Judith D. Schwartz > Quotes

“biodiversity actually begins in the soil.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“They say farmers need a safety net. I think the soil should be our safety net. If you add up the dollar figure for improved health, carbon sequestration, lower fossil fuel bills, and resistance to weather extremes, it’s a lot.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“proverb from the Sanskrit Vedic Scriptures of around 1500 bce: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“ultimately, quality of health depends on the quality of food, and food can only be as good as the soil on which it is grown.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“tucked into the 2012 Farm Bill was a clause indemnifying Monsanto if the use of their products happens to mess up someone’s land.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“People need to manage land with water circulation in mind,”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Water for the Recovery of the Climate: A New Water Paradigm,”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“One farmer I met, Gene Goven of Turtle Lake, North Dakota, put it more succinctly: “You build soil where the roots go—down!”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“The most urgent challenge of present civilization is to understand that the drying out of landscapes has a much more serious impact on climatic change than an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Humans can’t eat grass, but cattle, thanks to their microscopic partners, are performing the service of turning inedible grasses into protein that we can eat.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Science has never succeeded by burying the manifestations of unintended consequences. It has succeeded when we recognize them and deal with those issues. That’s hard to do when you have a belief system that becomes a religion.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“offers numerous cautionary tales of kingdoms, cultures, and empires that squandered their soil and found themselves with nothing left to live on. From the earliest farmers in the Fertile Crescent to the Mayans, Romans, and Easter Islanders,”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Across the board, levels of key mineral nutrients—zinc, calcium, manganese, iron, copper—in our food crops have declined by an average of 50 to more than 100 percent over the last century.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Bare ground devoid of plant cover retains heat and has little moisture to spare. Radiation from the sun, then, just sits there and the soil proceeds to dry out, oxidize, compact, and lose the capacity to absorb water and sustain microbial life, all of which makes it more likely to remain plantless.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“using Holistic Management (with cattle, sheep, goats, horses) or other restorative models (agroforestry, pasture cropping, natural sequence farming), and those islands of resilience expand and connect and, in time, are no longer islands but rather large intact areas of revived ecology. Floods happen less frequently and droughts aren’t as severe.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“from a soil microorganism point of view, a crop monoculture is akin to junk food: “If there’s just wheat or any one thing, it’s like us eating doughnuts all day.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“the problem isn’t the amount of carbon per se—the quantity of carbon on earth is constant—but where that carbon is.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“By planting annuals and plowing and clearing so that the soil is open to the elements for much of the year, we’re managing for oxidation instead of photosynthesis, regardless of whether we realize it or not.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“soil health, soil biology, plant diversity, resilience to weather fluctuations, fertility, quality, and economic vitality all go together.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“seeds engineered so that the plant produces sterile seeds or no seeds at all. Farmers are then forced to purchase new seeds every year. It’s thought that pollen from plants with the terminator trait could infect neighboring crop fields, rendering those plants infertile. Globally, more than a billion people depend on small, often marginal farm holdings for their food. What could possibly go wrong here?”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“This means that the soil could offset about one-third of the human-generated emissions annually absorbed in the atmosphere.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Every field that’s turned into a parking lot or industrial park means more water siphoned off into gutters and culverts and less water in the ground. Land that’s dried out and lost its soil carbon to oxidation means that rain, unable to soak in, cascades across the surface and into the waste stream. Eventually all that water flows off to the sea. One consequence is that we’re wasting perfectly good water at a time when many places are experiencing water shortages.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Slaps in the face like this provide opportunities for change. A drought definitely gets people thinking about how they can manage resources better. It’s easy to see then that our ranch has more grass and more animals, and makes more money. A flood is a harder link for people to make. People think they have no control over it. We actually do.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“The concept of the biotic pump, if correct, brings a new urgency to the need to conserve forests.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“We’ve lost an estimated 50 to 80 percent carbon in our soils over the last 150 years.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Australia’s native fauna are soft-footed, Andrew notes. Managed as they were, the hard-hoofed livestock imported from abroad damaged vegetation. This altered the floodplains’ ebb and flow. Cultivating crops according to European methods swiftly depleted the soil. Andrews explains: “Whenever rain falls on the soil it will start to move and transport soluble nutrients in the soil unless there are plants there to control it. If there are no plants there, whether because they were sprayed out or plowed out, the nutrients will be washed out of the soil by the moving water—that is, leached.”21”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World

“Organisms we can’t see are accorded the same respect as those that are big and flashy or promise to give a nice immediate kick to the economy. Soil is viewed not as an inert granular medium for growing things, but as a hub for valuable activities, interactions and exchanges.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Savory is concerned that since tree planting sounds like a good, noncontroversial idea, governments and NGOs might rally around that when the money could be better used to focus on the far more vast areas of grasslands with rainfall too low to provide full soil cover with trees.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“The EPA continues to classify Roundup as low-toxicity, despite numerous studies that have linked glyphosate itself or inert ingredients in Roundup to health problems, including birth defects.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Consider that farmers are sued when genetically manipulated seeds they don’t even want sprout on their soil. (The pretext: This is “patent infringement” and thus the company is owed royalties. No matter that the designer seeds have contaminated the crop.) Or the draconian contracts in which farmers must promise not to save seeds, which has been a fundamental right of growers since the advent of agriculture.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth