Life on a farm is a school of patience; you can't hurry the crops or make an ox in two days.
There is, of course, a gold mine or a buried treasure on every mortgaged homestead. Whether the farmer ever digs for it or not, it is there, haunting his daydreams when the burden of debt is most unbearable.
There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
It is thus with farming, if you do one thing late, you will be late in all your work.
Our farmers round, well pleased with constant gain, like other farmers, flourish and complain.
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.
There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.
There is no gilding of setting sun or glamour of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers wives.
Like a gardener I believe what goes down must come up.
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.
Sowing is not as difficult as reaping.
Farmers only worry during the growing season, but towns people worry all the time.
Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. The small landowners are the most precious part of a state.
The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.
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.
No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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.
The master's eye is the best fertilizer.
The land too poor for any other crop, is best for raising men.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The farmer works the soil. The agriculturalist works the farmer.
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.
When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
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.