Grain Harvest Quotes

Michael Pollan likens consumer choices to pulling single threads out of a garment. We pull a thread from the garment when we refuse to purchase eggs or meat from birds who were raised in confinement, whose beaks were clipped so they could never once taste their natural diet of worms and insects. We pull out a thread when we refuse to bring home a hormone-fattened turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. We pull a thread when we refuse to buy meat or dairy products from cows who were never allowed to chew grass, or breathe fresh air, or feel the warm sun on their backs. The more threads we pull, the more difficult it is for the industry to stay intact. You demand eggs and meat without hormones, and the industry will have to figure out how it can raise farm animals without them. Let the animals graze outside and it slows production. Eventually the whole thing will have to unravel. If the factory farm does indeed unravel - and it must - then there is hope that we can, gradually, reverse the environmental damage it has caused. Once the animal feed operations have gone and livestock are once again able to graze, there will be a massive reduction in the agricultural chemicals currently used to grow grain for animals. And eventually, the horrendous contamination caused by animal waste can be cleaned up. None of this will be easy. The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one.

Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?

If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labour per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.

The festival of Lughnasadh speaks of fullness and bounty of richness and sacrifice. As cornfields ripple in the late summer breeze and whisper golden promises of the grain harvest to come, we know deep within our psyche that the darkness is but a heartbeat away.

Every year, Kansas watches the world die. Civilizations of wheat grow tall and green; they grow old and golden, and then men shaped from the same earth as the crop cut those lives down. And when the grain is threshed, and the dances and festivals have come and gone, then the fields are given over to fire, and the wheat stubble ascends into the Kansas sky, and the moon swells to bursting above a blackened earth. The fields around Henry, Kansas, had given up their gold and were charred. Some had already been tilled under, waiting for the promised life of new seed. Waiting for winter, and for spring, and another black death. The harvest had been good. Men, women, boys and girls had found work, and Henry Days had been all hot dogs and laughter, even without Frank Willis's old brown truck in the parade. The truck was over on the edge of town, by a lonely barn decorated with new No Trespassing signs and a hole in the ground where the Willis house had been in the spring and the early summer. Late summer had now faded into fall, and the pale blue farm house was gone. Kansas would never forget it.

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.

From the tiniest grain of sand to the brain of an Einstein, all existence, animate and inanimate, is the product of the same ninety-two elements that are themselves the harvest of the energy of the creation. At every turn an underlying commonality, a unity, emerges from within the diversity.

Everything is so precariously held together here that you might want a helping hand. Nobody is going to teach you that right after a harvest, poorly paid labourers were hungry enough to smoke out rodent holes and steal back the grains of paddy pilfered by rats. But you will manage. You will learn to relate without family trees. You will learn to make do without a village map. You will learn that criminal landlords can break civil laws to enforce caste codes. You will learn that handfuls of rice of rice can consume half a village. You will loafer learn that in the eyes of the law, the rich are incapable of soiling their hands with either mud or blood. You will learn to wait for revenge with the patience of a village awaiting rain.

Without the act and anticipation of planting and harvest, there could be no agriculture as we know it, and our species would still be wandering in small bands of hunters, gatherers, and herdsmen. Indeed, some experts believe that Homo sapiens might never have evolved at all in a world that lacked seeds.

Something in one's heart takes fright, not at the thought of growing old, not at feeling one's youth used up in this mineral universe, but at the thought that far away the whole world is ageing. The trees have brought forth their fruit; the grain has ripened in the fields; the women have bloomed in their loveliness. But the season is advancing and one must make haste; but the season is advancing and still one cannot leave; but the season is advancing...and other men will glean the harvest.

That was when the Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas. As a result, shipping salt to Venice became so profitable that the same merchants could afford to ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors. Growing fat on the salt subsidy, Venice merchants could afford to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean, where they picked up valuable cargoes of Indian spices and sold them in western Europe at low prices that their non-Venetian competitors could not afford to offer. This meant that the Venetian public was paying extremely high prices for salt, but they did not mind expensive salt if they could dominate the spice trade and be leaders in the grain trade. When grain harvests failed in Italy, the Venetian government would use its salt income to subsidize grain imports from other parts of the Mediterranean and thereby corner the Italian grain market.

Gardeners slaughter no animals. They kill nothing. Fruits, seeds, vegetables, nuts, grains, grasses, roots, flowers, herbs, berries-all are collected when they have ripened, and when their collection is in the interest of the garden's heightened and continued vitality. Harvesting respects a source, leaves it unexploited, suffers it to be as it is.

Does my farming technique have enough fish tank to support a powdered-water lifestyle? This is something I think about while harvesting my grain on bicycle.

In times when the grain was harvested by hand, many traditions and superstitions grew up around this important event.

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.17

He ran into God many times during the year: felt of him in the warm field-dirt of May; saw his face in the shiny harvest grain; heard his voice among the tops of the Norway pines.

I know that mood. Three years of the desert taught it to me. Something in one’s heart takes fright, not at the thought of growing old, not at feeling one’s youth used up in this mineral universe, but at the thought that far away the whole world is ageing. The trees have brought forth their fruit; the grain has ripened in the fields; the women have bloomed in their loveliness. But the season is advancing and one must make haste; but the season is advancing and still one cannot leave; but the season is advancing ... and other men will glean the harvest.

Great cutting edge, indifferent to tissue Great stamping mass, indifferent to the cry of crushed bones, Grant us your hardness: We would be as prompt to suffer As you to inflict our suffering! Light flashes out from your whirling blades Heads bow to the earth before your harvesting: Heads of grain, heads of men and women. Grant us your hardness and bright surface. Be with us in the hour of our processing. - Hymn to Steel: for 5 million human voices

. . . to my surprise I began to know what The Language was about, not just the part we were singing now but the whole poem. It began with the praise and joy in all creation, copying the voice of the wind and the sea. It described sun and moon, stars and clouds, birth and death, winter and spring, the essence of fish, bird, animal, and man. It spoke in what seemed to be the language of each creature. . . . It spoke of well, spring, and stream, of the seed that comes from the loins of a male creature and of the embryo that grows in the womb of the female. It pictured the dry seed deep in the dark earth, feeling the rain and the warmth seeping down to it. It sang of the green shoot and of the tawny heads of harvest grain standing out in the field under the great moon. It described the chrysalis that turns into a golden butterfly, the eggs that break to let out the fluffy bird life within, the birth pangs of woman and of beast. It went on to speak of the dark ferocity of the creatures that pounce upon their prey and plunge their teeth into it--it spoke in the muffled voice of bear and wolf--it sang the song of the great hawks and eagles and owls until their wild faces seemed to be staring into mine, and I knew myself as wild as they. It sang the minor chords of pain and sickness, of injury and old age; for a few moments I felt I was an old woman with age heavy upon me.

the goddess knew that her daughter had been taken, and tore her hair into utter disorder, and repeatedly struck her breasts with the palms of both hands. With her daughter’s location a mystery still, she reproaches the whole earth as ungrateful, unworthy her gift of grain crops, and Sicily more than the others, where she has discovered the proof of her loss; and so it was here that her fierce hand shattered the earth-turning plows, here that the farmers and cattle perished alike, and here that she bade the plowed fields default on their trust by blighting the seeds in their keeping. Sicilian fertility, which had been everywhere famous, was given the lie when the crops died as they sprouted, now ruined by too much heat, and now by too heavy a rainfall; stars and winds harmed them, and the greedy birds devoured the seed as it was sown; the harvest of wheat was defeated by thorns and darnels and unappeasable grasses.

Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year—a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants—and it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five. Both the high relative share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible: this is not a biased personal impression stemming from a poor understanding of the global energy system – but a realistic conclusion based on engineering and economic realities.

This summer of 1533 has been a summer of cloudless days, of strawberry feasts in London gardens, the drone of fumbling bees, warm evenings to stroll under rose arbours and hear from the allées the sound of young gentlemen quarrelling over their bowls. The grain harvest is abundant even in the north. The trees are bowed under the weight of ripening fruit. As if he has decreed that the heat must continue, the king's court burns bright through the autumn. Monseigneur the queen's father shines like the sun, and around him

In plains of gold we live, With joy we harvest our barley and wheat. To the world what treasures we give, And at home we relax and feast. So away, crows, fly far, These grains are not for your covens. The barley is destined for the brewery, And wheat for bread and muffins.

The population aids the army. Recently Porkhov schoolboys caught three parachutists. A bearded old villager, armed with a stake, brought in a diversionist, disguised in the green uniform of a pre-revolutionary forester. The peasants drive off the cattle. Grain fields are burning. This year the stalks are almost as tall as an average man. There was not enough time to harvest the grain. Attacks and counterattacks continue. On both sides the losses are heavy. Yesterday one of our tanks caught fire. The driver rushed his burning tank at a German machine.

Moses questions God about death Moses asks God the most basic question, "You create us; then you kill us. "Why" God says, I understand the purpose within your question; therefore I'll answer. You want to know the meaning of phenomenal duration, so you can teach others and help their souls unfold. Anyone who asks this question has some of the answer. Sow seed corn, Moses, and you will experience the purpose of taking a form. Moses plants and tends the crop; when the ears have ripened to the shape of their beauty, he brings out to the field his blade and sharpening stone. The unseen voice comes, Why did you work to bring the corn to perfection only now to chop it down? "Lord, it is the winnowing time when we separate the corn grains we use for food from the straw we use for bedding and fodder. They must be stored in different cribs in the barn." Where did you learn this threshing-floor work? "You gave me discernment." Do you not feel that I should have a similar discernment in the planting and harvesting of forms that I do? So creation has a purpose. God has said, I was a hidden treasure, and I desired to be known. That desire is part of manifestation.

These people you call anabaptists will take no oaths. They will serve no kings. Not only do they deny the commonwealth their labour, the magistrate their obedience, but they deny the child his book. They love ignorance. They say we live in the last days, so why learn anything? Why tend crops, why store grain: there is no need of a harvest.

Harvest Do not let a woman with a sexy rump deceive you with wheedling and coaxing words; she is after your barn. -Hesiod Shall we gather the sunset pluck what is ripe harness the cicada's song? Even if this isn't the season of new love let us remember the buds and reap what we can. No crop is too small. No harvest too lean. The grain will yield. So scatter and slash call in the cows and let us milk them all dry. Plow as you will. Bulldoze away. Why not make every season our season each day our day to till and tease to clear and seed to plant and replant as we please. Come my sweet smell of hay do not be deceived by Hesiod. He says that I am after your barn. I want the whole fucking farm!

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage? I read on, and I find myself smiling at that sound-fleshed young girl, her daring and her folly and her many fears.

The truth of the matter was, that whether a person did good or committed evil was rarely ever due to their inherent nature. Each person was like a plot of farmland; some were lucky, their fields sprinkled with seeds of grains, bearing an abundant harvest come autumn, paddies wafting with the soft fragrance of rice and fields of wheat dancing in the wind like waves, and everything would be good and praise-worthy. But some were not so lucky. Their fields were planted with the seeds of poppy flowers, and the spring breeze brought only the sin of intoxicated dissipation and euphoric decadence, filling the skies and covering the lands with that vile, bloody red and gold. The people abhorred it, cursed it, feared it, even as they indulged in its blissful stupor, rotted away in its filthy stench.

Someone once said that the challenge of living is to develop a long obedience in the same direction. When it's demanded, we can rise on occasion and be patient . . . as long as there are limits. But we balk when patience is required over a long haul. We don't much like endurance. It's painful to persevere through a marriage that's forever struggling. A church that never crest 100 members. Housekeeping routines that never vary from week-to-week. Even caring for an elderly parent or a handicapped child can feel like a long obedience in the same direction. If only we could open our spiritual eyes to see the fields of grain we're planting, growing, and reaping along the way. That's what happens when we endure... Right now you may be in the middle of a long stretch of the same old routine.... You don't hear any cheers or applause. The days run together―and so do the weeks. Your commitment to keep putting one foot in front of the other is starting to falter. Take a moment and look at the fruit. Perseverance. Determination. Fortitude. Patience. Your life is not a boring stretch of highway. It's a straight line to heaven. And just look at the fields ripening along the way. Look at the tenacity and endurance. Look at the grains of righteousness. You'll have quite a crop at harvest . . . so don't give up!

[Saturn, or the Latin age of the gods. Year of the world 2491.] 73 This is the age of the gods beginning among the nations of Latium and corresponding in character to the golden age of the Greeks, among whom our mythology will show [544ff] that the first gold was grain, by the harvests of which for many centuries the first nations counted their years [407]. Saturn was so called by the Latins from sati, sown [fields], and is called Chronos by the Greeks, among whom chronos means time, whence comes the word chronology.

Autumn was a harvest of big-box stores and their back-to-school sales: fruit leather, instant mac 'n' cheese, and bread that we unhusked, crinkling, from its plastic sleeve. My mouth watered for the sweetness of processed wheat sown thick through gas stations from California to New York. Honey Buns and Wonder Breads, in perfect squares and machined circles, and the ripe weight of a Danish, mass-produced, that attempts no fidelity to the country after which it is named--- no country but this one ambered by waves of industrial grain.

Word from the outside, whether it arrived in a mail sack or a news report, seldom overshadowed the facts of our lives. We talked in facts -- work and weather, the logistics of this fence, that field -- but stories were how we spoke. A good story rose to the surface of a conversation like heavy cream, a thing to be savored and served artfully. Stored in dry wit, wrapped in dark humor, tied together with strings of anecdote, these stories told the chronology of a family, the history of a piece of land, the hardships of a certain year or a span of years, a series of events that led without pause to the present. If the stories were recent, they filtered through the door to my room late at night, voices hushed around the kitchen table as they sorted out this day and held it against others, their laughter sharp and sad and slow to come. Time was the key. Remember the time...and something in the air caught like a whisper. Back when. Back before a summer too fresh and real to talk about, a year's work stripped in a twenty-minute hailstorm; a man's right hand mangled in the belts of a combine, first day of harvest; an only son buried alive in a grain bin, suffocated in a red avalanche of wheat.

