We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.
The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces.
Love changes, and in change is true.
There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that’s both extensive and centralized. There’s no substitute for petroleum. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.
American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.
People talk about “job creation,” as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.
Specialization is the great evil of civilization.
My label is just “good farming”, which isn’t something you can put on a t-shirt.
Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it’s conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.
The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you’ll probably be the last one to know exactly how you’re serving the art and how the art is serving you.
You can’t live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.
Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
The discussion about food doesn’t make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.
Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.
Corn and bean people, I’m afraid, have extremely specialized minds.
The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.
To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn’t acknowledge limits.
Especially among Christians in positions of wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus’ commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective “Christian”.