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A land needs people to nurse its flesh and bring from
it the goodness of crops.
Louis L'Amour |
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I’m not sure why I’ve always loved barns.
I don’t live in a farm. I don’t have any farming connections.
Nevertheless, I, like many other city folk, find the site of an old family
homestead – complete with a weathered farmhouse, silo, and barn –
comforting. Comforting because these scenes provide a glimpse into a
hard-working, self-sufficient and seemingly honest way of life. And
comforting because that’s a lifestyle we can all admire.
William G. Simmonds |
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To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,– One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do If bees are few. Emily Dickinson |
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For these struggling occupants of the forest
clearings on the western fringe of settlement their more substantial
eastern neighbors had coined the term "back-country people."
They were popularly and most unsympathetically classified as peculiarly
ignorant, improvident, and insensate else they would never have subjected
themselves to the peculiar handicaps and hazards of the frontier.
Dale Van Every |
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Out there on the prairie where even close
friends tend to stand an arm's length apart.
Garrison Keillor |
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ON A SEED
This was the goal of the leaf and the root. For this is the source of the root and the bud... Georgie Starbuck Galbraith |
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We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to. Dr. Paul Connett |
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What I stand for is what I stand on. Wendell Berry |
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For
man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature,
it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.
Edwin Way Teale. |
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In the early days everything was raised on a local
scale, and there was no transportation away from the rivers, so famine
might exist only a few days' travel from an area of plenty.
Louis L'Amour |
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Their former condition had been so unfavored that they
could be attracted to the deprivations and hardships of frontier
existence.
Dale Van Every |
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Observe the daily circle of the sun, And the short year of each revolving moon: By them thou shalt foresee the following day, Nor shall a starry night thy hopes betray. When first the moon appears, if then she shrouds Her silver crescent, tipped with sable clouds, Conclude she bodes a tempest on the main, And brews for fields impetuous floods of rain. Ben Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac |
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All the years of existence represent a long love affair with the earth, this earth, the only earth we know. Edwin Way Teale |
| To protect our source of food, then, the
only sensible, practical thing to do is to protect the productive land we
now have.
H. H. Bennett |
| Get hold of some land. It will last and
be there when all the rest has changed. Everything else fades with time,
but the land stays there. Sure, there's floods, earthquakes, and storms,
but by and large, the land stays.
Louis L'Amour |
| Rural communities are the heart and soul
of our Nation and they are emblematic of the unique character of the
American people.
Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman |
| There have perhaps been
few excursions man has ever been privileged to take that could have been
more likely to hold him spellbound than a descent of the Ohio in the days
when the region was still an undisturbed wilderness.
Dale Van Every |
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Even while the reaper fills his greedy hands, And binds the golden sheafs in brittle bands: Oft have I seen a sudden storm arise From all the warring winds that sweep the skies: And oft whole sheets descend of slucy rain, Sucked by the spongy clouds from off the main; The lofty skies at once come pouring down, The promised crop and golden labors drown. Ben Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac |
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| Man masters nature not by force but by
understanding.
Jacob Bronowsky |
| Every day we have some weather, and yesterday was no
exception.
John Carr |
| Labor is the true standard of value.
Abraham Lincoln |
| Thirst teaches the value of water.
Russian Saying |
| The Indian meaning of the
name Kickapoo was "standing now here. now there." As a nation
they had a long record of moving from place to place and getting into
trouble with each successive set of neighbors.
Dale Van Every |
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All measures of Longitude are deduced from
Barley corns: Three Barley-corns make an Inch, 12 Inches a Foot, 3 Feet a
Yard, 5 1/2 Yards one Pole or Perch, 40 Perches make a Furlong, 8 Furlongs
make a Mile, in a Mile are 320 Perches or Poles, 1066 paces, 1408 Ells, 1760
Yards, 5280 Feet; 63360 Inches, 190080 Barley corns.
Ben Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac |
| No man but feels more of a man in the
world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small
it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very
handsome property.
