Farming and farmers

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.
Edwin Markham (1852-1940), U.S. poet. The Man with the Hoe.

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 neighbours. 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.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), U.S. statesman, writer. Positions to Be Examined Concerning National Wealth (written 4 April 1769; published in Complete Works, vol. 4, ed. by John Bigelow, 1887-88).

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.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), U.S. president. Letter, 28 Oct. 1785, to politician (later president) James Madison.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
Bill Bryson (b. 1951), U.S. author, journalist. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America, ch. 4 (1989).

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 flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.
P. J. O'Rourke (b. 1947), U.S. journalist. Parliament of Whores, "How to Tell Your Ass from This Particular Hole in the Ground" (1991).

The master's eye is the best fertilizer.
Pliny The Elder (c. 23-79), Roman scholar. Historia Naturalis, bk. 18, sct. 24.

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.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British philosopher, mathematician. The Conquest of Happiness, ch. 10 (1930).

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.
Fawn M. Brodie (1915-81), U.S. biographer. No Man Knows My History, ch. 2 (1945).

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.
George Sand (1804-76), French novelist. The Haunted Pool, ch. 2 (1851), speaking of peasants.

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.
George Sand (1804-76), French novelist. The Haunted Pool, ch. 2 (1851).

The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. Society and Solitude, "Farming" (1870).

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionise 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.
Ellen Glasgow (1874-1945), U.S. novelist. The Voice of the People, bk. 2, ch. 4 (1900).

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), U.S. general, Republican politician, president. Speech, 25 Sept. 1956, Peoria, Ill.

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.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Walden, "The Bean-Field" (1854).

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Walden, "The Ponds" (1854).

No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), U.S. educator. Address, 18 Sept. 1895, Atlanta Exposition.

How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labors, and whose talk is of bullocks?
Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus 38:25.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
Daniel Webster (1782-1852), U.S. lawyer, statesman. "Remarks on the Agriculture of England," speech, 13 Jan. 1840, Boston.

No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), U.S. journalist. "What is Going on in the World," in American Mercury (Nov. 1933).

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
E. B. White (1899-1985), U.S. author, editor. One Man's Meat, "The Practical Farmer" (1944).

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.
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92), U.S. poet. A Song of Harvest.