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.

Even after a bad harvest there must be sowing.

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

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

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.

When I am free to train and free to move, I feel like a gorilla in the jungle. Then, when there are a bunch of media obligations, I feel like I have been captured and am being kept on display.

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

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

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.

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

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

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

There cannot be a stronger natural right than that of a man’s making the best profit he can of the natural produce of his lands.

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.

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

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

I greatly enjoyed the Hawaiian Islands. They are a real little paradise in spite of the influx of Americans who have made it one of their most pleasant ‚centers of resort‘: the soft climate and luxuriance of the tropics; the greenness, the fragrance, the flowers – extraordinary flowers covering the tallest trees and turning them into huge bouquets.

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.

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.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

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.

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

Sowing is not as difficult as reaping.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

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.

It’s silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.

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.

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.