Small Farms Quotes

They've destroyed small farms and local economies across the globe. And now, they own patents on the seeds themselves. Those seeds represent the knowledge, labor, and heritage of all of humanity, and their DNA is now owned by Monsanto and ConAgra and ADM. They're the oligarchs of food, the pater familias of life itself. "The ownership, genetic code, practices and profits of agriculture are being collected in fewer and fewer hands - hands that have no dirt under the fingernails," writes George Pyle. ~ Anonymous

The greatest destroyer of the small economies of small farms has been the doctrine of sanitation. I have no argument against cleanliness and healthfulness; I am for them as much as anyone. I do, however, question the validity and honesty of the sanitation laws that have come to rule over farm production in the last thirty or forty years. Why have new sanitation laws always required more, and more expensive, equipment? Why have they always worked against the survival of the small producer? Is it impossible to be inexpensively healthful and clean? ~ Wendell Berry

All schools should teach children basic cooking skills. Every school should be able to buy sustainable, good quality food wherever possible from local sources. Every school should include food-growing in the curriculum. For some, that will mean twinning with willing farms. For others, it will mean literally building their own small farms. ~ Zac Goldsmith

The real improvements then must come, to a considerable extent, from the local communities themselves. We need local revision of our methods of land use and production. We need to study and work together to reduce scale, reduce overhead, reduce industrial dependencies; we need to market and process local products locally; we need to bring local economies into harmony with local ecosystems so that we can live and work with pleasure in the same places indefinitely; we need to substitute ourselves, our neighborhoods, our local resources, for expensive imported goods and services; we need to increase cooperation among all local economic entities: households, farms, factories, banks, consumers, and suppliers. If. we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide "jobs" to the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non- polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. In that way, we will put local capital to work locally, not to exploit and destroy the land but to use it well. This is not work just for the privileged, the well-positioned, the ~ Wendell Berry

Fast rather than slow, more rather than less
this flashy "development" is linked directly to society's impending collapse. It has only served to separate man from nature. Humanity must stop indulging the desire for material possessions and personal gain and move instead toward spiritual awareness.
Agriculture must change from large mechanical operations to small farms attached only to life itself. Material life and diet should be given a simple place. If this is done, work becomes pleasant, and spiritual breathing space becomes plentiful. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka

It is a source of endless wonder that these two islands lying side by side off the coast of Europe should have been the fount of so much anguish, each for the other. One spawned the mightiest empire in history, and its arrogant overlords were loathed by their oppressed neighbors across the Irish sea. The other -- small, poor, with virtually no valuable natural resources -- supported a people conspicuously lacking in political gifts and afflicted with an extraordinary incidence of alcoholism. "It is a very moist climate," Churchill once observed. Yet endowed with immense charm, romantic vision, and remarkable genius, it was the homeland of Swift, Shore, Yeats, Joyce, Millington Synge, O'Casey, O'Faolain, and Dublin's Abbey Theater. ~ William Manchester

I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Love is not about grand intentions. It is about small attentions. ~ Robert Breault

Dopamine makes up less than one percent of the brain's neurotransmitters. It's a small portion. Dopamine is released when people are happy, angry, stressed. So it's really hard to call this specific neurotransmitter "the pleasure neurotransmitter." ~ Carl Hart

These are not fever dreams. They are near inevitabilities. It's an easy prediction to make - that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon - that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company. ~ Brad Stone

If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can't accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don't make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Cathy, don't look so defeated. She was only trying to put us down
again.
Maybe nothing did work out right for her, but that doesn't mean we are
doomed. Let's go forth tomorrow with no great expectations of finding
perfection. Then, expecting only a small share of happiness, we won't
be disappointed. ~ V.C. Andrews

Every morning, I go off to a small studio behind my house to write. I try to ignore all email and phone calls until lunchtime. Then I launch into the sometimes frantic busy-ness of a tightly scheduled day. ~ Daniel Goleman

