#farming

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#farming #interest #lots #positive #reasons

My family has spent 400 years farming on the banks of the Rio Grande. We know the value of hard work, love of the community, love for water and land. ↗

— Ken Salazar

#banks #community #family #farming #hard

Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#factory-farming #meat #science #veganism #vegetarianism

In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#hayduke #tree-farming #nature

The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#vegetarianism #food

I wonder how it is that people's philosophies have come to spin faster than the changing seasons. ↗

— Masanobu Fukuoka

#simple-living #change

Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education. ↗

— Alice Waters

#community #education #farming #food #education

Though the industrial logic that made feeding cattle to cattle seem like a good idea has been thrown into doubt by mad cow disease, I was surprised to learn it hadn't been discarded. The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#nature

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#ecology #farming #symbiosis #nature

Factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems. The meat industry causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, planes and ships in the world. ↗

— Joan Jett

#cars #causes #contributors #emissions #environmental