Agricultural Quotes
More Agricultural Quotes
…the end result of the adoption of permaculture strategies in any country or region will be to dramatically reduce the area of the agricultural environment needed by the households and the settlements of people, and to release much of the landscape for the sole use of wildlife and for re-occupation by endemic flora.
bill mollison— Permaculture: A Designers' Manual, chapter 1.3 (1988)
My object, having a surplus to deal with, is to consider how I can deal with it to the greatest advantage to the consumer— how, without inflicting any injury on Canada, I can secure the most substantial benefit to this country, to the manufacturing, to the commercial, and to the agricultural interests...The real way in which we can benefit the working and manufacturing classes is, unquestionably, by removing the burden that presses on the springs of manufactures and commerce.
robert peel— Speech in the House of Commons (11 March 1842).
Never before in the history of our State have Oregonians had so much to be congratulated upon. No State in the Union is receiving more attention. Her agricultural products, her mild climate, her great natural resources, invite the immigrant, the capitalist and the pleasure seeker, while the sound basis upon which rest her finances, and the fact that within two years her taxable property has increased more than ten millions of dollars, clearly indicate that the State, in the face of a general business depression throughout the land, is in no danger of deterioration of decay.
Zenas Ferry moody— Governor Zenas F. Moody – Biennial Message, 1885. Oregon State Archives, Oregon Secretary of State.
In nature, G. hirsutum and G. barbadense are perennial shrubs. However, in the agricultural system both species are cultivated as annuals, with destruction of plants after harvesting the fruit for seed and fibre. The plants are mainly grown for their fibre, cotton lint, which is used in textiles and clothing.
— The Biology of Gossypium hirsutum L. and Gossypium barbadense L. (cotton) Version (pg. 1), The Australian Government Office of the Gene Technology.
In every case, agricultural as well as manufacturing profits are lowered by a rise in the price of raw produce, if it be accompanied by a rise of wages. ...The natural tendency of profits is to fall; for in the progress of society and wealth, the additional quantity of food required is obtained by the sacrifice of more and more labour.
David Ricardo— Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter 6: On Profits (1817).
Never before in the history of our State have Oregonians had so much to be congratulated upon. No State in the Union is receiving more attention. Her agricultural products, her mild climate,her great natural resources, invite the immigrant, the capitalist and the pleasure seeker, while the sound basis upon which rest her finances, and the fact that within two years her taxable property has increased more than ten millions of dollars, clearly indicate that the State, in the face of a general business depression throughout the land, is in no danger of deterioration of decay.
Zenas Ferry moody— Governor Zenas F. Moody: Biennial Message, 1885. Oregon State Archives, Oregon Secretary of State.
If you had to constitute new societies, you might on moral and social grounds prefer cornfields to cotton factories, an agricultural to a manufacturing population. But our lot is cast, and we cannot recede.
robert peel— Letter to J. W. Croker (27 July 1842).
— Charles Stuart Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel from His Private Papers. Volume II (London: John Murray, 1899), p. 529.
Eating is an agricultural act.
wendell berry— "The Pleasures of Eating"
Not that a car would have been much faster anyway, what with the police posts at state lines, the searches, the restricted zones not merely in cities one expected that during August but right out in the country, in agricultural areas. Because of hijackers after food trucks, of course.
john brunner— The Sheep Look Up (1972), August. “THE END OF A LONG DARK TUNNEL”
Why, I say, that to tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection; it is plunder, and I entirely disclaim it; but I ask you to protect the rights and interests of labour generally in the first place, by allowing no free imports from countries which meet you with countervailing duties; and, in the second place, with respect to agricultural produce, to compensate the soil for the burdens from which other classes are free by an equivalent duty. This is my view of what is called "protection."
benjamin disraeli— Speech in the House of Commons (14 May 1850).
[The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history’s dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson’s estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt’s anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.
thomas frank— Ibid. (p. 8)
Taxes are a barbaric remnant of ancient times in which early farmers, tied to the land, no longer able to roam freely, unable to fight back with awkward agricultural tools the way they once could with hunting implements, became victims, first, of itinerant plunderers, then of bandits settling down beside them to become the governments we know today.
l. neil smith— "The Unnecessary Depression"
[Many agricultural counties] are far more important in the life of the State than their population bears to the entire population of the State. It is for this reason that I have never been in favor of restricting their representation in our State Senate to a strictly population basis. It is the same reason that the founding fathers of our country gave balanced representation to the States of the Union, equal representation in one House and proportionate representation based upon population in the other.
