Get a fresh perspective on the crucial role of farmers in feeding the world and the importance of sustainable food systems with these agriculture quotes.
Agriculture is the foundation of modern civilization and the backbone of our food systems. It has played a crucial role in feeding humanity for thousands of years and continues to do so today, providing the food that sustains our populations and drives economic growth.
It is essential for meeting the basic needs of a growing global population. With the world’s population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, it’s more important than ever to ensure that we have a sustainable and efficient food system in place.
Throughout history, farmers, leaders, and philosophers have shared their wisdom and insights on the importance of agriculture and the role it plays in shaping our world. Agriculture quotes are a powerful tool for inspiring and guiding us, reminding us of the importance of this critical industry and the impact it has on our lives.
Whether you’re a farmer, an advocate for sustainable food systems, or simply someone who appreciates the power of a good quote, these words of wisdom are sure to resonate and inspire you. So, let enjoy our collection of insightful and inspiring agriculture quotes, curated to highlight the significance and importance of this critical industry.
Inspirational agriculture quotes
Check out these inspirational agriculture quotes are a testament to the hard work, dedication, and passion that drives this industry. They remind us of the vital role that agriculture plays in our lives and offer a source of inspiration and motivation for those working in this field.
After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed.
John Boyd Orr
The E.U. imports more agricultural goods from developing countries around the world than does the U.S., Canada and Japan, combined.
John Bruton
Man’s survival, from the time of Adam and Eve until the invention of agriculture, must have been precarious because of his inability to ensure his food supply.
Norman Borlaug

The experience of ages has shown that a man who works on the land is purer, nobler, higher, and more moral. Agriculture should be at the basis of everything. That’s my idea.
Nikolai Gogol
Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.
Masanobu Fukuoka
For food, we initially relied on nature; then ourselves; and now other people.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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.
James Madison

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Milton Friedman
If you eat, you are involved in agriculture.
Wendell Berry
Everything else can wait, agriculture can’t.
Norman Borlaug
Best agriculture quotes
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
Wendell Berry
Farming, if you do one thing late, you will be late in all your work.
Cato the Elder
Bring diversity back to agriculture. That’s what made it work in the first place.
David R. Brower

Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. Chemically grown vegetables may be eaten for food, but they cannot be used as medicine.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.
Thomas Jefferson
There are no miracles in agricultural production.
Norman Borlaug
Of course people don’t want war. Why should a poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best thing he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?
Hermann Goring

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate.
Wendell Berry
The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.
Frances Moore Lappe
Agriculture quotes
Check out these agriculture quotes capture the essence of this critical industry and offer a glimpse into the minds of those who have dedicated their lives to this field:
Flowers are food for the soul. And the seeds they fashion are life, sustenance, the future. We are utterly dependent on them. Seeds are the bridge between us and the sun, emissaries of the solar system, bundles of cosmic energy.
Janisse Ray
Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
Carl Sagan
Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.
Samuel Johnson

Their hands are tied not by ropes but by the greed of the intermediaries that the system has generated, who eat up the farmer’s income while it is on its way into his hands.
Faraaz Kazi
Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
William Jennings Bryan
Steak on the plate went up. Steak on the hoof went down.
Will Rogers
Happy he who far from business, like the primitive are of mortals, cultivates with his own oxen the fields of his fathers, free from all anxieties of gain.
Horace

Agriculture is at the same time the most tranquil, healthy, and independent occupation.
Thomas Jefferson
Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors––however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble.
Barbara Kingsolver
Soil is not just a substance, soil is the soul.
Amit Kalantri
Sustainable agriculture quotes
These sustainable agriculture quotes highlight the importance of this approach and the impact it has on our world:
Farmers interested in long-term sustainability often prioritize caring for the soil, because they recognize that a healthy soil promotes healthy crops and livestock.
Brodt Sonja
Sustainable agricultural practices are intended to protect the environment, expand the Earth’s natural resource base, and maintain and improve soil fertility.
USDA
A growing number of innovative farmers and scientists are taking a different path, moving toward a farming system that is more sustainable–environmentally, economically, and socially.
Union of Concerned Scientist

Sustainable farms treat uncultivated or less intensively cultivated areas as integral to the farm.
Union of Concerned Scientist
When it comes to agriculture, the most sustainable and productive systems are more diverse and complex—like nature itself.
Union of Concerned Scientist
Crop breeding research is also crucial to the success of a more sustainable agroecological system, providing farmers with access to a broad range of crop varieties that can be readily adapted to farm-specific conditions and practices.
Union of Concerned Scientist
Practitioners of sustainable agriculture seek to integrate three main objectives into their work: a healthy environment, economic profitability, and social and economic equity.
Gail Feenstra

