Tobacco Farming Quotes

Eighty percent of American Farm Bill subsidies go to corn, grains, and soy oil. Amazingly, tobacco receives four times more government subsidies (2 percent) than all fruits and vegetables combined (0.45 percent).

Unless society came out past Flat Rock Crossroads, kept on past Booker T. High School, hung two rights, a left, turned in on Milk Farm Road and found Roland plowing a tobacco field, jerked him off the tractor, warped him and set him back up there without anybody riding by and noticing, blame can't be laid on society.

Ask me about my childhood, and I will tell you to walk to the edge of the woods with a choir of crickets chirping from every direction, a hot, humid breeze brushing through your hair, your feet, bare and callused. Stand there, unmoving, and watch the dance of ten thousand fireflies blinking on and off in the darkness. Inhale the scent of cured tobacco, freshly plowed southern soil, burning leaves, and honeysuckle. Swallow the taste of blackberries, picked straight from the bushes, and lick your teeth, the after-taste still sweet in your mouth. Now, stretch out on the ground and relax all your muscles. Watch nature's festival of flickering lights.

Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.

A swift rhythm is played out by my hands, a cadence known only to those who have strung tobacco. To many, the meter and rhythm of stringing is the only poetry they've ever known.

He would not even consider going elsewhere to live, even though he were offered a chance to work another man’s farm on shares. Even to move to Augusta and work in the cotton mills would be impossible for him. The restless movement of the other tenant farmers to the mills had never had any effect on Jeeter. Working in cotton mills might be all right for some people, he said, but as for him, he would rather die of starvation than leave the land. In seven years his views of the subject had not been altered; and if anything, he was more determined than ever to remain where he was at all cost.

Tolkien said of himself that “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size),” he spoke the truth, not only about his material likes (trees, farms, tobacco, mushrooms, plain English food) and dislikes (cars, French cooking, early rising) but also about the disposition of his soul. He, like a hobbit, was at home in his shire; he, like a hobbit, trusted the cosmos—but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.

Today, it is the scent of honeysuckle that takes me back in time and lays me down near a barn. I pick a honeysuckle blossom, touch the trumpet to my nose and inhale. With sticky filthy fingers, I pinch the base of its delicate well then lick the drop of nectar. The sweet liquid makes me thirst for more, and I reach for another and another, the same hands that reach again and again for tobacco as I string. I separate honeysuckle blossoms and taste.

And that great mixture was brought to America in the holds of slave ships. To the north, the south. Their sons and daughters picked tobacco, cultivated cotton, worked on the largest estates and smallest farms. We are craftsmen and midwives and preachers and peddlers. Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation’s government. The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race—which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children?

I came to absorb the history of the Virginia Tidewater—that primordial American demesne where the land was sucked dry by tobacco, laid waste and destroyed a whole century before golden California became an idea, much less a hope or a westward dream—I realized that the Dabney farm must have been as nondescript and as pathetic a relic as any of the scores of shrunken, abandoned “plantations” scattered for a hundred miles across the tidelands between the Potomac and the James.

In some ways, the only thing we have in common is the color of our skin. Our ancestors came from all over the African continent. It's quite large... They had different ways of subsistence, different customs, spoke a hundred different languages. And that great mixture was brought to America in the holds of slave ships. To the north, the south. Their sons and daughters picked tobacco, cultivated cotton, worked on the largest estates and smallest farms. We are craftsmen and midwives and preachers and peddlers. Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation's government. The word we. We are not one people, but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race - which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children? For we are Africans in America. Something new in the history of the world, without models for what we will become. Color must suffice. It has brought us to this night, this discussion, and it will take us into the future. All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together.

These men were very kind. They made presents to our chiefs and our people made presents to them. We had a great many horses, of which we gave them what they needed, and they gave us guns and tobacco in return. All the Nez Perce made friends with Lewis and Clark, and agreed to let them pass through their country, and never to make war on white men. This promise the Nez Perce have never broken. No white man can accuse them of bad faith and speak with a straight tongue. It has always been the pride of the Nez Perce that they were the friends of the white men. When my father was a young man there came to our country a white man [Rev. Henry H. Spaulding] who talked spirit law. He won the affections of our people because he spoke good things to them. At first he did not say anything about white men wanting to settle on our lands. Nothing was said about that until about twenty winters ago, when a number of white people came into our country and built houses and made farms. At first our people made no complaint. They thought there was room

