Regenerative Agriculture Quotes

“We live in what we perceive to be a broken land—fires ravage our western boundaries, acid rains water our failing crops, and our climate is trying to kick us out—but it is our relationship that is broken and relationships are easy to fix. They require humility, acknowledgement, openness, and shared language. Really, if they require anything of us at all, they require us to stop talking and to start listening—listening for the hope that they have stored deep within their ageless marrow, deep below the punishing reach of the plow and the spade, deep below the place where technology’s roots can reach, but shallow enough for photosynthetic processes to penetrate. Yes, grass can do that.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“To be means to be useful; to have means to profit at the expense of use. Profit and use, control and relationship.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“To pay attention is to see the remarkable. In many ways far too real, it is to see ourselves in the ordinary, the daily, the mundane miracles of Creation.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“Wildness is a medium for mindfulness, a consciousness in which cultivation transforms into community and harvest into communion through the shared language of being—of life itself.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“To move conservation forward—to move toward ethics and regeneration and holism—we must first learn to see so that we can learn how to speak so that we can learn how to know better.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“Without the herbivore, grass is without value. Without the valuable cover of grass, the soil is without life. Without life, the terrestrial world becomes valueless and simply unhappy. The uniform diversity of the meadowland demonstrates that value co-creates the valuable via the tool of time. Time and value. Seeing and being. Grass is nothing at all. The community of grass is all.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Dark Cloud Country: The 4 Relationships of Regeneration

“The food that came out of the [industrialized] system was artifically cheap - the price was subsidized by the environment, our wildlife and aquatic life, and our bad health. We just couldn’t see those hidden costs - nor could we grasp how future generations would inherit the effects of our extractive, intensive farming methods. When you add up all the ways the bill is coming due, it takes the shine off the glittering promises of postwar industrialized food. The deal we made with our planet, its creatures, and our rural workforces, all so we could enjoy a slightly cheaper hamburger, might just be the worst deal that was ever made.”
― Will Harris, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food