quotations about farming
Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.
WENDELL BERRY
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Bringing it to the Table
But I do say emphatically that successful farming isn't altogether a matter of training, not by a long shot. You can't expect to take any kind of a man and make a soldier out of him merely by teaching him the manual of arms. You can't expect to take a mass of all sorts of human raw material, put it through a theological seminary and so make it all up into successful preachers. By the same token a man isn't necessarily marked for success in farming just because he can't be stumped by any question you put to him in the classroom. I'm willing to wager today in your school there are men teaching you the theory--successful teachers too--who couldn't grow forty bushels of corn to the acre on my best field if the job were given to them. Some of them couldn't drive a straight furrow across a ten-acre patch with any amount of practice. It isn't in them. There are other men, men who don't know a syllable of the theory of it and who couldn't at the start tell the difference between a breaking plow and a double shovel, who are able to go out on the ground, square themselves round, pick up the knack and work wonders.
WILLIAM R. LIGHTON
"From Father to Son: What Does It Take to Make a Farmer?", The Country Gentleman, July 11, 1914
A gentleman farmer never dirties himself with the soil or soils himself with the dirt.
EVAN ESAR
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