Where, exactly, did rainbow colored, sugar frosted, air puffed, marshmallow infused cereal come from? Was it raised by cartoon rabbits and harvested by mischievous leprechauns? These products were so distantly removed from the local farms, so thoroughly metamorphosed, that we couldn’t even be sure what the raw ingredients had been... Looking back on these farming families standing in line with their shopping carts, I wonder if the money they received for growing the right ingredients even covered the cost of their shopping bills. Could a farmer who planted fields of wheat and oats now afford a box of cereal made from his own grain?

And then there are colors. The truth is that the brain knows far less about colors than one might suppose. It sees more or less clearly what the eyes show it, but when it comes to converting what it has seen into knowledge, it often suffers from one might call difficulties in orientation. Thanks to the unconscious confidence of a lifetime's experience, it unhesitatingly utters the names of the colors it calls elementary and complementary, but it immediately lost, perplexed and uncertain when it tries to formulate words that might serve as labels or explanatory markers for the things that verge on the ineffable, that border on the incommunicable, for the still nascent color which, with the eyes' other bemused approval and complicity, the hands and fingers are in the process of inventing and which will probably never even have its own name. Or perhaps it already does -- a name known only to the hands, because they mixed the paint as if they were dismantling the constituent parts of a note of music, because they became smeared with the color and kept the stain deep inside the dermis, and because only with the invisible knowledge of the fingers will one ever be able to paint the infinite fabric of dreams. Trusting in what the eyes believe they have seen, the brain-in-the-head states that, depending on conditions of light and shade, on the presence or absence of wind, on whether it is wet or dry, the beach is white or yellow or olden or gray or purple or any other shade in between, but then along comes the fingers and, with a gesture of gathering in, as if harvesting a wheat field, they pluck from the ground all the colors of the world. What seemed unique was plural, what is plural will become more so. It is equally true, though, that in the exultant flash of a single tone or shade, or in its musical modulation, all the other tones and shades are also present and alive, both the tones or shades of colors that have already been name, as well as those awaiting names, just as an apparently smooth, flat surface can both conceal and display the traces of everything ever experience in the history of the world. All archaeology of matter is an archaeology of humanity. What this clay hides and shows is the passage of a being through time and space, the marks left by fingers, the scratches left by fingernails, the ashes and the charred logs of burned-out bonfires, our bones and those of others, the endlessly bifurcating paths disappearing off into the distance and merging with each other. This grain on the surface is a memory, this depression the mark left by a recumbent body. The brain asked a question and made a request, the hand answered and acted.

A friend of hers had finished processing his wild rice, or manoomin, and the bag was for us. The rice was nicely cleaned, a rich green-brown. I plunged my unbandaged hand into the bag. The feeling of the rice, the cool laky scent, was calming. We took some out and admired the length of the grains. Native people around here have a specific ferocity about wild rice. I’ve seen faces harden when tame paddy rice, the uniformly brown commercially grown rice, is mentioned, called wild rice, or served under false pretenses. People get into fights over it. Real wild rice is grown wild, harvested by Native people, and tastes of the lake it comes from. This was the good stuff.

More food is good, but agricultural diets can provoke mismatch diseases. One of the biggest problems is a loss of nutritional variety and quality. Hunter-gatherers survive because they eat just about anything and everything that is edible. Hunter-gatherers therefore necessarily consume an extremely diverse diet, typically including many dozens of plant species in any given season.26 In contrast, farmers sacrifice quality and diversity for quantity by focusing their efforts on just a few staple crops with high yields. It is likely that more than 50 percent of the calories you consume today derived from rice, corn, wheat, or potatoes. Other crops that have sometimes served as staples for farmers include grains like millet, barley, and rye and starchy roots such as taro and cassava. Staple crops can be grown easily in massive quantities, they are rich in calories, and they can be stored for long periods of time after harvest. One of their chief drawbacks, however, is that they tend to be much less rich in vitamins and minerals than most of the wild plants consumed by hunter-gatherers and other primates.27 Farmers who rely too much on staple crops without supplemental foods such as meat, fruits, and other vegetables (especially legumes) risk nutritional deficiencies. Unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers are susceptible to diseases such as scurvy (from insufficient vitamin C), pellagra (from insufficient vitamin B3), beriberi (from insufficient vitamin B1), goiter (from insufficient iodine), and anemia (from insufficient iron).28 Relying heavily on a few crops—sometimes just one crop—has other serious disadvantages, the biggest being the potential for periodic food shortages and famine. Humans,

The consequences enveloped the entire globe. During 1890 a strong La Niña ocean temperature anomaly developed, followed by two El Niño years, which warmed Pacific waters and upended normal weather patterns—causing floods in some places, drought in others. In India, monsoons failed, leading to widespread cattle deaths, locust plagues, and grain riots.172 In Russia, peasants had been pressured to clear huge areas for wheat, with the grain exported as a cash crop; overseers had walked away rich. But by 1891 and 1892, the land was exhausted. Drought, bad harvests, and bitter winters led vast numbers of peasants to burn the thatched roofs of their homes for fuel and eat “famine bread” made out of weeds. Typhus swept in to finish off the emaciated. Worldwide, millions died. It was, as one scholar put it, a “fin de siècle apocalypse.”173 Weather patterns in the

Events specially staged to demonstrate the reality of that which doesn’t exist stand out in the particular detail in which they are described. No one really knows, for example, whether the harvests reported in Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s Russia were ever actually reaped, but the fact that the number of tilled hectares or tons of milled grain was always reported down to the tenth of a percent gave these simulacra the character of hyperreality. [...] In this sense, the ideology was accurate—it was describing itself. And any reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist—it was replaced by hyperreality, which trumpeted its existence by newspaper and loudspeaker and was much more tangible and reliable than anything else. In the Soviet land, “fairy tale became fact,” as in that American paragon of hyperreality, Disneyland, where reality itself is designed as a “land of imagination.

Ominously, food production is beginning to flatten out, both in world grain production and in food harvested from the oceans. The UK government’s chief scientist warned of a perfect storm of exploding population and falling food and energy supplies by 2030. The world will have to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to feed an extra 2.3 billion people, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has said, or else face disaster. These projections may underestimate the true scope of the problem. With hundreds of millions of people from China and India entering the middle class, they will want to enjoy the same luxuries that they have seen in Hollywood movies—such as two cars, spacious suburban homes, hamburgers and French fries, etc.—and may strain the world’s resources. In fact, Lester Brown, one of the world’s leading environmentalists and founder of the World Watch Institute in Washington, D.C., confided to me that the world may not be able to handle the strain of providing a middle-class lifestyle to so many hundreds of millions of people.

Ironically, in spite of all the care and attention my grandparents devoted to their land, all the food they grew each year ultimately became anonymous, and it ended up eaten by complete strangers. Young calves were sent to feed lots in the Midwest to be fattened on grain. Apples, their skins never perfect enough to be sold as fresh fruit, were transformed into juice, or sauce, or apple pies. The corn, like most grain raised in America, was destined for animal feed. It was, perhaps, fed to the very calves that they had sold, now 1000 miles away. Once the food left the farm, the entire system was turned on its head. The freshness they had worked so hard to attain, picking the fruit at the peak of harvest was replaced with shelf life… their harvest was trucked all across America. It was processed, boxed, frozen, and then shipped again. Their food was trucked down the interstate in 18 wheelers, and hauled away by trains while they slept. Their apples might end up in the filling of a donut in Chicago, or their beef in a taco in Alabama. They had no way of ever really knowing.

