountains; the ripe sphere of that same sun hanging low in a dusty sky in a breathtaking photograph from Afghanistan. In my darkest times I have to walk, sometimes alone, in some green place. Other people must share this ritual. For some I suppose it must be the path through a particular set of city streets, a comforting architecture; for me it's the need to stare at water until my mind comes to rest on nothing at all. Then I can go home. I can clear the brush from a neglected part of the garden, working slowly until it comes to me that here is one small place I can make right for my family. I can plant something as an act of faith in time itself, a vow that we will, sure enough, have a fall and a winter this year, to be followed again by spring. This is not an end in itself, but a beginning. I work until my mind can run a little further on its tether, tugging at this central pole of my sadness, forgetting it for a minute or two while pondering a school meeting next week, the watershed conservation project our neighborhood has undertaken, the farmer's market it organized last year: the good that becomes possible when a small group of thoughtful citizens commit themselves to it...Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.

It was a chicken. He had flown through the hole in the ceiling, and was flapping down. But he didn’t stop at my floor. He went straight through the hole where the blue block had been. He kept on falling and flapping, all the way down into the treasure room. It looked like my test dummy had found me. He landed gently on the gray square.     Nothing happened. I exhaled with relief.   And then…KABOOM!  Yep, I guess I was right after all. It WAS a booby trap. I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t tried it out myself. But then I felt kind of bad for the chicken. That brave (and bird-brained) chicken had saved my life! I will forever remember that chicken as Buster, my crash-test dummy. (I think “dummy” may be an especially accurate description in this case.)   Sadly, the chests didn’t make it. There was only a giant crater where they used to be. So long riches and possibly cookies. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. *sigh*   Monday   Good News: I have five emeralds. Bad News: I think another librarian doesn’t like me.   Whew! My pack mule days are finally done. Over the past couple of days, I gathered the last ten blocks of wool I needed to trade for a saddle, and dragged them back to the village. Then, one-by-one I grabbed the blocks of wool from the library, and gave them to the farmer. I don’t think the librarian was too pleased with me. She strung together about nine “Hurrrs” while I removed my blocks of wool. I’ve never heard villagers speak so much. In my experience, that’s usually not a good thing. (Think: Mr. Rimoldi.)   Anyway, it was totally worth it. My wooly trade with the farmer went down without a hitch. Tomorrow I get a saddle!

A multinational never plays by the rules in somebody else’s country. This is one of the many reasons why our own economic policies need to be looked at again. It is only logical that nobody will invest money in another country unless they hope to take more money out than they brought in. So how does foreign investment help us? I do not think that foreigners should not be invited in to play a role but I think it should be a role which India decides and which they are required to play in India’s interest. Foreign investment can only help us in areas where Indian capital, Indian know-how, is not available. If the multinationals are desperate to capture the Indian consumer market, which is as large as the whole of Europe put together, then sadly, successive governments have made this easy for them. The only instrument left to us is to defeat them by producing better and cheaper products than they do. In the dairy sector, our cooperatives have continued to hold their own, even against giants like Nestle. If our cooperatives had not been around, we would still be importing baby food, condensed milk and sundry other dairy products just as our neighbouring countries are doing. I take great pride in stating that it is we – our farmers and their cooperatives – who disciplined foreign capital in dairy products in this country.

She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be. Why was it that in planetarium lectures the telescopic photographs flashed upon the interior of the dome were so familiar—not just to her, but to everyone. Farmers and children, and, once, Paumanuk Indians pausing in their sad race to extinction, had all understood the sharp abstract images, immediately and from the heart. The nebulae, the sweep of galaxies, the centrifugal clusters—nothing more, really, than projected electric light on a plaster ceiling—carried them away in a trance, and the planetarium lecturer need not have said a word. And why was it that certain sounds, frequencies, and repetitious rhythmic patterns suggested stars, floating galaxies, and even the colorful opaque planets orbiting in subdued ellipses? Why were certain pieces of music (pre-Galilean, post-Galilean, it did not matter) harmonically and rhythmically linked to the stars and suggestive of the parallel light that rained upon the earth in illusory radiants bursting apart? She had no explanation for these or a hundred other questions about the same matters.

