Crop Failure Quotes

“the goddess knew that her daughter
had been taken, and tore her hair into utter disorder,
and repeatedly struck her breasts with the palms of both hands.
With her daughter’s location a mystery still, she reproaches
the whole earth as ungrateful, unworthy her gift of grain crops,
and Sicily more than the others, where she has discovered
the proof of her loss; and so it was here that her fierce hand
shattered the earth-turning plows, here that the farmers and cattle
perished alike, and here that she bade the plowed fields
default on their trust by blighting the seeds in their keeping.
Sicilian fertility, which had been everywhere famous,
was given the lie when the crops died as they sprouted,
now ruined by too much heat, and now by too heavy a rainfall;
stars and winds harmed them, and the greedy birds devoured
the seed as it was sown; the harvest of wheat was defeated
by thorns and darnels and unappeasable grasses.”
― Ovid

“In this year there was so great corruption of the air, and inundation of rain, throughout the whole of England and Scotland, that both crops and hay were nearly all lost. And some men's corn rotted in the fields from the day of harvest; some men's corn, shaken out by the wind, grew again under the straw; some men's harvest was so late that they did not reap it until about the festival of St. Martin [11 November] or later.”
― Joseph Stevenson, Chronicon de Lanercost