An early flourish of confidence is useful. Then there's the small crudities - the slubs and bumps that come with outdoor work - the odd charm of imprecision. ~ Robert Genn

I do find the sight of small children eating very moving. Watch the way their tiny fingers clamp the cutlery. The exaggeratedly precise way they move cups or glasses to their lips. ~ John Niven

5. Differentiation is easiest to make when the stimulus is smallest. In Awareness Through Movement, Feldenkrais wrote, "If I raise an iron bar I shall not feel the difference if a fly either lights on it or leaves it. If, on the other hand I am holding a feather, I shall feel a distinct difference if the fly were to settle on it. The same applies to all the senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste, heat, and cold." If a sensory stimulus is very great (say, very loud music), we can notice a change in the level of that stimulus only if the change is quite significant. If the stimulus is small to begin with, then we can detect very small changes. (This phenomenon is called the Weber-Fechner law in physiology.) ~ Norman Doidge

This is Klara. She's yours to do with as you will. Here.' He gave me a small, silver handled whip. 'You might need this to remind her of that, though ~ K.A. Perkins

Limit your life to concentration on the self and your world can only be small. Embrace interconnectedness and unity and the world becomes endlessly full of possibilities. ~ A.C. Ping

That I had never heard of such a bird did not surprise me ... But others more experienced also did not know of the Carolina Parakeet. The more I spoke of the bird, the more it seemed that, somehow, its existence had been a chimera. Admittedly, my survey was small and unscientific, but intelligent people who could reel off the names of various dinosaurs and identify sparrows at epic distances could not name the forgotten parakeet. I realized, forcefully, what I suppose I knew abstractly: Histories, like species, can go extinct. ~ Christopher Cokinos

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday ... I look back on my life as a good day's work, it was done and I feel satisfied with it. I made the best out of what life offered. ~ Grandma Moses

Only after all the noise has spent itself do we begin to hear in the silence of our heart, the still, small, mighty voice of God. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

I swear, one range fire and you've turned into a timid little baby kitten afraid of his own shadow."
Reza swore under his breath, wishing Emily wasn't standing right there watching Teague show his ass - figuratively, of course. He wondered how long it would be before Teague tried to hit on her.
The thought made Reza's spine stiffen as he glanced over at her.
Emily raised both eyebrows, her lips twitching. "Range fire?"
Heat crawled up Reza's neck, along with a strong desire to throttle Ben Teague. "I may or may not have been involved in an accident involving a small fire here at Fort Hood."
"Ha," Teague snorted and grabbed his helmet. "He burned down three hundred acres of training area last year."
"It was an accident," Reza snarled. ~ Jessica Scott

For thirty-two years I went shopping with my coupon box in tow
without ever seeing another consumer with either a coupon box or
binder. Not once. I spotted small coupon wallets that fit in a purse
or envelopes of coupons, but never a box or binder. By early 2011,
I was beginning to see women with coupon binders everywhere I
went. All of a sudden, couponing was hot. It was as if couponing
was a totally new concept, and yet coupons had been around for
over 125 years. ~ Mary Potter Kenyon

Too small is our world to allow discrimination, bigotry and intolerance to thrive in any corner of it, let alone in the United States of America. ~ Eliot Engel

It is worth remembering one of the important lessons of the Buck story: a small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom. ~ Paul A. Lombardo