In addition to the alienation of farmers, large parts of the Mittelstand, growing numbers of industrialists and of the nationalist right by 1928, there was a further worrying trend facing the regime, the progressive disillusionment of young people and of the literary and cultural elites. The First World War and its aftermath had shaken loose many of the traditional ties binding young people to their families and to their local communities. As the Koblenz authorities noted in the early 1920s, ‘the present sad appearance of the young, their debasement on the steeets, in pubs and dance halls results from the absence of firm authority by fathers and by schools during the war. The children of that time are today s young people who have little sense of authority and discipline.’ In Cologne, it was observed that young people were spending too much time on ‘visits to pubs, excessive drinking and dancing’. As

The obsession with quarterly earnings came about because personal compensation was increasingly tied to what happened to the share price. Improving market capitalization became the number one job for senior executives. Success would lead to personal wealth. Sadly,

Shareholder value became, from the 1990s onwards, a driver of management consulting success and, somewhat sadly, of advertising agency marginalization.

Do your zombies eat brains? Are they horrible and scary? They're only sad.

Wal-Mart was a living hell full of bad lighting, sad faces, and screaming children. We had only started getting them everywhere in Mexico a few years ago, but it was like all the American stereotypes followed them down here. This was one of the supercenters that had a McDonald’s in it and a produce section that pissed off all our farmers. It reeked of everything I hated.

Lookee here, ma'am, at these sad lines of hog manure," he said, jabbing at the rows of formulas. "Up here you created an elegant formula-tion that stands on its own. Then you seem to doubt your work, even though it's obviously correct, because you proceed to pour all kinds of doo-doo on it until it dies of asphyxia at the bottom of the page." "But it's not hog manure ..." "Ma'am, I grew up on a hog farm. Never, ever doubt a North Carolina hog farmer's ability to recognize and categorize excrement.

That night, it rained on the other dogs, who slept outside in the cold barn, which leaked. But the little dog snuggled into a warm bed beside the fire, hugged by the farmer’s children, his belly full. And as he did, the dog sadly thought to himself, ‘I could not become a dragon. I am an utter and complete failure.’ “The end.

Not everyone is sad when the Callers enter the room and shout out the next list of names. On the contrary, some people beg and plead, prostrating themselves at the Callers’ feet. These are generally the folks who have been here a long time, too long, especially those who are remembered for unfair reasons. For example, take the farmer over there, who drowned in a small river two hundred years ago. Now his farm is the site of a small college, and the tour guides each week tell his story. So he’s stuck and he’s miserable. The more his story is told, the more the details drift. He is utterly alienated from his name; it is no longer identical with him but continues to bind. The cheerless woman across the way is praised as a saint, even though the roads in her heart were complicated. The gray-haired man at the vending machine was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord, and finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history. He waits with aching heart for his statues to fall.

Representative here are these remarks, dating from the 1860s, of a British forest officer on the Baigas of central India, a tribe that lived in valuable forests that the newly established Forest Department wished to take over. The officer wrote of this community of swidden farmers that they were ‘the most terrible enemy to the forests we have anywhere in the hills.’ It was sad ‘to see the havoc that has been made among the forests by the Baiga axes.’ In some areas ‘the hills have been swept clean of forests for miles; in others, the Baiga marks are tall, blackened, charred stems standing in hundreds among the green forests’—it was ‘really difficult to believe that so few people could sweep the face of the earth so clear of timber as they have done.

Eventually I said, "Do you remember Baba Haji?" And she said, "Of course." "No," I said. "Do you remember the time I was a kid. I walked around into his courtyard, and there was a bull they wanted to kill for a feast for me. All the mean were struggling with it. Is that real? Did that happen?" I was terrified of what she'd say, because all this time, I had held on to that one memory like a peach pit in my pocket. It was mine and it was the only I had of my Baba Haji. Is it was untrue, I don't think I could take it. "No," she said. "It wasn't like that." I closed my eyes, because I had lost my Baba Haji. "That wasn't for a feast for you. The bull had gone mad," she said. "It was going to kick someone or kill one of the farmers. So they went to your Baba Haji. He was so strong, they all went to him for this kind of thing. He took care of everyone who worked of him. And it was a mercy to kill the bull, because it would thrash and break its own neck if they didn't." "Really?" I said. "And did he come out and hold my face?" "I suppose so." "And were his hands red with blood?" "Oh no. He would never have done that. You must have imagined that." "But he smiled at me." "Of course. You were his. He would have also made a feast," she added. "But it would have been a sheep. He would have spilled the blood. You have to understand that means a blessing. It's ancient. To step over the river of blood, to accept the sacrifice and be thankful. Then we could eat, only after we understand the cost of joy. And he would have washed his hands.