This worship of the sacred fire did not belong exclusively to the populations of Greece and Italy. We find it in the East. The Laws of Manu as they have come to us show us the religion of Brahma completely established, and even verging towards its decline; but they have preserved vestiges and remains of a religion still more ancient—that of the sacred fire—which the worship of Brahma had reduced to a secondary rank, but could not destroy. The Brahmin has his fire to keep night and day; every morning and every evening he feeds it with wood; but, as with the Greeks, this must be the wood of certain trees. As the Greeks and Italians offer it wine, the Hindu pours upon it a fermented liquor which he calls soma. Meals, too, are religious acts, and the rites are scrupulously described in the Laws of Manu. They address prayers to the fire, as in Greece; they offer it the first fruits of rice, butter, and honey. We read that “the Brahmin should not eat the rice of the new harvest without having offered the first fruits of it to the hearth-fire; for the sacred fire is greedy of grain, and when it is not honored it will devour the existence of the negligent Brahmin.” The Hindus, like the Greeks and the Romans, pictured the gods to themselves as greedy not only of honors and respect, but of food and drink. Man believed himself compelled to satisfy their hunger and thirst if he wished to avoid their wrath.

Last night they stole the watchman’s rattle, and knocked the watchman down. Now they go rattling through the streets, proclaiming the ballad of Worse-was-it-Never. There was a former age, it seems, when wives were chaste and pedlars honest, when roses bloomed at Christmas and every pot bubbled with fat self-renewing capons. If these times are not those times, who is to blame? Londoners, probably. Members of Parliament. Reforming bishops. People who use English to talk to God. Word spreads. On the farms around, labourers see the chance of a holiday. Faces blackened, some wearing women’s attire, they set off to town, picking up any edged tool that could act as a weapon. From the marketplace you can see them coming, kicking up a cloud of dust. Old men anywhere in England will tell you about the drunken exploits of harvests past. Rebel ballads sung by our grandfathers need small adaptation now. We are taxed till we cry, we must live till we die, we be looted and swindled and cheated and dwindled … O, Worse was it Never! Farmers bolt their grain stores. The magistrates are alert. Burgers withdraw indoors, securing their warehouses. In the square some rascal sways on top of a husting, viewing the rural troops as they roll in. ‘Pledge yourselves to me—Captain Poverty is my name.’ The bell-ringers, elbowed and threatened, tumble into the parish church and ring the bells backward. At this signal, the world turns upside down.

But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science; physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive—they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. Meanwhile, a tiny proportion of absentee landowners controlled huge swathes of terrain. The solution to rural poverty, Nehru therefore believed, was less new technology than new policies: give land from big landowners to ordinary farmers, free the latter from the burdens of caste, and then gather the liberated smallholders into more-efficient, technician-advised cooperatives. This set of ideas had the side benefit of fitting nicely into Nehru’s industrial policy: enacting them would cost next to nothing, reserving more money for building factories.

We start with a next-generation miso soup: Kyoto's famous sweet white miso whisked with dashi made from lobster shells, with large chunks of tender claw meat and wilted spinach bobbing on the soup's surface. The son takes a cube of topflight Wagyu off the grill, charred on the outside, rare in the center, and swaddles it with green onions and a scoop of melting sea urchin- a surf-and-turf to end all others. The father lays down a gorgeous ceramic plate with a poem painted on its surface. "From the sixteenth century," he tells us, then goes about constructing the dish with his son, piece by piece: First, a chunk of tilefish wrapped around a grilled matsutake mushroom stem. Then a thick triangle of grilled mushroom cap, plus another grilled stem the size of a D-sized battery, topped with mushroom miso. A pickled ginger shoot, a few tender soybeans, and the crowning touch, the tilefish skin, separated from its body and fried into a ripple wave of crunch. The rice course arrives in a small bamboo steamer. The young chef works quickly. He slices curtains of tuna belly from a massive, fat-streaked block, dips it briefly in house-made soy sauce, then lays it on the rice. Over the top he spoons a sauce of seaweed and crushed sesame seeds just as the tuna fat begins to melt into the grains below. A round of tempura comes next: a harvest moon of creamy pumpkin, a gold nugget of blowfish capped with a translucent daikon sauce, and finally a soft, custardy chunk of salmon liver, intensely fatty with a bitter edge, a flavor that I've never tasted before. The last savory course comes in a large ice block carved into the shape of a bowl. Inside, a nest of soba noodles tinted green with powdered matcha floating in a dashi charged with citrus and topped with a false quail egg, the white fashioned from grated daikon.

The cuisine of Northern Iran, overlooked and underrated, is unlike most Persian food in that it's unfussy and lighthearted as the people from that region. The fertile seaside villages of Mazandaran and Rasht, where Soli grew up before moving to the congested capital, were lush with orchards and rice fields. His father had cultivated citrus trees and the family was raised on the fruits and grains they harvested. Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of fava beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.

As of now, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of food energy for humans—somewhere between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for a calorie of food. The fossil fuel is in both the fertilizer and the pesticides, and it’s essential to the machinery needed to plant, harvest, process, and transport grain. All told, an acre of corn drinks about fifty gallons of oil.

Taiichi Ohno blamed this batch-and-queue mode of thinking on civilization’s first farmers, who he claimed lost the one-thing-at-a-time wisdom of the hunter as they became obsessed with batches (the once-a-year harvest) and inventories (the grain depository).4 Or perhaps we’re simply born with batching thinking in our heads, along with many other “common sense” illusions—for example, that time is constant rather than relative or that space is straight rather than curved. But we all need to fight departmentalized, batch thinking because tasks can almost always be accomplished much more efficiently and accurately when the product is worked on continuously from raw material to finished good. In short, things work better when you focus on the product and its needs, rather than the organization or the equipment, so that all the activities needed to design, order, and provide a product occur in continuous flow.

warm places with ample supply of water. In the Philippines, rice planting is a celebration. The soil is first prepared by the farmer and his carabao (KAH-RAH-BOW), then the land is flooded and the planters come in to do their jobs. Each seedling could develop two or more offshoots, each producing about 200 flowers, which turn into grains. After harvest time, these grains are removed from the stalks by threshing them. They are then hulled in a big wooden mortar and pestle, usually by the synchronized pounding of two men. The process of winnowing, usually done by the females using a bilao (a woven, flat, round, bamboo tray),

When the sweep of God's sickles brings final harvest to the earth, separating grain from grapes, the present system of power and prestige will be reversed. The pagan persecutors who now tread the holy city underfoot (Rev. 11:2) will be trodden underfoot by the church's mighty avenger (14:20). Their defiling blood pours from a winepress "outside the city," for those who belong to earth's so-called "great city," which wages war on God's church (11:8; 17:18), have no share in God's holy, heavenly city. No one unclean shall ever enter the holy city, the new Jerusalem, "but only those whose navies are written in the Lamb's book of life" (21:27).

