Organic Farming Quotes

Of course, I prefer organic farming to chemical-dependent farming, but sometimes absolutist organic prescriptions go too far. I don't even rule out the possibility of genetic modification generating some benign ideas, as long as we can keep them away from monopolists such as Monsanto. ~ Tristram Stuart

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Far from being a "luxury for the rich," organic farming may turn out to be a necessity not just for the poor, but for everyone. ~ Raj Patel

It is vitally important that we can continue to say, with absolute conviction, that organic farming delivers the highest quality, best-tasting food, produced without artificial chemicals or genetic modification, and with respect for animal welfare and the environment, while helping to maintain the landscape and rural communities. ~ Prince Charles

There are 6.6 billion people on the planet today. With organic farming we could only feed four billion of them. Which two billion would volunteer to die? ~ Norman Borlaug

David Pimentel, a Cornell University professor of ecology and agriculture analyzed a 22-year organic versus conventional farming trial done at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania. He concluded that organic farming produced the same yields of corn and soybeans as conventional farming, but used 30 percent less energy (Pimentel 2005). Scientists at the Research Institute ~ Pamela C. Ronald

People tend to assume that organic farming and sustainability go hand in hand. But that's not necessarily the case - and it hasn't been for most of history. While going organic has some big advantages, even today most organic farmers still rely on the plow - the chief culprit in the this story. Why? Because it provides cheap, reliable weed suppression." David Montgomery - Growing a Revolution ~ David R. Montgomery

The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

There's no such thing as sustainability. There are just levels of it. It's a process, not a real goal. All you can do is work toward it. There's no such thing as any sustainable economy. The only thing I know that's even close to sustainable economic activity would be organic farming on a very small scale or hunting and gathering on a very small scale. And manufacturing, you end up with way more waste than you end up with finished product. It's totally unsustainable. It's just the way it is. ~ Yvon Chouinard

Before World War II, there was no such thing as organic food. All food was organic. Food was just food - plants, grains, meats, and dairy that we could all recognize or grow. There were no long lists of ingredients on packages that you couldn't pronounce, much less have any idea what they did to your body or the environment. In 1938, the USDA's Yearbook of Agriculture was called Soils and Men, and it remains a handbook of organic farming today, but back then that was the norm. ~ Nora Pouillon

Animals who are exploited for "organic" foods are raised, maintained, transported, and slaughtered just like their nonorganic" counterparts: They are debeaked, dehorned, detoed, castrated, and/or branded, and they are kept, transported, and slaughtered in the same deplorable conditions. ~ Lisa Kemmerer

When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity" - to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to - he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health. ~ Michael Pollan

In science knowledge comes first and then faith follows. In spirituality faith comes first and then knowledge follows. The knowledge that pesticides and chemical fertilizers are good for plants came through science. Based on this knowledge, people had faith in pesticides and fertilizers and they were used all over the world. Then a different knowledge came and faith shifted to organic farming. Knowledge brought faith, the knowledge changed, and then faith changed. The knowledge and faith of science is of "happening." In spirituality, faith is first and knowledge comes later. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires _more_ acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest?

How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world's farmland to organic farming, we'd need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an _additional_ 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today.

Combined, we'd need to chop down roughly half of the world's remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far _more_ greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today.

That's not a viable path. ~ Ramez Naam

If we pursue organic farming as our healthy food style, we can bring down cost of treatment to a great extent. ~ Sulaiman Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi

The sheer mystery and majesty of heritage wisdom, contained in each cell, each mitochondria, instills in the farmer who respects and honors the pigness of the pig a daily emotional high. The satisfaction of being nature's nurturer always trumps the short-lived adrenaline high of being nature's conqueror. Such an attitude offers spiritual ascendance over physical domination, which never really happens anyway. And that's why the industrial farmer, for all the smoke and noise and horsepower, never feels in control, but always dreads being drowned by the nature he thinks he's controlling. ~ Joel Salatin

Organic farming is personal. ~ Dave Carter

So organic farming practices are something that, to me, are interlinked with the idea of using biodiesel. ~ Daryl Hannah

An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing. ~ Vandana Shiva

It's not just what you eat that matters, it's what eats you. You can have all the right macrobiotics and organic food, but if your body is filled with resentment, worry, fear, lust, guilt, anger, bitterness, or any other emotional disease, it's going to shorten your life. ~ Rick Warren

My dad was a breeder. Most of his work happened in little test plots and didn't require much labor. He tried growing them for a while, and realized that farming is hard. It's just brutally hard. We didn't have the interest or fortitude to farm. ~ Sanjay Rawal

