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Life on a farm is a school of patience; you can't hurry the crops or make an ox in two days.
-Henri Alain
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There is, of course, a gold mine or a buried treasure on every mortgaged homestead. Whether the farmer ever digs for it or not, it is there, haunting his daydreams when the burden of debt is most unbearable.
-Fawn M. Brodie
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The great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
-William Jennings Bryan
Cross of Gold, Speech given at the Democratic National Convention, July 9, 1896
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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
-Bill Bryson
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It is thus with farming, if you do one thing late, you will be late in all your work.
-Cato The Elder
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Our farmers round, well pleased with constant gain, like other farmers, flourish and complain.
-George Crabbe
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Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
-Dwight D Eisenhower
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The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.
-Benjamin Franklin
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There is no gilding of setting sun or glamour of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers wives.
-Hamlin Garland
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Like a gardener I believe what goes down must come up.
-Lynwood L. Giacomini
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He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted -- and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.
-Ellen Glasgow
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Farmers only worry during the growing season, but towns people worry all the time.
-Edward W. Howe
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Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. The small landowners are the most precious part of a state.
-Thomas Jefferson
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The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue. To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the weekend in town astride a radiator.
-Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac
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Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
-Edwin Markham
The Man with the Hoe, "first published in the San Francisco Examiner", January 15, 1899
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Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, the emptiness of ages in his face, and on his back the burden of the world.
-Edwin Markham
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
-H. L. Mencken
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Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrant has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.
-P. J. O'Rourke
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The master's eye is the best fertilizer.
-Pliny The Elder
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The land too poor for any other crop, is best for raising men.
-R. Pocock
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With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.
-Bertrand Russell
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I see upon their noble brows the seal of the Lord, for they were born kings of the earth far more truly than those who possess it only from having bought it.
-George Sand
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It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.
-George Sand
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Books about Farming