which turn into grains. After harvest time, these grains are removed from the stalks by threshing them. They are then hulled in a big wooden mortar and pestle, usually by the synchronized pounding of two men. The process of winnowing, usually done by the females using a bilao (a woven, flat, round, bamboo tray), separates the kernels that we eat from the hulls, the rough outer

into grains. After harvest time, these grains are removed from the stalks by threshing them. They are then hulled in a big wooden mortar and pestle, usually by the synchronized pounding of two men. The process of winnowing, usually done by the females using a bilao (a woven, flat, round, bamboo tray), separates

ample supply of water. In the Philippines, rice planting is a celebration. The soil is first prepared by the farmer and his carabao (KAH-RAH-BOW), then the land is flooded and the planters come in to do their jobs. Each seedling could develop two or more offshoots, each producing about 200 flowers, which turn into grains. After harvest time, these grains are removed from the stalks by threshing them. They are then hulled in a big

The collapse of world grain markets would have been catastrophe enough, but people would have eaten. In 1929, drought devastated much of the harvest, and for nine more years crop conditions denied the prairies a satisfactory harvest. In 1931, the wind began lifting the dry topsoil in great black clouds. In 1932, the first great plague of grasshoppers devoured every green thing, plus clothing and tool handles. In 1933, drought, hail, rust, and frost joined the grasshoppers, as though all nature’s forces had united to give prairie settlers notice to quit.

Winterfest is as much a celebration of the darkest part of the year as a festival of the returning light. For the first three days of Winterfest, we pay homage to the darkness. The tales told and puppet shows presented are those that tell of resting times and happy endings. The foods are salt fish and smoked flesh, harvested roots and fruit from last summer. Then, on the midday of the festival, there is a hunt. New blood is shed to celebrate the breaking point of the year, and new meat is brought fresh to the table, to be eaten with grain harvested from the year before. The next three days are days that look toward the coming summer. The looms are threaded with gayer thread, and the weavers take over an end of the Great Hall to vie among themselves for the brightest patterns and lightest weave. The tales told are ones that tell of beginnings of things, and of how things came to be.

7and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth. 8The LORD has sworn by his right hand and by his mighty arm: “Never again will I give your grain as food for your enemies, and never again will foreigners drink the new wine for which you have toiled; 9but those who harvest it will eat it

Farmers know that there are goodly harvests which ripen late, especially when the grain is strong.

So the Badarians stored their harvests in large clay bins within their desert settlements, where they also ground their grain as they required and sometimes, too, they turned their flour to bread, for loaves were found in several of their graves. A form of porridge also appears to have been a common food, ladled out of the cooking pots into hand-sized bowls from which it was consumed, perhaps, with the aid of the delicately made spoons of bone and horn and ivory which were also buried with the dead. Meat too, was on the menu, and in generous quantities. Alongside their domesticated herds of oxen, sheep and goats, hunting and gathering were still considerable activities; the bones of birds and fish were also plentiful inside the settlements, as were wild seeds and pulses and the roots of reeds and grasses, some of which could be as sweet as filberts whilst others would have been so fragrant yet so bitter that they could only have served as perfume.

Until the twentieth century, the threat of famine was a universal aspect of human existence across the world. Harvests failed; populations starved; for anyone but the wealthy, food wasn’t to be relied on. Even in rich countries such as Britain and France, ordinary people lived with the daily spectre of going to sleep hungry and spent as much as half their income on basic staples such as grain and bread.

REMEMBER! said the three-column ad in Indian newspapers, TODAY is A DINNERLESS DAY. Thus the government one day last week began its campaign to prepare Indians for what has become an annual food crisis. It was bad enough last year when India harvested 88 million tons of grain, far short of the nation’s need. This year the harvest is expected to fall below 75 million tons. What with some 12 million more mouths to feed, India faces its severest food crisis in two decades.

A failed harvest in 1555 led to rising grain prices and the widespread trouble food shortages always triggered. A Parliament called by Mary in 1555 solved some of the problems but also created others. For example, Parliament granted the government a large sum of money through taxation to alleviate the financial difficulties, but it refused to approve another measure put forward by Mary: the confiscation of property belonging to nobles who had gone into exile.

Again and again he spoke to Charlotte of things, watermelons and grain and cattle and string, reaper-mowers and harvester combines, chisel mortisers and scroll saws and flue stops and piston rings and grain elevators. Objects existing in time and space.

The past should never serve as an encumbrance, but we must exploit our experiences as learning assets. The only importance of any experience is to test oneself. Worthy challenges, fused with humility of spirit, enrich a person’s character. One must harvest the grain from their effort and discard the shaft. Before moving onward, it is critical for me to look back and remove any negative predilections that accumulated from days gone by that might mar, stunt, or otherwise arrest future personal development.

-To the Brave ones of soil- A robust hope of thousands hungry enduring the fetid winds of trickery and guile Are they testing the strength of soil? harvesting the crops un-ripened How many times you stole the color of wheat? Plundered the tossed grains of reaper Howl that familiar trick again! Capital is in 'Peace' Country is in 'Peace' Everything is in 'Peace' Peace is a hungry wolf, baring its fangs And if I say there is a peace in me its tight.

No matter how hopeless today feels, light is on the way, and it has less to do with what I do and everything to do with who God is. He is good. He is sovereign. If you’re in a season of pain, it might feel foreign for you to read those words. It might feel like a cruel joke to hear that light is making its way beneath the crack in your doorway. But it’s the truth. You might be praying for fruit right now, but perhaps God’s plan for today is the grain that will yield your harvest someday down the road.

When we pray the Lord's Prayer, observed Luther, we ask God to give us this day our daily bread. And He does give us our daily bread. He does it by means of the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the baker who made the flour into bread, the person who prepared our meal. We might today add the truck drivers who hauled the produce, the factory workers in the food processing plant, the warehouse men, the wholesale distributors, the stock boys, the lady at the checkout counter. Also playing their part are the bankers, futures investors, advertisers, lawyers, agricultural scientists, mechanical engineers, and every other player in the nation's economic system. All of these were instrumental in enabling you to eat your morning bagel.

Each grass from a lifeless grain is bred, Else to harvest no wheat were won: Always from good is good begun. So seemly a seed could not die in vain, That sprig nor spice there would be none Of that precious pearl without a stain.

All winter she has struggled to describe the joy of her life’s work and the discoveries that have solidified in a few short years: how trees talk to one another, over the air and underground. How they care and feed each other, orchestrating shared behaviors through the networked soil. How they build immune systems as wide as a forest. She spends a chapter detailing how a dead log gives life to countless other species. Remove the snag and kill the woodpecker who keeps in check the weevils that would kill the other trees. She describes the drupes and racemes, panicles and involucres that a person could walk past for a lifetime and never notice. She tells how the woody-coned alders harvest gold. How an inch-high pecan might have six feet of root. How the inner bark of birches can feed the starving. How one hop hornbeam catkin holds several million grains of pollen. How indigenous fishermen use crushed walnut leaves to stun and catch fish. How poplars clean soils of chlorinated solvents and willows remove heavy metals. She lays out how fungal hyphae—countless miles of filaments folded up in every spoon of soil—coax open tree roots and tap into them. How the wired-up fungi feed the tree minerals. How the tree pays for these nutrients with sugars, which the fungi can’t make.

