I am a revolutionary, so my son can be a farmer, so his son can be a poet.
Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.
I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer.
The diligent farmer plants trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit.
Never answer a question from a farmer.
He that would look with contempt on the pursuits of the farmer, is not worthy the name of a man.
The American farmer, whose holdings were not so extensive as those of the grandee nor so tiny as those of the peasant, whose psychology was Protestant and bourgeois, and whose politics were petty-capitalist rather than traditionalist, had no reason to share the social outlook of the rural classes of Europe. In Europe land was limited and dear, while labor was abundant and relatively cheap; in America the ratio between land and labor was inverted.
If an industrialist can sell his products anywhere in India and the world, why should a farmer not be allowed to do so?
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.
Those who believe that we have reached the limit of business progress and employment opportunity in this country are like the farmer who had two windmills and pulled one down because he was afraid there was not enough wind for both.
Many people think that when we practice agriculture, nature is helping us in our efforts to grow food. This is an exclusively human-centered viewpoint. . . we should instead, realize that we are receiving that which nature decides to give us. A farmer does not grow something in the sense that he or she creates it. That human is only a small part of the whole process by which nature expresses its being. The farmer has very little influence over that process. . . other than being there and doing his or her small part.
How will you know a good farmer when you meet him? He will not ask you for any favors.
Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer; I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.
As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence.
I can't control my own income, I can't control my own destiny, I can't even control my own farm if I'm a farmer. This is not going to last.
I know there's a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that's fine with me.
A farmer is always going to be rich next year.
If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.
My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that's my dad. And he was a very good man.