In the northern colonies, European Americans tended to own one or two slaves who worked on the family farm or were hired out. Rhode Island and Connecticut had a few large farms, where twenty or thirty slaves would live and work. Plantation-based slavery was more common in the South, where hundreds of slaves could be owned by the same person and forced to work in tobacco, indigo, or rice fields. In most cities, slaveholdings were small, usually one or two slaves who slept in the attic or cellar of the slave owner’s home. Abigail Smith Adams, a Congregational minister’s daughter, grew up outside Boston in a household that owned two slaves, Tom and Pheby. As an adult, she denounced slavery, as did her husband, John Adams, the second President of the United States. Historians recently discovered the remains of slaves found in the African Burial Ground near today’s City Hall in New York City. By studying the skeletons, scientists discovered that the slaves of New York suffered from poor nutrition, disease, and years of backbreaking labor. Most of them died young.

No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And, above all, no animal must ever tyrannize over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And, above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And, above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

There were many such in the American Revolution. Thomas Paine spent much of his career designing a new form of iron bridge to aid transportation and communication. Dr. Joseph Priestley, another man who fled royalist and Anglican persecution and who removed himself from England to Philadelphia after a “Church and King” mob had smashed his laboratory, was a chemist and physician of great renown. Benjamin Franklin would be remembered for his deductions about the practical use of electricity if he had done nothing else. Jefferson, too, considered himself a scientist. He studied botany, fossils, crop cycles, and animals. He made copious notes on what he saw. He designed a new kind of plow, which would cut a deeper furrow in soil exhausted by the false economy of tobacco farming. He was fascinated by the invention of air balloons

I LIVE IN A part of the country that at one time a good farmer could take some pleasure in looking at. When I first became aware of it, in the 1940s, the better land, at least, was generally well farmed. The farms were mostly small and were highly diversified, producing cattle, sheep, and hogs, tobacco, corn, and the small grains; nearly all the farmers milked a few cows for home use and to market milk or cream. Nearly every farm household maintained a garden, kept a flock of poultry, and fattened its own meat hogs. There was also an extensive “support system” for agriculture: Every community had its blacksmith shop, shops that repaired harness and machinery, and stores that dealt in farm equipment and supplies. Now the country is not well farmed, and driving through it has become a depressing experience. Some good small farmers remain, and their farms stand out in the landscape like jewels. But they are few and far between, and they are getting fewer every year. The buildings and other improvements of the old farming are everywhere in decay or have vanished altogether. The produce of the country is increasingly specialized. The small dairies are gone. Most of the sheep flocks are gone, and so are most of the enterprises of the old household economy. There is less livestock and more cash-grain farming. When cash-grain farming comes in, the fences go, the livestock goes, erosion increases, and the fields become weedy. Like

Each kid got a small allowance for helping with the harvests, and Kiernan would always head straight to the tobacco shop. Not for cigarettes. At first, he even threw the cigarettes away, but later he'd save them and sell them to the older kids to get enough money for another pack. Kiernan didn't want the smokes. He wanted the baseball cards. When we got back to the Farm, Kiernan would sketch out a baseball diamond in the dirt and we'd stage games with the players from the cards he collected.

Before Congress instituted the federal income tax in 1913, following the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, America’s tax burden fell disproportionately on the poor. High taxes were levied on widely consumed products such as alcohol and tobacco. Urban property was taxed at a higher rate than farms and estates. “From top to bottom, American society before the income tax was a picture of inequality, and taxes made it worse,” writes Isaac William Martin, a professor of sociology at the University of California in San Diego.

But what we did is we studied our town. We did an inventory of all of the things that were present there—farms and marshes and springs and historic sites, Indian trails, buildings, our tobacco farms included. And what happened after we did this very careful and very extensive inventory is, we fell in love with the place. Most of us didn’t know where we lived. We had just moved in and out rather oblivious to the beauty of things.

Against this backdrop of diverse geography, farming and fishing still dominate the economy. Many farmers rely on mule transportation and agricultural techniques that have persisted for generations. They tend citrus and olive groves planted by their forefathers, and cultivate grapes, figs, capers, olives, wheat, and tobacco. Family-run enterprises extract marble, pumice, and iron ore from local sources. The island of Halki derives its name from the Greek word for copper (halkos), a reminder of the copper mines that once covered it. Manufacturers on the island of Chios have longed produced mastichochoria, an aromatic resin used to make cosmetics and employed in other industries as well.

Neither of us uttered a word about what happened. We never do. But I can't smudge it from my mind. The farm boys' sneering red faces. The runt shaking the fence. The brown lump of spit tobacco. The anguish in David's eyes. They don't know the first thing about us; they just hate us because we're black

The intensive cultivation methods of European farming were finally abandoned by the immigrants and they moved swiftly to the other extreme, farming soils to exhaustion and abandoning them to move on to new fields. American genius in agriculture until the dust bowl years has really never been its cleverness but its inexhaustible supply of land that could be carelessly exploited and abandoned. Southern planters controlled thousands of acres and ruthlessly exploited labor and land and then sought more land. By the Revolution “the older tobacco areas along the Chesapeake and the great rivers

the 1770s hundreds of thousands of slaves were working cotton, tobacco and rice plantations in the southern colonies of America—there were 60,000 black slaves in South Carolina and 140,000 in Virginia alone—as well as in the West Indies. Many of the most prominent Americans lobbying for independence were slave owners. George Washington inherited ten slaves when he was eleven years old and cultivated his farm on the labor of 100 slaves; Thomas Jefferson inherited fifty-two slaves when he turned twenty-one and had a “slave family” numbering more than 170 on his plantation. But even in London, it was hard to ignore the issue of double standards

...from the big tobacco barns there welled forth a fragrance that was for these Kentuckians, the soul of autumn. Oozing out into the sunshine from every crack in the great structures, it exhilarated like an elixir, like a long draught of some rich, spicy wine.

She was not alone. “There’s a definite panic on the hip scene in Cambridge,” wrote student radical Raymond Mungo that year, “people going to uncommonly arduous lengths (debt, sacrifice, the prospect of cold toes and brown rice forever) to get away while there’s still time.” And it wasn’t just Cambridge. All over the nation at the dawn of the 1970s, young people were suddenly feeling an urge to get away, to leave the city behind for a new way of life in the country. Some, like Mungo, filled an elderly New England farmhouse with a tangle of comrades. Others sought out mountain-side hermitages in New Mexico or remote single-family Edens in Tennessee. Hilltop Maoists traversed their fields with horse-drawn plows. Graduate students who had never before held a hammer overhauled tobacco barns and flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog by the light of kerosene lamps. Vietnam vets hand-mixed adobe bricks. Born-and-bred Brooklynites felled cedar in Oregon. Former debutants milked goats in Humboldt County and weeded strawberry beds with their babies strapped to their backs. Famous musicians forked organic compost into upstate gardens. College professors committed themselves to winter commutes that required swapping high heels for cross-country skis. Computer programmers turned the last page of Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life and packed their families into the car the next day. Most had no farming or carpentry experience, but no matter. To go back to the land, it seemed, all that was necessary was an ardent belief that life in Middle America was corrupt and hollow, that consumer goods were burdensome and unnecessary, that protest was better lived than shouted, and that the best response to a broken culture was to simply reinvent it from scratch.

just a stone’s throw one from th’other. But whereas Esther shared her life with twelve siblings brung up on a sprawling family farm, Billy Coyle was an only child brung up down in a holler just north of Brambleberry. And whereas Esther’s daddy raised tobacco and bootlegged moonshine, Billy’s daddy dug graves. That’s how Billy had come to take up a job in the morgue at Louisville

No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And, above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

Somewhere beyond the ridgetop, Col Oaks was plowing tobacco with a single mule, old Red, and a walking plow. The air smelled of vegetation and stirred earth. Beside me, R.T. was filing his hoe. Standing there in the brilliance with my ears sticking out under the brim of my straw hat and my mouth probably hanging open (somebody was always telling me, "Shut your mouth, Andy!"), I saw how beautiful the field was, how beautiful our work was. And it came to me all in a feeling how everything fitted together, the place and ourselves and the animals and the tools and how the sky held us.

So it was that the nineteen-year-old farm boy hanging around the docks was captured and put aboard a ship bound for Barbados. Sold to the owner of a tobacco plantation, he did not have to labor long. Cromwell’s fleet arrived shortly thereafter, and with the promise of freedom he joined Venables’s army and wound up in Jamaica. Nothing more is known of him until 1662, when he signed on with Mings.