The human population is too large, and the earth too small, to sustain us in the ways our ancestors lived. Most of the land that is good for farming is already being farmed. Yet 80 million more humans are being added to the population each year. The challenge of the coming decades is to limit the destructive effects of agriculture even as we continue to coax ever more food from the earth. ~ Nina V. Fedoroff

John Frame's 'tri-perspectivalism' helps me understand Willow. The Willow Creek style churches have a 'kingly' emphasis on leadership, strategic thinking, and wise administration. The danger there is that the mechanical obscures how organic and spontaneous church life can be. The Reformed churches have a 'prophetic' emphasis on preaching, teaching, and doctrine. The danger there is that we can have a naïve and unBiblical view that, if we just expound the Word faithfully, everything else in the church - leader development, community building, stewardship of resources, unified vision - will just happen by themselves. The emerging churches have a 'priestly' emphasis on community, liturgy and sacraments, service and justice. The danger there is to view 'community' as the magic bullet in the same way Reformed people view preaching. ~ Timothy J. Keller

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics. ~ Michael Pollan

They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft. At the same instant the ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek; the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back. The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing--for once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy--and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous to the ear-drums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold--that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would come a momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors--the men would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears starting in their eyes. Meantime, heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors made any difference to them; one by one t ~ Upton Sinclair

The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit. ~ Eric Schlosser

We find ourselves facing a rising tide of biologically active, synthetic organic chemicals. Some tinker with our hormones. Some attach themselves to our chromosomes and trigger mutations. Some cripple the immune system. Some light up our genes and so enhance the production of certain enzymes. If we could metabolize these chemicals into completely benign breakdown products and excrete them, they would pose less of a hazard. Instead, a good many of them accumulate. ~ Sandra Steingraber

You know, I use organic products, but I get [laser treatments]. It's what makes life interesting, finding the balance between cigarettes and tofu. ~ Gwyneth Paltrow

Take 3 ~ 4 times in one day, the mixture of one tablespoon of honey, 2 tablespoon of organic apple cider vinegar and 8 ounces of water. ~ Sonia

Organic Rapid Ramp Up'. Increase market penetration, market share, market size in existing lines of business. ~ Rashmi Bansal

I explained my opinion of the ship's logic. "That is a strange designation," said the ship. "While I have certain organic elements incorporated into my substructure and decentralized DNA computing components, I am not - in the strictest sense of the term - a biological organism. I have no digestive system. No need for elimination, other than the occasional waste gas and passenger effluvium. Therefore, I have no anus in either real or figurative terms. Therefore, I hardly believe I could qualify to be called an ... " "Shut up," I said. ~ Dan Simmons

In most ecological systems you have a composite, biotic components as well as abiotic components acting together to form a whole, whereas in a human built environment most of the components are abiotic or they are inorganic. One of the first things we need to do is to complement the inorganic components with more organic components, and to make them interact to form a whole. ~ Ken Yeang

The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn't still be a farmer. ~ Will Rogers

Geology is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature; it enquires into the causes of these changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the surface and external structure of our planet. ~ Charles Lyell

We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we're going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water. ~ Larry Ellison

What is fetus farming? Simply put, it is the creation and development of a human fetus for the purposes of later killing it for research or for harvesting its organs. ~ Nathan Deal

[Anything which] is a living thing and not a dying body ... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power ... 'Exploitation' ... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer - the romantic - asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening') it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is 'normal,' that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. ~ Adrienne Rich

My mother was a housewife. Both from - well, my father was from a farming family, agricultural family in the north of England. And my mother came from a very working class. ~ David Bowie

To be inventive, to have ideas, is an organic part of being talented. ~ Sanford Meisner

Never underestimate a farmer. ~ Lance Conrad

Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike. ~ David Ives

To suggest that organic vegetables, which cost far more than conventional produce, can feed billions of people in parts of the world without roads or proper irrigation may be a fantasy based on the finest intentions. But it is a cruel fantasy nonetheless. ~ Michael Specter

As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt. ~ John Desmond Bernal

But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other states more than that of their own, and have succeeded in obscuring the American system in the minds of the people, and giving them in its place pure and simple democracy, which is its false development or corruption. Under the influence of this false development, the people were fast losing sight of the political truth that, though the people are sovereign, it is the organic, not the inorganic people, the territorial people, not the people as simple population, and were beginning to assert the absolute God-given right of the majority to govern. All the changes made in the bosom of the States themselves have consisted in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of the majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy. This tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with provoking secession and rebellion than the anti-slavery sentiments of the Northern, Central, and Western States. ~ Orestes Augustus Brownson