Charles Dudley Warner |
| O prairie mother, I am one of your boys. I have loved
the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more Carl Sandburg |
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| Laughing Corn
There was a high majestic fooling And day after tomorrow in the yellow corn The ears ripen in late summer Come on with a high and conquering laughter. One of the smaller blackbirds chitters on a stalk And I never heard its name in my life. A white juice works inside. Always – I never knew it any other way – And the rain and the corn and the sun and the corn Over the road is the farmhouse. It will not be fixed till the corn is husked. Carl Sandburg |
| "You see, farmin’ in Maine ain’t really
farmin’, it’s rearranging rocks." Jean Shepherd |
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We who pass do not own this land, we but use it, we
hold it briefly in trust for those yet to come.
We must not reap without seeding, we must not take from the earth
without replacing. |
| "For I was a farm boy, and town kids can make you
feel awfully backward when you’re young and a farm boy." Ernie Pyle |
| It was soon after crossing into Iowa, coming south from
Minnesota, that I gradually became conscious of the wind. I don’t know whether you know that long, sad wind that blows so steadily across the hundreds of miles of Midwest flat lands in the summertime. If you don’t, it will be hard for you to understand the feeling I have about it. Even if you know it, you may not understand. To me the summer wind in the Midwest is one of the most melancholy things in all life. It comes from so far, and it blows so gently and yet so relentlessly; it rustles the leaves and the branches of the maple trees in a sort of symphony of sadness, and it doesn’t pass on and leave them still. It just keeps coming, like the infinite flow of Old Man River. You could – and you do – wear out your lifetime on the dusty plains with that wind of futility blowing in your face. And when you are worn out and gone, the wind, still saying nothing, still so gentle and sad and timeless, is still blowing across the prairies, and will blow in the faces of the little men who follow you, forever. As soon as I became conscious of the wind, I was back in character as an Indiana farm boy again. Like dreams came the memories the wind brought. I lay again on the ground under the shade trees at noon, during my half-hour rest before going back to the fields, and the wind and the sun and hot rural silence made me sleepy, and yet I couldn’t sleep for the wind in the trees. The wind was like the afternoon ahead that would never end, and the days and the summers and even the lifetimes that would flow on forever, tiredly, patiently. It’s just one of those small impressions that will form in a child’s mind, and grow and stay with him through a lifetime, even playing its part in his character and his way of thinking, and he can never explain it. Ernie Pyle |
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| We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it
as a living organism Paul Brooks |
| Look deep, deep into nature, and you will understand everything
better. Albert Einstein |
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| It appears that an increasing number of people are
recognizing the value of farmland in one’s investment portfolio, not just for its
annual income, but for the safety it brings over years of ownership. Monty Meusch |
| It might be said that the early barn is the best example of American
colonial architecture. Each old barn was born of American soil and fitted to an American
landscape for specific American needs. Eric Sloane |
| As farmers expand with larger equipment and fewer
tillage trips across the land, they are interested in renting more ground. Government
payments are driving the market. Rick Hickman |
| I built those stalls and that shed there; I am barber, leech and doctor.
I am a weaver, a shoemaker, farrier, wheelwright, farmer, gardener, and when it can’t
be helped, a soldier. Travels in the Confederation, 1783 |
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| The farmer, the hunter, or the deep-sea
fisherman always had his eyes upon the heavens. He lived with their
vagaries as much as with the trails he followed or the furrows he plowed.
He could read the weather in the clouds, locate distant islands or lagoons
by their appearance. He knew the flight of birds and which lived upon land
and which upon the sea. Long before there was a compass, he understood how
to locate the sun on an overcast day.