The houses of the ruling and representative class were very different from those of the great majority of Virginians. When the traveller came to one of the widely separated gaps in the forest and found himself upon the borders of a great plantation, the estate presented the appearance of a small village. In the centre stood the house of the planter, around which were clustered the offices, all separate from the main building, the tobacco-houses, and the numerous huts of the negro quarters. In the fields the slaves were seen sawing wood and making clearings, or cultivating tobacco. Not far away the herds of cattle were at pasture, and the whole scene recalled an English farm.

I have little more to say. I merely repeat, remember always your duty of enmity towards Man and all his ways. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

As I string, a swift rhythm is played out with my hands, a cadence known only to those who have strung tobacco. To many of the poor workers, the meter and rhythm of stringing tobacco is the only poetry they’ve ever known.

Miss Elton, who found the conversation increasingly distressing, got up, murmured a quick good night . . . and went to her room. During the bellicose talk in the lounge, the ghosts of Frank Durrant, Madeleine, Arvid and Mr. Sorenius seemed to be slipping further and further away with their own receding world. And what was one offered in exchange for this world of the dead? A future in which all signposts pointed to war and the ruin of all those useless little things which made life worth living. And then, as if provoked by the contrast of the speeches and ideas to which she had just been listening, a flood of images, each of them a small part of her life at Ashleigh Place, swept through her mind with an overwhelming suddenness—a walk on a windy autumn afternoon to the farm with a message about eggs, cartloads of logs coming before Christmas to be stacked in the stables, the remodelling of the rose-garden, with Mrs. Durrant setting the new labels in their places, two swans which spent a season on the little River Mene at the foot of the western slope, and the sudden appearance of a kingfisher by those fitful waters, the endless cooing of wood-pigeons in the trees round the house, the catch whistled by the baker's boy as he jumped out of his bright little van, the tick of the huge grandfather clock in the darkest corner of the hall, the pattern of the old-fashioned tiles in the bathroom which she had used, cockchafers beating against the windows on hot summer nights, the scent of the tobacco plants in the round bed near the drawing-room, an expedition to the woods on a grey day to cut mistletoe. . . .

The planter himself was of a type then common in the South. He was a large, coarse looking man, with an immense paunch, wore a broad-brimmed, home-made straw hat and butter nut jeans clothes. His trousers were of the old-fashioned, "broad-fall" pattern. His hair was long, he had a scraggy, sandy beard, and chewed "long green" tobacco continually and viciously. But he was shrewd enough to know that ugly talk on his part wouldn't mend matters, but only make them worse, so he stood around in silence while we took his corn, but he looked as malignant as a rattlesnake. His wife was directly his opposite in appearance and demeanor. She was tall, thin, and bony, with reddish hair and a sharp nose and chin. And goodness, but she had a temper! She stood in the door of the dwelling house, and just tongue-lashed us "Yankees," as she called us, to the full extent of her ability. The boys took it all good naturedly, and didn't jaw back. We couldn't afford to quarrel with a woman. A year later, the result of her abuse would have been the stripping of the farm of every hog and head of poultry on it,

The old barn had a history. Nine-year-old Sally Ferman had heard all of the stories, and every single one scared her. Her dad told her that the farm was originally owned by a young German immigrant by the name of Hans Schneider. He built a cabin and married a French woman, Rebecca. They had three sons, and over the years, Hans and his boys built the barn, raised cattle and sheep, and grew tobacco and corn

We drove down the highway, past shabby farmsteads with flaking paintwork and rotting wood, past tumbling-down tobacco barns cut through with shards of sunlight. Past abandoned cars and rusting farm machinery, and black cattle standing in paddocks next to farmhouses. Past towns that seemed half-abandoned, with boarded-up shops and houses with Confederate flags in their windows and 'VOTE TRUMP' signs on the front lawn. Shutters were closed and leaves gathered on the porch; churches with billboards promised redemption for drug addicts. Flakes of snow fell but didn't settle. Our friend drove us around the country in his white pick-up truch with his sheepdog in the back and hisred toolbox and wrenches in the footwell. He told us about his people, past and present, and introduced us to farmers who were holding on. They all told us the same thing: America had chosen industrial farming and abandoned its small family farms, and this was the result - a landscape and a community that was falling apart. They showed us fields of oilseed rape that were full of weeds because they were now resistant to the herbicides that had been overused. They spoke of mountains ripped open for minerals, and rivers polluted, the farming people leaving the land or holding on in hidden poverty. And the worse it got, the more people seemed to gravitate to charlatans with their grand promises and ready-made scapegoats to focus all their anger on.

fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.