Today, we give thanks to the cycle of rebirth For the grains, corn, and fruit that we pluck from the earth To those who carry with them the seed of new life That we reap during harvest with the basket and scythe We give thanks for the blessings upon fertile ground That keeps us fed and hale all the year-’round Everything that is and all that has been Carried forth by faithful servants within A blessing unto nature and the goddess of three Ever sacred is your will that is worked through me.

Then, when the State Chief Executive of Minnesota sent a request to Washington for the assistance of the Army against the riots he was unable to control—three directives burst forth within two hours, stopping all trains in the country, commandeering all cars to speed to Minnesota. An order signed by Wesley Mouch demanded the immediate release of the freight cars held in the service of Kip’s Ma. But by that time, it was too late. Ma’s freight cars were in California, where the soybeans had been sent to a progressive concern made up of sociologists preaching the cult of Oriental austerity, and of businessmen formerly in the numbers racket. In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives—and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night. Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smoldering piles—a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins—and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt; they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him. The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.

Koch Agriculture first branched out into the beef business, and it did so in a way that gave it control from the ranch to the butcher’s counter. Koch bought cattle feedlots. Then it developed its own retail brand of beef called Spring Creek Ranch. Dean Watson oversaw a team that worked to develop a system of “identity preservation” that would allow the company to track each cow during its lifespan, allowing it over time to select which cattle had the best-tasting meat. Koch held blind taste tests of the beef it raised. Watson claimed to win nine out of ten times. Then Koch studied the grain and feed industries that supplied its feedlots. Watson worked with experts to study European farming methods because wheat farmers in Ukraine were far better at raising more grain on each acre of land than American farmers were. The Europeans had less acreage to work with, forcing them to be more efficient, and Koch learned how to replicate their methods. Koch bought a stake in a genetic engineering company to breed superyielding corn. Koch Agriculture extended into the milling and flour businesses as well. It experimented with building “micro” mills that would be nimbler than the giant mills operated by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. Koch worked with a start-up company that developed a “pixie dust” spray preservative that could be applied to pizza crusts, making crusts that did not need to be refrigerated. It experimented with making ethanol gasoline and corn oil. There were more abstract initiatives. Koch launched an effort to sell rain insurance to farmers who had no way to offset the risk of heavy rains. To do that, Koch hired a team of PhD statisticians to write formulas that correlated corn harvests with rain events, figuring out what a rain insurance policy should cost. At the same time, Koch’s commodity traders were buying contracts for corn and soybeans, learning more every day about those markets.

The economy was in a state of collapse that winter, with banks failing and the stock market crashing deeper each day. But even that broad chaos was just a distraction from deeper problems that had all but crippled Donnie Smith’s business over the last couple of years. The cost of feed grains like corn had reached the highest levels in history due to new ethanol subsidies that President George Bush signed into law in late 2005. The ethanol mandate worked at direct cross-purposes with the USDA’s multibillion-dollar crop subsidies, which had delivered cheap corn and soybeans to Tyson Foods since 1996. Newly built ethanol plants were consuming more than a third of the entire U.S. corn harvest, wiping out grain supplies, boosting prices, and taking away the cushion of cheap grain that had helped keep Tyson profitable for more than a decade. At the same time, consumer demand had fallen through the floor. Americans weren’t eating at restaurants or buying Tyson’s chicken nuggets at the grocery store. For the first time since World War II, per capita chicken consumption wasn’t growing on a year-over-year basis. For fifty years, the economic underpinnings of the U.S. economy had been breaking in Tyson’s favor. But now that Donnie was almost in charge, the tide of history was going the other way.

Ukraine, March 1929 Roman founded an organization called OWK. He and Ostap made leaflets with their own hands, with the help of thick pencils, and distributed them all over the city, nailing them to doors and walls. When one of Afros' OGPO men stopped him on the street and asked about his actions, Roman replied, "I serve the revolution, comrade. And what are you doing?" The brothers were brought before Afros and Zhuk in the house they had confiscated in the village square. Zhuk asked if Roman wanted to be taken to Murmansk. Roman said no. He explained that apparently there were no kulaks left in Ispes after the concentrated purge six weeks ago. Therefore, Roman And Ostap decided to form an organization that anyone can join, and they are holding the first assembly next week. The organization is called OWK, the acronym for 'Organization without Kulaks'. "I even used the abominable Russian word, out of national solidarity with you and your friends, Comrade Zhuk," Roman said. "It is an organization of non-wealthy farmers, a definition that applies to the entire population that remained in Ispas. It is difficult to continue to maintain in Ukraine the class war between the successful farmer and the less successful farmer, in part because the classification changes from harvest to harvest. Kulak Mouser is the bane of the current harvest. And because the harvest was so bad and despite your laudable efforts, of course, there don't seem to be any kulaks left in our village. So we don't know exactly how to conduct the class war about which you spoke so eloquently a few weeks ago." Her novel to Jouk has a friendly smile. "We are deeply committed to purging the last of the anti-communist elements. And therefore - OW-K. "If you're serious, you'll participate in collectivization," said Jock. "I understand your point about the inefficiency of the small-scale farm, comrade," Roman said. "I am attentive to her. But listen to me until the end. The land of the Lazar family is far from the other farms, and it is impossible to connect it to them easily and create the collectivization, savings and cooperation that you strive for. So this is my proposal: my family and I will agree to meet your quota without collectivization. Let's show you how we work - with your help, maybe lend us a steel plow that expresses our new understanding and partnership? I'm sure it will work much better than our old wooden plows, and we'll do the rest. We will plow our land now, we will plant your wheat in August. We will work tirelessly for the cause and bring you the grain you demand. We will not give and we will not bargain.” "And in return?" "Nothing," Roman said. "In return we will continue to fatten horses and cows in peace." "You intend to pay other people to work in your wheat fields, Comrade Lazar?" asked Zhuk in a smooth voice. "Of course not," said Roman. "I know that even if I only have three horses, and I only pay two people to work for me, it means that I am a fat and lazy kulak, lower than a human pig. Then, as a founding member of OWK, I will have to destroy myself. So the answer is no. I will not pay anyone to work for me. Every person who passes through the fields will work for free, and that is the duty of all Ukrainians, right? As you told us we have to do to be counted for true patriots.

you harvest the crops of your land, do not harvest the grain along the edges of your fields, and do not pick up what the harvesters drop. —Leviticus 19:9

Reap, reap the grain and gather The sweet grapes from the vine; Our Lord's mother is weeping, She hath nor bread nor wine; She is weeping. The Queen of Heaven, She hath nor bread nor wine.

The dark brown soil is turned By the sharp-pointed plow; And I’ve a lesson learned. My life is but a field, Stretched out beneath God’s sky, Some harvest rich to yield. Where grows the golden grain? Where faith? Where sympathy? In a furrow cut by pain. Maltbie D. Babcock

Samuel’s Warning Against Kings 10So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking for a king from him. 11[†]He said,  y “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you:  z he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. 12[†]And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some  a to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14[†]  b He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. 15He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. 16He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men [1] and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17[†]He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. 18And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves,  c but the LORD will not answer you in that day.