Louis L'Amour |
| The barns in Europe were small, just big enough to
house a few horses or cattle, but when they built an American barn, it became the symbol
of a new life. From the beginning the American barn was big, like the hopes and plans for
life in the New World. It was unlike anything built anywhere else. It was entirely
American. Eric Sloane |
| Using your neighbor’s tools is like wearing his clothes. Old farm saying |
| It is pretty to behold our backsettlements where the
barns are as large as palaces, while the owners live in log huts; a sign of thrifty
farming. Lewis Evans, 1753 |
| Weather has always had a great deal to do with the planning of a barn,
both for the health and comfort of the animals and for the protection of the barn timbers
and the stored grain. Eric Sloane |
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| There continues to be strong competition for farm
ground, with a lot of cash rent paid up front, and cash rent being paid on share crops as
well. Cash rent ranges from $140/acre to $170/acre are common, with a few in central
Illinois as high as $200/acre. Dennis Hoyt |
| Long before the ax fell, the early barn builder plotted out the routes of
sunshine and wind, the slopes of drainage and decided just how the seasons might affect
his barn site. Eric Sloane |
| Hear the wind Blow through the buffalo-grass, Blow over wide-grape and brier. This was frontier, and this, And this, your house, was frontier. There were footprints upon the hill And men lie buried under, Tamers of earth and rivers. They died at the end of labor, Forgotten is the name. Stephen Vincent Benet, WESTERN STAR |
| In the Midwest where there are no hills to deflect the wind and the
"snow falls horizontally," there is often a fence or even a rope stretched from
the house to the barn so a farmer might not get lost on his way to the barn. Eric Sloane |
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| Never did a tree fall that I did not feel
a pang, and rightly so, for when the trees are gone, man will also be
gone, for without them we cannot live. The very air we breathe comes from
trees, and when they are gone, the air will thicken and men will die and
our greatest towers of tone will fall away to rubble and there will be
only weeds, and then grass to cover the unsightly mounds we leave behind.
Louis L'Amour |
| Worldwide farmers grow far more food per
acre now than two decades ago. Ronald Bailey |
| In the earliest settlements it would have been considered a useless
extravagance to paint one’s house and to paint the barn would be vulgar and showy. Eric Sloane |
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| Frontiers have a way of killing, maiming
or simply dismissing gentlemen. In any case, most folk with settled estates have no reason
to go to a raw, new country. They can invest in it later, without needing to break their
bodies on it now. To succeed on the frontier, a man needed the kind of violent, grabbing
drive that only failure or mediocrity in his former life could fuel. Robert Hughes |
| Early American farm life has influenced many of our present-day customs.
No one was more aware of the connection that the barn has with Christmas than the farmer.
Christ, of course, was born in a barn. The children were told that on Christmas night the
cattle spoke and kneeled in honor of the Saviour. Gifts were left in the barn for the
children to find in the morning, and to keep them away from the barn while the presents
were being prepared, the legend was that misfortune would befall anyone who listened to
the cattle "speak" on Christmas Eve. Eric Sloane |
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"The Farmer’s Calling"
An address delivered by the Hon. Levi H. Alden, before the Green County Agricultural Society at their Annual Fair, held at Greenville, Oct. 2, 1846, and published at the request of the Society, contain many valuable ideas expressed in a plain, straight forward and unpretending style. We extract the following remarks on the farmer’s calling.
"One thing I think is very certain that the public are beginning to set a higher estimate on the farmer’s calling than formerly; and this is encouraging for the welfare of the country. In the commotions which I have read of in history, I never find that the owners and tillers of the soil have risen up and overthrown Law and Order, and turned society upside down. I have read of their rising against oppression. It was the farmers who achieved our independence. It was a farmer who led them on to victory. When the great majority of the people have a right in the soil, and work with their own hands, then you may be sure Law and Order will prevail. Now, the more respectable you make a profession, the more will be willing to enter it. Hence, as I said, the fact that the calling of the farmer stands higher in public opinion is encouraging, for more will be farmers; and the more farmers, the better for the cause of good government.
