On a very cold, snowy Sunday in February, only the pastor and one farmer arrived at the village church. The pastor said, 'Well, I guess we won't have a service today.' The farmer replied: 'Heavens!, if even only one cow shows up at feeding time, I feed it.'
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The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt.
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The whole financial structure of Wall Street seems to rise or fall on the mere fact that the Federal Reserve Bank raises or lowers the amount of interest. Any business that can't survive a one percent change must be skating on thin ice. Why even the poor farmer took a raise of another ten percent just to get a loan from the bank, and nobody from the government paid any attention. But you let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help to get them back into bed again.
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There they lived on, those New England people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise, keeping up...
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By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
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He altered the image of the Jew from that of rabbi, merchant, wanderer, to that of scientist, farmer and soldier.
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Most Americans don't have any idea how well the Department of Agriculture protects the grower at the expense of the consumer. When a chemical is banned from use, a farmer or livestock operator who has the chemical in stock has a choice: either to lose money by disposing of the product, or to use it and take the risk of getting caught breaking the law. How severe is that risk? Well, if you use a banned product in your cattle feed, you have to face the prospect that the government is going to inspect one out of every 250,000 carcasses. They will test this carcass not for all banned substances, but just for a small fraction of them. And even if they detect some residue of a banned substance, and even if they're able to trace the carcass to the ranch that produced it, the guilty rancher is likely at most to receive a stern letter with a strongly worded warning. I never met a rancher who suffered in any way from breaking any regulation meant to protect the safety of our meat. The whole procedure is, in short, a charade.
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One farmer says to me, You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.
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The arrogance of the young is a direct result of not having known enough consequences. The turkey that every day greedily approaches the farmer who tosses him grain is not wrong. It is just that no one ever told him about Thanksgiving.
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I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment.
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Vineyards and shining harvests, pastures, arbors, And all this our very utmost toil Can hardly care for, we wear down our strength Whether in oxen or in men, we dull The edges of our ploughshares, and in return Our fields turn mean and stingy, underfed, And so today the farmer shakes his head, More and more often sighing that his work, The labour of his hands, has come to naught.
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It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experiences of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity.
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A farmer who had a quarrelsome family called his sons and told them to lay a bunch of sticks before him. Then, after laying the sticks parallel to one another and binding them, he challenged his sons, one after one, to pick up the bundle and break it. They all tried, but in vain. Then, untying the bundle, he gave them the sticks to break one by one. This they did with the greatest ease. Then said the father, Thus, my sons, as long as you remain united, you are a match for anything, but differ and separate, and you are undone.
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One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.
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There is, of course, a gold mine or a buried treasure on every mortgaged homestead. Whether the farmer ever digs for it or not, it is there, haunting his daydreams when the burden of debt is most unbearable.
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The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.
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A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
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The only difference between a pigeon and the American farmer today is that a pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere.
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The present century has not dealt kindly with the farmer. His legends are all but obsolete, and his beliefs have been pared away by the profes...
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A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.
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Even if a farmer intends to loaf, he gets up in time to get an early start.
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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
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You can milk a cow the wrong way once and still be a farmer, but vote the wrong way on a water tower and you can be in trouble
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When you make a career change there has to be some kind of connection. I remember a Beverly Hills attorney who wanted to become a potato farmer in Oregon. Well, there's a guy who's born to lose.
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The farmer works the soil. The agriculturalist works the farmer.
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You can milk a cow the wrong way once and still be a farmer, but vote the wrong way on a water tower and you can be in trouble.
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The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his pea...
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A farmer learns more from a bad harvest than a good one.
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Coming into a new area, this organism doesn't have any real enemies; the defenses of the local population are not up,
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But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God.
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