I accept your offering, and I bid you welcome my children, my Sons of Rapha.” Goliath responded with the respect he showed only to the gods but to no man, “We are your bondservants, my lord and god. Command us and we will obey.” Dagon growled, and then spoke. “The skies are very dark over the land of Canaan. The time has come for me to reveal to you your most important calling.” Goliath responded, “We have trained for twenty-five years. We have organized the Rephaim forces of Philistia to be the most feared regiment in the land. We are ready for any commission.” Dagon explained, “The reason I formed your warrior cult those many years ago was not merely to defeat the Israelites, as abominable as they are. The real purpose of your existence is to seek out an individual, a Chosen Seed within Israel, who was prophesied to crush the head of the Serpent.” “The destruction of our seed,” muttered Goliath. “Precisely,” said Dagon. “Is this the gibborim ruler of Israel, King Saul?” “No. Saul is cursed. We believe the messiah is someone else. But we do not know who. He is already within the ranks of Israel, but he has not risen. He has not shown himself. I want you to use conspiracy and intrigue to find out who this Chosen Seed is. And then I want you to hunt him down and kill him.” “Gladly, mighty Dagon.” The implications were obvious. If they killed the savior of Israel, they would kill its only hope, and the nation would be a grain harvest ready for winnowing with the scythe of Dagon. He said, “We will draw him out, and cut him into pieces.

Samuel Warns against a Kingdom 10 So Samuel passed on the LORD’s warning to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 “This is how a king will reign over you,” Samuel said. “The king will draft your sons and assign them to his chariots and his charioteers, making them run before his chariots. 12 Some will be generals and captains in his army,[*] some will be forced to plow in his fields and harvest his crops, and some will make his weapons and chariot equipment. 13 The king will take your daughters from you and force them to cook and bake and make perfumes for him. 14 He will take away the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his own officials. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and your grape harvest and distribute it among his officers and attendants. 16 He will take your male and female slaves and demand the finest of your cattle[*] and donkeys for his own use. 17 He will demand a tenth of your flocks, and you will be his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will beg for relief from this king you are demanding, but then the LORD will not help you.

To hear Chip talk you’d think every Nebraskan male knows how to put a horseshoe on a mule. They know how to bring forth grain from dirt, or what a combine harvester is. They get what happens to that brought-forth grain, the steps before the Cheerios. The women knit long underwear and are adept at fruit canning.

Joshua moved his shoulders restlessly. He changed the subject by saying, “We’ve got to do something about food now that the manna has ceased.” Caleb’s eyebrows went up and he shook his head in a gesture of astonishment. “That was a great miracle, the manna. It came from the hand of God when our people needed it, but now that we’ve crossed the Jordan and we’re in the land that God promised our fathers, it has just stopped. The people are wondering about that too.” “They’ve taken God for granted,” Joshua said shortly. “Now they’ll have to plant seed and harvest grain to make their bread.

4/20, CANNABIS DAY, APRIL 20 420 FARMERS’ MARKET RISOTTO Recipe from Chef Herb Celebrate the bounty of a new growing season with a dish that’s perfectly in season on April 20. Better known as 4/20, the once unremarkable date has slowly evolved into a new high holiday, set aside by stoners of all stripes to celebrate the herb among like-minded friends. The celebration’s origins are humble in nature: It was simply the time of day when four friends (dubbed “The Waldos”) met to share a joint each day in San Rafael, California. Little did they know that they were beginning a new ceremony that would unite potheads worldwide! Every day at 4:20 p.m., you can light up a joint in solidarity with other pot-lovers in your time zone. It’s a tradition that has caught on, and today, there are huge 4/20 parties and festivals in many cities, including famous gatherings of students in Boulder and Santa Cruz. An Italian rice stew, risotto is dense, rich, and intensely satisfying—perfect cannabis comfort cuisine. This risotto uses the freshest spring ingredients for a variation in texture and bright colors that stimulate the senses. Visit your local farmers’ market around April 20, when the bounty of tender new vegetables is beginning to be harvested after the long, dreary winter. As for tracking down the secret ingredient, you’ll have to find another kind of farmer entirely. STONES 4 4 tablespoons THC olive oil (see recipe) 1 medium leek, white part only, cleaned and finely chopped ½ cup sliced mushrooms 1 small carrot, grated ½ cup sugar snap peas, ends trimmed ½ cup asparagus spears, woody ends removed, cut into 1-inch-long pieces Freshly ground pepper 3½ cups low-sodium chicken broth ¼ cup California dry white wine Olive oil cooking spray 1 cup arborio rice 1 tablespoon minced fresh flat-leaf parsley ¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese Salt 1. In a nonstick skillet, heat 2 tablespoons of the THC olive oil over medium-low heat. Add leek and sauté until wilted, about 5 minutes. Stir in mushrooms and continue to cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Add carrot, sugar snap peas, and asparagus. Continue to cook, stirring, for another minute. Remove from heat, season with pepper, and set aside. 2. In a medium saucepan over high heat, bring broth and wine to a boil. Reduce heat and keep broth mixture at a slow simmer. 3. In a large pot that has been lightly coated with cooking spray, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons THC olive oil over medium heat. Add rice and stir well until all the grains of rice are coated. Pour in ½ cup of the hot broth and stir, using a wooden spoon, until all liquid is absorbed. Continue adding the broth ½ cup at a time, making sure the rice has absorbed the broth before adding more, reserving ¼ cup of broth for the vegetables. 4. Combine ¼ cup of the broth with the reserved vegetables. Once all broth has been added to the risotto and absorbed, add the vegetable mixture and continue to cook over low heat for 2 minutes. Rice should have a very creamy consistency. Remove from heat and stir in parsley, Parmesan, and salt to taste. Stir well to combine.

26 He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. 27 Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. 28 All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. 29 As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”   —Mark 4:26-29

which turn into grains. After harvest time, these grains are removed from the stalks by threshing them. They are then hulled in a big wooden mortar and pestle, usually by the synchronized pounding

Only Father observed this tradition to the letter. Mother and we, the children just made the blessing over the etrog - a perfect lemon from Palestine - and the lulav - a palm branch, a sprig of willow and myrtle - every morning for eight days. Father went to the synagogue every day and made those prayers there. Sukkoth being a harvest festival, we blessed these symbolic fruits and grains of the land of Israel.

In Lower Manhattan’s city of towers, one gives no thought to the mythic emblems of the earth’s limitless fecundity: cornucopia bursting with sheaves of grain, vegetables, and ripe, edible fruit. Instead we imagine bounties of debt, harvests of financial instruments. No longer fortresses or cathedral spires, our towers have transformed into urban silos, overflowing with disembodied commodities.