"Why, I can remember the time when it was (in some places at
least) hardly considered respectable to be a farmer, especially if one worked enough to
brown and harden his hands. The time was (and not a very great while ago) when our village
girls thought more of a man with white hands who stood behind a broad board and measured
off tape and ribbons, (and gave short measure too) though he owed for the cloth on his
back and the making of it up; I say the time was, when they thought a great deal more of
such a man than of the young sunburnt, hard-handed honest-hearted farmer who paid his
debts and had something laid up against a rainy day. But such ideas are a good deal
changed. Our young men have found that getting along without work is harder than getting
along with work; and besides, a good many men of first rate talents and learning have put
their hands to the plow and looked straight forward and held on; so that now very few are
ashamed of the profession of the farmer."
American Quarterly Journal of Agricultural Science, Feb. 1847, pp.
90-91.
Rural Life
By C. N. Bement
"It is not my intention or desire to damp the sanguine expectations of young men, but there are sedate and reflecting minds, even among such, who will profit, as they go along, by experience, and take caution from the mistakes of others, their neighbors; rural pursuits will also become agreeable to such, and a strong inducement to reside in the country, and at the same time afford employment and livelihood to those about them. Besides, to such persons there is a constant variety in looking after the trees, shrubs, fruits, and crops, etc., which they plant, and see grow and flourish under their care; and which are presenting themselves always under some renewed form, rendering agriculture the most agreeable and least tiresome of human pursuits.
"Unless a man has a fortune at his command, sufficient to bear him through, (when he may be at liberty to please himself,) let him not be led into whimsical or extravagant expenses; neither should the man of fortune deceive himself by visionary profits, estimated or anticipated, and which are not to be realized.
"Agriculture,’ says an ancient writer, ‘is the most
certain source of domestic riches. Where it is neglected, whatever wealth may be imported
from abroad, poverty and misery will abound at home. Such is and ever will be the
fluctuating state of trade and manufactures, that thousands of people may be in full
employment to-day, and in beggary to-morrow. This can never happen to those who cultivate
the ground. They can always by industry, obtain at least the necessaries of life, and the
fruits of their own labor."
American Quarterly Journal of Agricultural Science, July, 1846, p.
89
But only crazy or very foolish men would sell their Mother Earth.
Black Elk, Ogalala Sioux
An outbreak of foot and mouth disease is still the most terrible fate for a farmer. One
morning he may have a happy full life, a steading full of beasts, cows lowing, sheep and
lambs bleating, hens cackling, his world full of happy sounds; and within forty-eight
hours - nothing, no sound, no living creature, only empty desolate buildings, bare fields,
and the smoke of a long burial trench.
Dorothy Hartley
Famine is the fiercest of the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Ronald Bailey
In all things, including acute discomfort, the land is a great leveler.
Dorothy Hartley
Now at the end of the twentieth century, we are on the verge of eliminating hunger.
Ronald Bailey
Except where civil wars exist or despotic governments prevail, there has never been a
time during the last two centuries when the people in the developing world were better fed
or when their food supply was more secure.
D. Gale Johnson
World food supplies continue to grow while prices steadily decline.
Ronald Bailey
Nearly all of the increase in grain production in the developing countries over the
past two decades has been from higher yields rather than from expanding crop area.
Ronald Bailey
Full participation in the world food market is the best guarantee of food security for
the poor in the developing world, yet government policies often discourage this trend.
Ronald Bailey
Of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than
agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more becoming to a free man.
Cicero
Agriculture is the earliest and most honorable of arts.
Rousseau
The agricultural human’s pull historically has been toward the monoculture of
annuals. Nature’s pull is toward a polyculture of perennials.
Wes Jackson
No other human occupation opens so wide a field for the profitable and agreeable
combination of labor with cultivated thought as agriculture.
Abraham Lincoln
I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any
country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches
of a husbandman’s cares.
George Washington
To plow is to pray; to plant is to prophesy; and the harvest answers and fulfills.
Robert G. Ingersoll
One hears alot about the rules of good husbandry; there is only one
- leave
the land far better than you found it.
George Henderson
When tillage begins, the other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of
human civilization.
Daniel Webster
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments
- there are consequences.
Robert G. Ingersoll
How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen
Paree?