Earl Warren— Earl Warren, governor of California, speech at Merced, California (October 29, 1948), as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle (October 30, 1948), p. 3. Warren was asking for a "no" vote on a proposition which would reconstitute the state senate on the basis of population.
King Cotton, phrase frequently used by Southern politicians and authors prior to the American Civil War, indicating the economic and political importance of cotton production. After the invention of the cotton gin (1793), cotton surpassed tobacco as the dominant cash crop in the agricultural economy of the South, soon comprising more than half the total U.S. exports.
— The Editors of The Encyclopædia Britannica, in King Cotton, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.,16 January 2014.
You might on moral and social grounds prefer cornfields to cotton factories, an agricultural to a manufacturing population.
robert peel— In L. W. B. Brockliss, David Eastwood A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, C.1750-c.1850, Manchester University Press, 1997, p.33
The agricultural population, says Cato, produces the bravest men, the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least given of all to evil designs… A bad bargain is always a ground for repentance.
pliny the elder— Naturalis Historia, Book XVIII, sec. 26.
While the agricultural estate might foreshadow some of the methods used later in the factories, the industrial 'domestic system' was often a more immediate ancestor.
Sidney Pollard— The genesis of modern management: a study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. (1968, p. 42); Partly cited in: Le Texier, Thibault. "The first systematized uses of the term “management” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." Journal of Management History 19.2 (2013): 189-224.
In a basic agricultural society, it's easy enough to swap five chickens for a new dress or to pay a schoolteacher with a goat and three sacks of rice . Barter works less well in a more advanced economy. The logistical challenges of using chickens to buy books on Amazon.com would be formidable.
— Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, (2010), p. 218
With deference to all nations and followers of divine religions , we are asking if this atrocity is true, then why the people of the region should pay for it by occupation of Palestinian lands and unending suppression of Palestinian people, by homelessness of millions of Palestinians, by destruction of their cities and rural areas and agricultural lands.
— Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in What President Ahmadinejad Actually Said About Israel and Iran's Nuclear Program
Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
john kenneth galbraith— Chapter X, Section 5, p. 122 (Mr. Galbraith was originally an agricultural economist...)
Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.
linus pauling— Linus Pauling In His Own Words (1995) by Barbara Marinacci
Humanity has not yet evolved and we do not as yet know a type of government superior to and better than the Soviets of Workers’, agricultural Labourers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies.
— Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 38–41
In the past, the Mongols and Tibetans were divided as lords and slaves, but the two chairmen [Ma Qi and Ma Bufang], insisting on the principle of equality of all nationalities in our country, corrected the absurdity and astutely reformed it, which is really a perceptive measure greatly significant for the frontiers. Better still, in September when cattle and sheep are plump, people cheerful, making the lake worship ritual is really a celebration, analagous to the Mid-Autumn Festival in agricultural society, celebrating the harvest. The nomadic nationalities can now all rejoice without division in land and region.
Uradyn Erden Bulag— Dilemmas The Mongols at China's edge: history and the politics of national unity (2002, p. 55)
The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age.
Richard Hofstadter— Chapter II, part I (p. 62)
The agricultural population, says Cato, produces the bravest men, the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least given of all to evil designs…. A bad bargain is always a ground for repentance.
pliny the elder— Naturalis Historia, Book XVIII, sec. 26.
In the past, the Mongols and Tibetans were divided as lords and slaves, but the two chairmen [Ma Qi and Ma Bufang], insisting on the principle of equality of all nationalities in our country, corrected the absurdity and astutely reformed it, which is really a perceptive measure greatly significant for the frontiers. Better still, in September when cattle and sheep are plump, people cheerful, making the lake worship ritual is really a celebration, analagous to the Mid-Autumn Festival in agricultural society, celebrating the harvest. The nomadic nationalities can now all rejoice without division in land and region.
Uradyn Erden Bulag— Dilemmas The Mongols at China's edge: history and the politics of national unity (2002, p. 55)
Agronomy is that division of the agricultural College work which relates to the field and its crops and has to do with investigation and instruction along the lines of (a) Farm management; the application of economic business methods to farm (b) Farm Crops; their production and improvement, (c) Soils; their fertility, cultivation, and improvement, (d) Farm Mechanics; the tools, machinery, fences and drains of the farm.
— Iowa Agricultural College (1895) Biennial Report of the Board of Trustees of the State Agricultural College and Farm to the Governor of Iowa and the ... General Assembly, Vol. 16. p. 36; Also in: Iowa State College of Agriculture and the Mechanical Arts. Division of Agriculture Catalogue of the Division of Agriculture : agronomy, dairying, animal husbandry, horticulture, agricultural chemistry : science with practice : Ames, Iowa 1903-1904 (1903), p. 61