There may be organic life out there, or maybe machines created by long-dead civilizations, but any signals, even if they are difficult to decode, would tell us that the concepts of logic and physics are not limited to the hardware in human skulls, and will transform our view of the universe. ~ Martin Rees

Be authentic and organic. It can't be forced or it won't work. And most importantly, have fun. ~ Richard Branson

Would a watermelon in the midst of a chase sequence not be, in its own organic way, emblematic of our entire misunderstood enterprise? At once totally logical and perfectly irrational? ~ W. D. Richter

I have a long attention span, and I am also a good scientist, and there are a lot of problems that remain in the organic agricultural movement that the government does not invest in solving. ~ Sandra Lerner

Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. ~ D.H. Lawrence

When you see an aging or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building there is no more magic to that building. But if it is allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added into it - it's so organic. ~ David Lynch

High-tech tomatoes. Mysterious milk. Supersquash. Are we supposed to eat this stuff? Or is it going to eat us? ~ Anita Manning

Depression and anxiety are two of the body's first reactions to stockpiles of hurt. Of course, there are organic and biochemical reasons we experience clinical depression and debilitating anxiety - causes over which we have no control - but unrecognized pain and unprocessed hurt can also lead there. ~ Brene Brown

In the final analysis the hierarchic pattern is nothing like the straightforward witness for organic evolution that is commonly assumed. There are facets of the hierarchy which do not flow naturally from any sort of random undirected evolutionary process. If the hierarchy suggests any model of nature it is typology and not evolution. How much easier it would be to argue the case for evolution if all nature's divisions were blurred and indistinct, if the systema naturalae was largely made up of overlapping classes indicative of sequence and continuity. ~ Michael Denton

Even as the cell is the unit of the organic body, so the family is the unit of society. ~ Ruth Nanda Anshen

If you can't afford organic food and are unable to grow your own, it's crucial to wash all inorganic produce very carefully to minimize the toxins you consume. Soak everything for 20 minutes in water with vinegar and salt or water with fresh lemon juice and salt. ~ Suzanne Somers

Think on your toes, use what's around you, and come up with something organic and fun. ~ Zac Efron

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor. ~ Alvin Toffler

I wish you could take a 'plan b' pill for after you eat a lot of organic cheese puffs and your stomach hurts and you don't want to be fat tomorrow ~ Megan Boyle

In short, conquest is in no sense a necessary sign of higher human development, though conquistadors have always thought otherwise. Any valid concept of organic development must use the primary terms of ecology-cooperation and symbiosis-as well as struggle and conflict, for even predators are part of a food chain, and do not 'conquer' their prey except to eat them. The idea of total conquest is an extrapolation from the existing power system: it indicates, not a desirable end, accomodation, but a pathological aberration, re-enforced by such rewards as this system bestows. As for the climactic notion that "the universe will be man's at last"-what is this but a paranoid fantasy, comparable to the claims of an asylum inmate who imagines that he is Emperor of the World? Such a claim is countless light-years away from reality. ~ Lewis Mumford

You are organic, aren't you? Or am I talking to a statue again? ~ Christina Daley

I always knew pesticides affected farmworkers. That's why I always tell people, "eat organic." Not just because it's better for you but because you know the people who picked your food weren't in a toxic environment. ~ Eva Longoria

Since chemical fertilizer burns out the soil organic matter, other farmers struggle with tilth, water retention, and basic soil nutrients. The soil gets harder and harder every year as the chemicals burn out the organic matter, which gives the soil its sponginess. One pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water. The best drought protection any farmer can acquire is more soil organic matter. ~ Joel Salatin

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. ~ Edward O. Wilson

NumbersUSA's work was critical to derailing the 2007 comprehensive federal immigration bill, which had, at that point, received the support of President Buch, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the high-tech industry, the Catholic Church, immigrant-advocacy organizations, and several industries reliant on immigration labor, including farming, food services, and construction. During the weeks leading up to the floor vote on the bill, NumbersUSA coordinated weekly phone calls with the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, mobilized its members to engage key senators, and provided those senators with information and arguments necessary to oppose the bill. Several actors, including pro-immigrant advocates, restrictionists, and members of Congress, have credited NumbersUSA with causing the collapse of the bill in the Senate. ~ Pratheepan Gulasekaram