In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky.j.g. ~ J.G. Ballard

Think of Chicago as a piece of music, perhaps," he continued. "In it you can hear the thousands of years of people living here and fishing and hunting, and then bullets and axes, and the whine of machinery, and the bellowing of cattle, and the shriek of railroads, and the thud of fists and staves and crowbars, and a hundred languages, a thousand dialects. And the murmur of the lake like a basso undertone. Ships and storms, snow and fire. To the north the vast dark forests, and everywhere else around the city rolling fields of farms, and all roads leading to Chicago, which rises from the plains like Oz, glowing with light and fire at night, drawing people to it from around the world. A roaring city, gunfire and applause and thunder. Gleaming but made of bone and stone. Bitter cold and melting hot and clotheslines hung in the alleys and porches like the webbing of countless spiders. A city without illusions but with vaulting imaginations and expectations. A city of burning energies on the shore of a huge northern sea. An American city, with all the violence and humor and grace and greed of this particular powerful adolescent country. Perhaps the American city - no other city in the nation is as big and central and grown up from the very soil. Chicago was never ruled by Spain or England or France or Russia or Texas, it shares no ocean with other countries, it is no mere regional captain, like Cincinnati or Nashville; it is itself, all brawn and greed and song, brilliant and vena ~ Brian Doyle

Jack glanced at ken. "Lily is a brilliant woman when it comes to academics, but she;'s so blind when it comes to people." It was a small warning to keep Ken's anger from boiling over. "She's struggling to accept that Whitney needs to die, but she needs more time. The pregnancy also probably makes her more emotional when it comes to her father."
"When the hell did you get so smart?" Ken demanded.
"I've been reading all the pregnancy books." jack sounded a little smug. ~ Christine Feehan

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I really like singing, but coming from a small town like where I grew up, how do you start that journey? ~ David Nail

The hospital was a low and narrow building of a single story, with a small garden. ~ Victor Hugo

Authors hide their big thefts by putting small ones between quotation marks. ~ Paul Eldridge

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent – it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I speak from the heart words I have no right to say. Words that I should have never uttered to you, yet I cannot help myself. I love you and I shall love you through eternity itself. ~ Bertrice Small

We find people of value,' she said, speaking like a teacher addressing a small child, 'and we determine what story they need to hear. It's the story that they're already telling themselves, don't you see? It's the nightmare they believe in. Once you understand that nightmare, you join them in it. Their fear becomes your fear. It's all a shared experience then. And once you have that, once they feel that is the truth, all the way down to their core, then your coping strategy becomes theirs. It's a natural progression. This is the power of a shared narrative. Of the echo chamber. ~ Michael Koryta

I've been thinking about this all day," he said between kisses. "All. Day."
Who was she kidding? She'd been harboring this fantasy for weeks. And then in a move that was becoming her 'thing', Alesha leaned back and pulled her sweater over her head and gave Reece a sexy smile. "Was this part of what you were thinking?"
His hands came up and cupped her breasts, his breath ragged, but his eyes were on hers. "This is better. ~ Samantha Chase

Love hunger and thirst for the sake of Christ. Insofar as you pacify your body, so much much will you do make your soul virtuous. God, who rewards thoughts, words, and deeds, will give good in return for even a small thing which you gladly suffer for His sake. ~ Gennadius Of Constantinople

The guard's name was Mo, short for Molasses, as in slow as molasses or thick as molasses. The nickname had been his since he was so young he no longer remembered what his real name was. ANd it was true that from his earliest infancy, although his heart was as big and as warm and as generous as an open hand, his brain had seemed just a tiny bit small. ~ Lauren Oliver

She came back pinked, sun-dazed and slow moving, with spume-salted hair and a sandy butt, displaying upon a narrow palm, with a child's innocence, a small and perfect white shell, saying in a voice still drugged with sun and heat, "It's like the first perfect thing I ever saw, or the first shell. It's a little white suit of armor with the animal dead and gone. What does it mean when things look so clear and so meaningful? Silly little things." I sat on a low stool, hating the phone. ~ John D. MacDonald

Suddenly the door crashed into the room in a cacophony of shattered, splintered wood, revealing Emil standing in the frame, his small beady eyes fixed on Peter. A satisfied smile split his fat face, his lips peeled away from a mouthful of neglected, black teeth. In his right hand was a half empty bottle of vodka, in his left hand was Elena. ~ Sean J. Quirk

New York is a small place when it comes to the part of it that wakes up just as the rest is going to bed. ~ P.G. Wodehouse