Sowing is not as difficult as reaping.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

You gotta water your plants. Nobody can water them for you.

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.

America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.

Middle-income countries are the biggest users of GMOs. Places like Brazil.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

The Green Revolution focused on the big three – maize, rice and wheat – and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.

Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don’t approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.

When the Revolution triumphed in 1959, our island was a true Yankee colony. The United States had duped and disarmed our Liberation Army. One couldn’t speak of developed agriculture, but of immense plantations exploited on the base of manual and animal labour that in general used neither fertilizers nor machinery.

In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation.

It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.

The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.

The harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessing previously secured.

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

If you’re using first-class land for biofuels, then you’re competing with the growing of food. And so you’re actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

I feel that my fans have cultivated my talent and they continue to nurture me.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.

Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can’t compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan’s free market enthusiasms.

I have a garden in my backyard that’s completely organic, which I’m very proud of.

Illinois surpasses every other spot of equal extent upon the face of the globe in fertility of soil and in the proportionable amount of the same which is sufficiently level for actual cultivation.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

Thanh Hoa itself is a rich agricultural province. Rice fields, a pattern of many shades of green, stretch far into the distance along the road, which also winds through foothills and the fringes of heavy jungle where tigers are said to roam. The vegetation, wild or cultivated, is lush.

Humility may well be one of the most difficult of the fruit of the Spirit to be cultivated in us – and to maintain. That’s because without humility, it’s not likely that you will put your complete trust in God.

We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows – and china.

If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

When I’m in my 50s, I kind of think I’ll want to be in a garden.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed… Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

Upon the farm of the uncle with whom I lived, we did know of the mortgage as some dreadful damper on youthful hopes of things that could not be bought. I do have a vivid recollection that the major purpose of a farm was to produce a living right on the spot for the family.

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

My early business ventures included growing Christmas trees and breeding birds.

I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it’s in the blood.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

The only thing that relaxes me is archery. That’s why I have to have apartments with gardens.

Even after a bad harvest there must be sowing.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible.

Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow.

Gardening is not a rational act.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.

Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

Happy the country that lives on nothing but its wits; cursed be the one that thinks it can get rich by planting or digging or drilling for wealth.

I am no supporter of factory labor for children, but I have never joined with those who clamored against proper work of children on farms outside their school hours.

There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.