Reason 1: Fear The first part says, "The lazy man won't go out and work. 'There might be a lion outside!' he says" (Proverbs 26:13, TLB). Fear grips Farmer Fraidy. Laziness is already mentioned, but the example given was about fear. It says that he doesn't want to go out because of a lion. We all have an imaginary lion in our lives. From my experience, I believe it's uncertainty. All change is terrifying because it's unfamiliar. This is the chilling truth: Some people would prefer the certainty of their present poverty rather than the uncertainty of their future prosperity. Sad but real.

They call that cliff the “Last Man Leap.” The local legend has it, that in the late eighteen hundreds, a local farmer fell in love with a woman from these parts. Sadly for him, his love was not reciprocated. The broken-hearted man went there one day and jumped to his death

In turn, the Hadza have become so used to visiting scientists that hosting the researchers who observe them has become a way to supplement their income. Sadly, visiting scientists who want to emphasize how much they are studying bona fide hunter-gatherers sometimes turn a blind eye to the degree to which the Hadza’s way of life is changing as a result of contact with the outside world. These papers rarely mention how many Hadza children now go to government schools, and how the Hadza’s territory is almost entirely shared with neighboring tribes of farmers and pastoralists, with whom they trade and whose cows tramp all over the region. As I write this, the Hadza don’t yet have cell phones, but they are not isolated as they once were. Despite these limitations, there is still much to learn from the Hadza, and I am fortunate to have visited them on a couple of occasions. But to get to the Hadza is not easy. They live in a ring of inhospitable hills surrounding a seasonal, salty lake in northwestern Tanzania—a hot, arid, sunbaked region that is almost impossible to farm.13 The area has some of the worst roads on the planet. Of the roughly twelve hundred Hadza, only about four hundred still predominantly hunt and gather, and to find these few, more traditional Hadza, you need sturdy jeeps, an experienced guide, and a lot of skill to travel over treacherous terrain. After a rainstorm, driving twenty miles can take most of the day. Many things surprised me when I first walked into a Hadza camp mid-morning on a torrid, sunny day in 2013, but I remember being especially struck by how everyone was apparently doing nothing. Hadza camps consist of a few temporary grass huts that blend in with the surrounding bushes. I didn’t realize I had walked into a camp until I found myself amid about fifteen Hadza men, women, and children who were sitting on the ground as shown in figure 2. The women and children were relaxing on one side, and the men on another. One fellow was straightening some arrows, and a few children were toddling about, but no one was engaged in any hard work. To be sure, the Hadza weren’t lounging on sofas, watching TV, munching potato chips, and sipping soda, but they were doing what so many health experts warn us to avoid: sitting.

The financial decline of farming towns has become an accepted fact of American life, and the economic plight of farmers (who seem to complain incessantly about their low prices, high debt, and the ever-present threat of bad weather) is now considered a kind of inescapable destiny. The American farm and the small towns it once supported, the thinking goes, have died over the last fifty years because there’s no money to be made in a largely backward-looking business. This would be a sad thing, if it was in any way true, but it is not. Farming is immensely profitable. The agriculture sector is one of the richest, most productive moneymaking machines in American life. After all, a lot of the business simply involves sitting around and letting plants grow and letting animals get fat. Mother Nature does the heavy lifting. Then the farmer harvests the plants, kills the animals, and watches the money roll in. In 2010 alone Tyson Foods sold $28.43 billion worth of meat and cleared $780 million in pure profit. And that was during a tough year, when consumers were dining out less and scrimping on steaks and the precooked meals that are Tyson’s real moneymakers. Other agriculture companies did just as well. The critical question isn’t whether there is money in agriculture, but rather where the money goes.