
“It’s good having friends who farm. It’s good to know the names of their cows and the calves that come in the spring. It’s fun to see the new ones when I head up to get eggs from my neighbor. It’s good knowing they would be here in a minute for us anytime day or night, and it’s good knowing they can count on us the same way. We have a 1958 Ford tractor that I love. We have silos and a barn that has been here 100 years. The original house burned down years before we got here. Our house is a little tract house—nothing much at all. But we put on a tin roof and a covered porch and built a masonry bread oven. We have a big garden—man, I’m starting to cry here. It’s not the prettiest farm at all, but it’s the best place I’ve ever lived in my life.”
Lynda Barry
more infosource: Vice interview by Amy Kellner
category: community, cow, farm, friendship, garden, home, tractor
medium: Interview
“I realized that all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa.”
Grant Wood
more infosource: originally published in an article in the New York Herald Tribune, quoted in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed, by Brady M. Roberts (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate, 1995), 32.
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category: cow, creative process, farm
medium: Interview
“I knew from the very first that some day there would be a cow here. One of the first things that turned up when we bought the place was a milking stool, an old one, handmade, smooth with the wax finish which only the seat of an honest man’s breeches can give to wood.”
E. B. White
more infosource: “Getting Ready for a Cow,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 315.
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category: beautiful description, cow, farm, tool, wax, wood, worn smooth
medium: essay
notes: White wrote this essay in September 1942.
“Central Park is to nature as Reddi Wip is to a cow.”
Bill McKibben
more infosource: “Apartment,” The New Yorker, March 17, 1986: 43–89.
category: analogy, Central Park, cow, nature
medium: magazine article
“Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].”
Michael Pollan
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