“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

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“We need to feed our planet, of course. But we also need the teeny creatures that drive all life on earth. There’s something strange about a farm that intentionally creates a biological desert to produce food for one species: us. It’s efficient, yes. But it’s so efficient that the ants are missing, the bees are missing, and even the birds stay away. Something’s not right here. Our cornfields are too quiet.”

Robert Krulwich

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“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

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“Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.”

Laura Gilpin

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“When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks, & thrushes. As little did I know what sublime mornings & sunsets I was buying.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“We are enjoying a descent of bears upon this region. If we survive it there should be much to tell. They are as thick as caterpillars in a pest year…A mother and two cubs went up the road by our house the other evening tearing down the small cherry trees along the wall. You could see where one of the cubs had wiped his bottom on a large stone and left traces of a diet of choke cherries and blueberries. I almost got one cornered in our pasture last night, but he lifted the wire and went under the fence. It is terrible.”

Robert Frost

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“Learning doesn’t happen behind walls.”

Qasim Davis

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“I know the look of green apples and peaches and pears on the trees, and I know how entertaining they are when they are inside of a person.”

Mark Twain

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“The lambs had nursed and the ewe was lying quiet. One lamb had settled itself on the mother’s back and was a perfect miniature of the old one—they reminded me of a teapot we have, whose knob is a tiny replica of the pot itself.”

E. B. White

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“‘It is hard to be brave,’ said Piglet, sniffling slightly, ‘when you’re only a Very Small Animal.'”

A. A. Milne

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“The worm fattens on the apple, the young goose fattens on the wormy fruit, the man fattens on the young goose, the worm awaits the man.”

E. B. White

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“After some years in the country, during which time I have experienced the satisfactions of working the land, building the soil, and making brown into green, I am beginning to believe that our new world which will open up after the war should be constructed round a repopulated rural America, so that a reasonably large proportion of the population shall participate in the culture of the earth.”

E. B. White

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“The way to learn to sail a big boat is first to sail a little one, because the little one is so much harder to manage. The same is true of udders. I can milk a sheep now, with her small cleverly concealed udder, and so I have no hesitancy about going on to a larger and more forthright bag.”

E. B. White

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“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

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“The land, even though it has been mistreated, can still support the population—that we know. The question is whether the population has the temperament and the ingenuity to support the land—that is, to return its goodness, not just sap it.”

E. B. White

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