Organic Farming Quotes

“I was struck by the fact that for Joel abjuring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is not so much a goal of his farming, as it so often is in organic agriculture, as it is an indication that his farm is functioning well. “In nature health is the default,” he pointed out. “Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“When a livestock farmer is willing to “practice complexity”—to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to—he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn’t designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Animals who are exploited for “organic” foods are raised, maintained, transported, and slaughtered just like their nonorganic” counterparts: They are debeaked, dehorned, detoed, castrated, and/or branded, and they are kept, transported, and slaughtered in the same deplorable conditions.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“I hope that, someday, grocery stores carry only permaculture food because the farmers make more money growing permaculture foods”
― Paul Wheaton, Building a Better World in Your Backyard - Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys

“Every day when I wake up and head out for chores, I'm struck by the beauty we enjoy on our farm. Based on visitors' comments, that's a shared awareness. Not one of our doors has a skull and crossbones. We want visitors to be struck not by what we've done, but rather by how we've caressed this beautiful niche of God's creation into a productive and profoundly inspiring place.”
― Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation

“The sheer mystery and majesty of heritage wisdom, contained in each cell, each mitochondria, instills in the farmer who respects and honors the pigness of the pig a daily emotional high. The satisfaction of being nature's nurturer always trumps the short-lived adrenaline high of being nature's conqueror. Such an attitude offers spiritual ascendance over physical domination, which never really happens anyway. And that's why the industrial farmer, for all the smoke and noise and horsepower, never feels in control, but always dreads being drowned by the nature he thinks he's controlling.”
― Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation

“Seed sovereignty should not be sacrificed at the altar of food security”
― Royal Raj S

“Ovik Mkrtchyan Quote On current trends in organic farming

The wrong approach to farming, when the focus is on high yields of the fields in any way, including the use of pesticides, growth hormones and artificial fertilisers, leads to the destruction of the fertile soil layer, which can take decades to restore.”
― Ovik Mkrtchyan

“It's true that Doug and Anna live in their own universe, complete with its own language. Like Tuna McAlpine, the Crabtrees eschew the term "conventional" farming, preferring "chemically dependent." Doug can tell you exactly why. "We've been practicing agriculture foe approximately twelve thousand years and using poisons in great quantities for just sixty of them," he reasons, " so to label that 'convention' is a huge insult to eleven thousand nine hundred and forty years of agriculture.”
― Liz Carlisle

“I challenge you to go to any industrial farm. You'll see anti-microbial shoe dips, shower in shower out, plastic suits. Whenever we get scientists visiting our farm, they invariably remark about how seemingly nonchalant we are about bio-security. The industry is paranoid about bio-security because their animals and plants are fragile. If our farm plants and animals had as dysfunctional an immune system as that found in industrial facilities, I'd be paranoid, too.”
― Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation

“An ecological farmer once told me that he quit industrial farming when he realized that his first waking thought every morning was: 'I wonder what's dead up there in the hog house today?' He couldn't hear the birds chirping. He couldn't enjoy the sunrise, or the rainbow after a thunderstorm. And his kids wanted nothing to do with the farm.

But after this epiphany, he closed down the pig concentration camp and devoted himself to pasture-based farming. Suddenly his children wanted to be involved. His thoughts turned lofty. He developed a can-do spirit. And his emotional zest returned.”
― Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation

“Intuitively we all know that nothing operates most efficiently at full throttle. Is it any wonder that a food system predicated on faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper would create an ignorant, duplicitous, harried, obese citizenry? A culture's people carry in their heads and physiques the manifestation of the food system's objectives.”
― Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation

“There is no requirement that the cows, pigs, or hens who were exploited to create “natural” products
be treated any different from how other factory farmed animals are treated. Farmed animals who are exploited for “natural” products are not allowed to
live in natural conditions—they are not even allowed to satisfy their most basic natural behaviors.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“Mulching is a technique consisting of covering the soil with organic or inorganic material to preserve humidity and improve soil condition. Our certified organic mulch is recycled from 100% green waste and ground to be the perfect size for your needs.”
― Cterra Inc

“Without this [Soil Food Web system of bacteria, fungi etc], most important nutrients would drain from soil. Instead, they are retained in the bodies of soil life.

Here is the gardener's truth: when you apply a chemical fertilizer, a tiny bit hits the rhizosphere, where it is absorbed, but most of it continues to drain through soil until it hits the water table. Not so with the nutrients locked up inside soil organisms, a state known as immobilization; these nutrients are eventually released as wastes, or mineralized.”
― Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web

“Bacteria are so small they need to stick to things or they will wash away; to attach themselves, they produce a slime, the secondary result of which is that individual soil particles are bound together. [...]

Fungal hyphae, too, travel through soil, sticking to them and binding them together, thread-like, into aggregates. [...]

The soil food web, then, in addition to providing nutrients to roots in the rhizosphere, also helps create soil structure: the activities of its members bind soil particles together even as they provide for the passage of air and water through the soil. [...]

The nets or webs fungi form around roots act as physical barriers to invasion and protect plants from pathogenic fungi and bacteria. Bacteria coat surfaces so thoroughly, there is no room for others to attach themselves. If something impacts these fungi or bacteria and their numbers drop or they disappear, the plant can easily be attacked.”
― Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web

“Few realize that a great deal of the energy that results from photosyntheisis in the leaves is actually used by plants to produce chemicals they secrete through their roots. These secretions are known as exudates. [...]

Root exudates are in the form of carbohydrates (including sugars) and proteins. Amazingly, their presence wakes up, attracts and grows specific beneficial bacteria and fungi living in the soil that subsist on these exudates and the cellular material sloughed off as the plant's root tips grow. [...]

During different times of the growing season, populations of rhizosphere bacteria and fungi wax and wane, depending on the nutrient needs of the plant and the exudates it produces. [...]

Plants produce exudates that attract fungi and bacteria (and, ultimately, nematodes and protozoa); their survival depends on the interplay between these microbes. It is a completely natural system, the very same one that has fueled plants since they evolved. Soil life produces the nutrients needed for plant life, and plants initiate and fuel the cycle by producing exudates.”
― Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web