Every person involved in the food system—growers, food processors, distributors, retailers, consumers, and waste managers—can play a role in ensuring a sustainable agricultural system.
Gail Feenstra
Sustainable agriculture is more than a collection of practices. It is also process of negotiation: a push and pull between the sometimes competing interests of an individual farmer or of people in a community as they work to solve complex problems about how we grow our food and fiber.
Gail Feenstr
Recycling of nutrients is facilitated by a diversified agriculture in which livestock and crop production are more spatially integrated. a
Brodt Sonja
Technology agriculture quotes
Technology has revolutionized agriculture in countless ways, enabling us to produce more food on less land, using fewer resources, and with greater efficiency. From precision agriculture to new innovations in breeding and genetics, technology has transformed the way we grow our food and care for our crops and livestock. These technology agriculture quotes highlight the significance of this rapidly advancing field and the impact it has on the world.
Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful and most noble employment of man.
George Washington
The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.
John F. Kennedy
Agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds – it’s the production of food and fiber from the world’s land and waters.
Norman Borlaug
The world has the technology, either available or well advanced in the research pipeline, to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people.
Norman Borlaug
Agriculture is a perpetuation of creation and must be looked upon as such.
Walt Davis
Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.
Edward Thorndike
Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and the key to global prosperity.
Dan Glickman
The role of technology in agriculture cannot be overstated. It is the driving force behind our ability to feed a growing global population.
Tom Vilsack
The goal of sustainable agriculture is to meet society’s food and textile needs in the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Paul Hawken
Agriculture is the backbone of our economy, and the future of agriculture is the future of our country.
Mike Johanns
Meaningful agriculture quotes
Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.
Thomas Jefferson
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Edward Dahlberg
We have to bring children into a new relationship to food that connects them to culture and agriculture.
Alice Waters
The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.
Jared Diamond
Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.
Richard Manning
The difference between dirt and soil is: Dirt is dead. Soil is alive.
Donna Maltz
Less than two percent of all Americans are now farmers. Corporations with all the warmth of equity investors now control the breadbasket of America. Anyone care to speculate how corporate control of the world’s food banks will work out for ordinary people who must eat to survive.
Kilroy J. Oldster
The farmers must be given subsidies to improve upon their yield, to feed the growing populations.
Lailah Gifty Akita
So imagine a world 6 degrees warmer. It’s not going to recognize geographical boundaries. It’s not going to recognize anything. So agriculture regions today will be wiped out.
Steven Chu
Humanity should not suffer from hunger, if we grow enough food to feed the growing populations.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Quotes about agriculture
He cannot wisely consent to spend the best years of his life in getting ready to live.
Horace Greeley
Evidence is overwhelming that, after switching to agriculture, human stature decreased, a very reliable indicator of a decline in overall wellbeing. People fell sick more often because of higher population density and because pathogens jumped from domesticated animals to humans. The quality of nutrition declined, as is abundantly documented in ancient bones and teeth.
Peter Turchin
Agriculture is the process of turning eco–systems into people.
Toby Hemenway
Zero hunger means there should be no hungry people. This can be achieve through enhancing agriculture in every continent.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful, and most noble employment of man.
George Washington
It is vitally important that we can continue to say, with absolute conviction, that organic farming delivers the highest quality, best–tasting food, produced without artificial chemicals or genetic modification, and with respect for animal welfare and the environment, while helping to maintain the landscape and rural communities.
Prince Charles
Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America’s water pollution.
Robert Kennedy
Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food.
Albert Allen Bartlett
A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.
Gertrude Stein
The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.
Bill Mollison
Insightful agriculture quotes
The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre–prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived.
Wendell Berry
Agriculture was the first manufacturing industry in America and represents the best of all of us.
Zach Wamp
The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.
Wendell Berry
Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as the blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
Martin Heidegger
The diligent farmer plants trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind.
Joseph Joubert
The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.
David R. Brower
Organic agriculture is more about fairness and respect than it is about parts–per–billion of pesticide residues
Jim Hightower
The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production – in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation – essential as they are, make people sick and die.
Barry Commoner
Humans merely share the Earth. We can only protect the land, not own it.
Chief Seattle
Final thought
The agriculture quotes above serve as a reminder of the importance and significance of the farming industry. These quotes inspire us to appreciate the role of agriculture in providing food and resources to the world. They emphasize the need to support and value agriculture, not just as an industry, but as a way of life that sustains and nourishes humanity.
Hope that you have enjoyed reading and exploring these agriculture quotes. We believe that these quotes have the power to resonate with people, as they encapsulate the challenges and rewards of farming life. We encourage you to share these quotes with others and spread the message of appreciation and support for the agriculture industry.
Finally, we can all take steps to support agriculture by choosing to buy local, sustainable products, and by recognizing the importance of farming in our lives. So let us celebrate and encourage those who dedicate their lives to agriculture, and continue to support them in any way we can.