Sam M. Lewis Joe Young
Worm or beetle - drought or tempest - on a farmer’s land may fall,
Each is loaded full o’ ruin, but a mortgage beats em all.
William McKendree Carleton
O farmers, pray that your summers be wet and your winters clear.
Virgil
Ah too fortunate farmers, if they knew their own good fortune!
Virgil
We all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
Oscar Wilde
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near.
Robert Frost
Have you become a farmer? Is it not pleasanter than to be shut up within four walls and
delving eternally with the pen?
Thomas Jefferson
To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch their
renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race, the
most satisfactory thing a man can do.
Charles Dudley Warner
Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of
ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential
service to his country, than a whole race of politicians put together.
Jonathan Swift
Destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
William Jennings Bryan
The environment is too important to be left to the environmentalists.
Helmut Sihler
The nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with the objects of
creation, there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break
forth into light.
Victor Hugo
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles
from a cornfield.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The farmer is the only business man who buys at retail, sells at wholesale and pays the
freight both ways.
John F. Kennedy
Farmers don’t just grow things; they run businesses.
Clayton Yeuter
It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use
it.
Theodore Roosevelt
One American farmer feeds 283 people.
1990 US Agricultural statistic
In farming, you can do everything right and still fail.
Mark Nunnery, Illinois grain farmer
To destroy a standing crop goes against the soundest instincts of human nature.
Henry Wallace
The Department of Agriculture inadvertently increased the human disaster of the Dust
Bowl; under the AAA acreage reduction programs, wealthy farmers were discovering that they
needed less help. Their tenants, turned out, took to the road in rattletrap 1925 Dodges,
1927 La Salles and 1923 Model Ts, looking for a greener land. They were joined by small
farmers whose For Sale signs marked the start of the dust-bowlers’ migrations.
William Manchester
In 1940, 25 percent of Americans lived on farms; average annual farm income was
$1,000.00. Three out of every four farms were lit by kerosene lamps.
U.S. agriculture statistic
Throughout the 1950s over a million farmers were leaving their farms each year
- 17 million for the postwar era by the 1960s.
William Manchester
The best business you can go into you will find on your father’s farm...
Horace Greeley
A farm is like a man - however great the
income, if there is extravagance but little is left.
Cato
The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the
fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.
Theodore Roosevelt
In 1963 American agriculture produced 60 percent more food than in 1940, while the
number of hours required to do the nation’s farming dropped from twenty million to
nine million.
William Manchester
Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and
duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not
recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come
after us.
Theodore Roosevelt
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is time for us now as a nation to exercise the same reasonable foresight in dealing
with our great national resources that would be shown by any prudent man in conserving and
wisely using the property which contains the assurance of well-being for himself and his
children
Theodore Roosevelt
The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, An’ it looks like it’s
climbin’ clear up to the sky.
Oscar Hammerstein II
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen
people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.
It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape
from the face of the earth.
Thomas Jefferson
The main characteristic of Nature’s farming can
. . . be summed up in a few words. Mother earth never attempts to farm without
livestock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and
to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there
is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; ample
provision is made to maintain large reserves of fertility; the greatest care is taken to
store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against
disease.
Albert Howard
Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear
that the laws of property have been extended as to violate natural right. The earth is
given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.
Thomas Jefferson
A good farmer is nothing more or less than a handy man with a good sense of humus.
E.B. White
I see a million hills green with crop-yielding trees and a million neat farm homes
snuggled to the hills. These beautiful tree farms hold the hills from Boston to Austin,
from Atlanta to Des Moines. The hills of my vision have farming that fits them and
replaces the poor pasture, the gullies, and the abandoned lands that characterize today so
large a part of these hills.
J. Russell Smith
Man has been endowed with reason and creative powers to increase what has been given
him, but so far he has not created but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, the
rivers are drying up, the game birds are becoming extinct, the climate is ruined, and
every day the earth is becoming poorer and more hideous.
Anton Chekhov
Train up a fig-tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade
of it.
Charles Dickens
