I thought I would share some famous quotes on agriculture with you. The last one is especially important in light of our water situation in California. I am hearing too many activists, politicians and reporters who think farming is optional
“When tillage begins the other arts
follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.”
Daniel
Webster
1782-1852
1782-1852
“No other occupation opens so wide a
field for the profitable and agreeable combination of labor with cultivated
thought as agriculture.
Let us hope that by the best
cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us, and the intellectual
and moral worlds within us, we shall secure an individual, social and political
prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward and which,
while the earth endures, shall not pass away.”
Abraham
Lincoln
Address
to the Wisconsin Agricultural Society
September
30, 1859
“Cultivators of the earth are the
most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the
most virtuous, and they are toed to their country, and wedded to its liberty
and interests by lasting bonds.”
Thomas
Jefferson
Letter
to John Jay
August
23, 1785
“I am one of the class of people that feeds
you all, and at present is abus’d by you all; in short I am a Farmer.”
Ben Franklin
On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor
1766
On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor
1766
“The
cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. Unstable is the
future of the country which has lost its taste for agriculture. If there is one
lesson of history that is unmistakable, it is national strength lies very near
the soil.”
Daniel
Webster
“It is the marriage of the soul with
Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.”
Henry
David Thoreau
1817-82
1817-82
“Of all the occupations from which
gain is secured, there is none better than agriculture, nothing more
productive, nothing sweeter, nothing more worthy of a free man.”
Marcus
Tullius Cicero
106-43
B.C.
“Sometime
in the future, when all the accomplishments of the 20th century are
recorded for posterity, it will finally be acknowledged that our greatest
achievement by far has been the introduction of high-tech, high-yield
agriculture. Measured in terms of benefit to human society, an adequate diet of
nutritious, abundant and affordable food eclipses all other developments of
this most remarkable century. Neither computer technology nor transistors,
robotics, advances in communication and transportation, life saving antibiotics
and modern medicine, nuclear energy, synthetics, plastics and the entire
petrochemical industry rank as high in importance as the advances in food
production. And all these other wonderful breakthroughs probably would not have
happened without a well fed population.”
Dixie
Lee Ray Environmental Overkill
“Now I see the secret of the making
of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to
eat and sleep with the earth.”
Walt
Whitman
Song
of the Open Road
“Farmers are the only people I know
that buy high, sell low and pay freight in both directions.”
John
F. Kennedy
“If you want to behold a truly
religious man in action, go to Fresno and watch a farmer watering his trees,
vines and plants.”
William
Saroyan
“Farming looks mighty easy when your
plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from a cornfield.”
Dwight
D. Eisenhower
“Burn down your
cities and leave your farms, your cities will spring up again as if by magic;
but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city of
the country.”
William
Jennings Bryan
Cross of Gold Speech
Cross of Gold Speech
Democratic
National Convention
July 8, 1896
July 8, 1896
Blessings this Easter.
P
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