Life's Just a Day Sunrise over fields, golden waves of grain, Tractor trails and morning dew, simple and plain. Life's just a day, on this old family farm, Where the rooster's crow, is our wake-up alarm. Yeah, shit happens, out here in the sticks, But we patch it up, with our country tricks. Oh-oh, life's just a day, it's a wild, wild ride, Shit happens, yeah, but we take it in stride. We love, we lose, but we still find our way, Oh-oh, life's just a day, and we're okay. Oh-oh, life's just a day, and we're okay. Barn dances at night, under a silver moon, Harvests that come, none too soon. Needed you more, but you gave me less, Now I'm sowing seeds, of newfound happiness. Yeah, shit happens, even when you plow straight, But we learn to bend, before it's too late. Oh-oh, life's just a day, it's a wild, wild ride, Shit happens, yeah, but we take it in stride. We love, we lose, but we still find our way, Oh-oh, life's just a day, and we're okay. Oh-oh, life's just a day, and we're okay. Through the dust and the dirt, we find our way, With the strength of the earth, we build our day. And when the sun sets, painting the sky, We'll remember the day, with a satisfied sigh. Oh-oh, life's just a day, it's a wild, wild ride, Shit happens, yeah, but we take it in stride. We love, we lose, but we still find our way, Oh-oh, life's just a day, and we're okay. Oh-oh, life's just a day, and we're okay. Life is but a day, and it's fleeting, they say, But in every furrow, there's a chance to sway. To the rhythm of the land, to the heartbeat of life, Through the good and the bad, the peace and the strife.

talking alone is not enough to prove that fruit is indeed part of the heart and life. We can be sure that on the Day of Judgment, men will be judged according to their fruit.108 No one will say then, ‘Did you believe?’ but rather, ‘Were you doers or talkers only?’ and they will be judged accordingly. The end of the world is compared to our earthly harvest,109 and you know that men at harvest want nothing but fruit and grain. But know that nothing will be accepted that’s not faith.

Egypt was synonymous with wealth. Fabulous harvests of grain grew on the fertile shores of the Nile, goods that could dominate the markets of the time. Besides which, Egypt exported the most widely used writing material of the period: papyrus.

According to folklorist Máire MacNeill in her 1962 book, The Festival of Lughnasa, the primary narrative that emerges from the Lughnasadh folklore and rites is a conflict between two gods over the harvest. The grain is kept by one god, who is typically referred to as “Crom Dubh.” In the conflict that ensues, Lugh and later St. Patrick wrest the grain from Crom Dubh to share among the people. Crom Dubh is likely the same figure as Crom Cruach and shares some qualities with the Daghdha and Donn,9 further connections to the Dark One.

Jesus compares the growth of the kingdom of God to the germination of a seed: “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come” (Mark 4:26-29). In other words, the farmer faithfully does his work, but he really has no understanding of just how God will ultimately transform his efforts into a harvest. The real magic happens after the seeds have been scattered. Our job, like the farmer’s, is to faithfully scatter those seeds as we represent Christ, but it is God who ultimately brings the harvest. And the real harvest is something we may never see, as God works in the lives of the people we interact with every day.

I worked myself to death to harvest five dàn of grain. Meanwhile you took four dàn in rent,” a man said to Da Ge. “We ate the husks of rice, the husks of wheat, the husks of millet. My children have been hungry from the day they were born. But what are your tenants to you? Nothing but fertilizer!” “I gave you fair terms,” Da Ge began but he was immediately drowned out. “Fair?” The man laughed bitterly. “Pay your debts! Everyone must pay their debts!” “If you don’t settle with them now,” one of the strangers said calmly, “these landowners will wait until we’re gone, and then they will wipe you out one by one. You cannot make half a revolution.” Scorn and contempt were heaped on the landlords. The agitation increased. Another family was brought in and there were more crimes and more denunciations. Together, their stories made a claim that no one could deny. “Aren’t these your countrymen?

Scotch Whisky Single Malt: This Scotch can only contain malted barley and water, must be the product of one distillery and aged in wood for at least three years. However, single malts can contain a mix of different distillations, casks, and years. This allows brands like a twelve-year-old Glenlivet to maintain consistency and always taste the same, no matter when it’s bottled. Single Grain: Like single malt, this Scotch is a product of one distillery but can be made from other grains and/or unmalted barley. It is used mainly for blending and rarely sold on its own, though it is becoming more popular as whisky connoisseurship increases. Blended Malt: This style, consisting of a mix of single malts from different distilleries, is not common. Blended Grain: This style uses a mix of single grains from different distilleries and is also not common. Blended Scotch: The most popular style in the world, including nondistillery names such as Johnnie Walker (red, black, and blue), Chivas Regal, Dewar’s, Ballantine’s, Cutty Sark, and so on. These are blends of single malts and grain whiskies from different distilleries, sometimes dozens. Vintage Year: While there are really no “vintages” in the sense of better or worse harvests, as with wine, bottles with a year on the label can only contain whiskies made in that year. This will usually taste different from the same distillery’s standard single malt—different but not necessarily better or as good.

Nixon's opening to Moscow had permitted a grain sale that sent millions of tons of American wheat and corn to Russia at below-market prices. Critics called it the "Great Grain Robbery," but their ranks didn't include the midwestern farmers who were delighted at the boost the sale gave to prices for the rest of their crops. General Ford extended the deal in 1975, following a new shortfall in the Soviet harvest.

The country will starve, not next year, but this winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting—there isn’t going to be any wheat this winter, not for the city of New York nor for any Eastern city. Minnesota is our last granary. They’ve had two bad years in succession, but they have a bumper crop this fall—and they have to be able to harvest it. Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment industry? They’re not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they haven’t been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have shut down and the rest are about to. And farms are perishing all over the country—for lack of tools. You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They’ve been spending more time fixing old tractors that can’t be fixed than plowing their fields. I don’t know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don’t know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did.” There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men—and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. “Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I’ve been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They’ve been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out. Selling it in the same way—illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We’re helping producers—and what tenacious producers!—not lousy, mooching ‘consumers.’ We’re giving loans, not alms. We’re supporting ability, not need. I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull-peddlers grow rich!” He

And how will I cope? After all, I’m like them too. My life’s harvest is not the building material for anything, neither in my time, now, nor in any other, never. But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.

It should seem fairly clear that the Leshi is related to the wolf shepherd and the bear spirit, as well as the deity Volos. It’s time to move on to St. Nicholas - another critical figure examined in the research done by Upenskij. To start things off, we can identify St. Nicholas as one of the major “wolf-shepherd” Saints. Particularly in Poland, and sometimes in Russia. One of the attributes of the East Slavic “Nicholas” was his association with the last patch of grain harvested from the field. Often called the “Beard of Volos” in Russia, it could also sometimes be called the “Beard of Nicholas.”76 However, the most strikingly pagan practice associated with St. Nicholas in Russia was perhaps the bull sacrifice on his feast day on December 6th

Care of the poor, vulnerable, weak, destitute, and isolated is the biblical standard of a just society. No society is just or healthy if the weakest aren't protected, if you need money to get a fair hearing in a court, or if the poor are denied opportunities to flourish. the king's justice especially blesses the needy and poor (Ps 72:4, 12-14). He passes judgment in their favor and saves the helpless by crushing their oppressors, as Yahweh crushed the head of Rahab, the Egyptian sea monster (Isa 51:9). The king's justice is summed up by the lovely phrase: 'The king is like rain upon the mowing, like showers that water the earth' (Ps 72:6; my translation). Without the rain of justice, everything dies--the garden withers to a wasteland. When a just king reigns, grain stalks stand tall and spread like cedars of Lebanon, and cities flourish like green fields, fresh as Eden (Ps 72:16). Rain refreshes and cleanses, glorifies and brightens. Rain on the mowing promises a future harvest beyond today's harvest. Blessed by Yahweh, the just king baptizes the land. Justice rolls down like waters, righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:24).