A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, the emptiness of ages in his face, and on his back the burden of the world.
By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrant has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.
Farmers are philosophical. They have learned that it is less wearing to shrug than to beat their breasts.
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
Farmers only worry during the growing season, but towns people worry all the time.
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
Give fools their gold, and knaves their power; let fortune's bubbles rise and fall; who sows a field, or trains a flower, or plants a tree, is more than all.
He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted — and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.
I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman's cares.
I see upon their noble brows the seal of the Lord, for they were born kings of the earth far more truly than those who possess it only from having bought it.
It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.
It is thus with farming, if you do one thing late, you will be late in all your work.
Life on a farm is a school of patience; you can't hurry the crops or make an ox in two days.
Like a gardener I believe what goes down must come up.
No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
Our farmers round, well pleased with constant gain, like other farmers, flourish and complain.
Sowing is not as difficult as reaping.
The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.