Family Farms Quotes

You can't have the family farm without the family.

The fight to save family farms isn't just about farmers. It's about making sure that there is a safe and healthy food supply for all of us. It's about jobs, from Main Street to Wall Street. It's about a better America.

In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.

Well, I was born in El Paso, Texas, it was in the nearest hospital to the family farm.

The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986)

A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief.

With my support, the House of Representatives recently voted to permanently repeal the death tax so that family farms and businesses can be passed down to children and grandchildren.

Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.

My constituents in Kansas know the death tax is a duplicative tax on small businesses and family farms that, in many cases, families have spent generations building.

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.

The American people know what's necessary to get this economy moving again. It's fiscal discipline in Washington, D.C. and across-the-board tax relief for working families, small businesses and family farms.

I love the idea that biodiesel has the potential to support farmers, especially the family farms.

The greatest job I ever had was working on my family farm. Each morning my father would come into my bedroom around 4:30 am and command me to get up and work the fields. I would spend the next two hours before school slopping pigs and cropping tobacco.

In my very first term there was an issue that brought us [George Mitchell, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd] together in a very deep, emotional, and personal level.It was called 'spousal impoverishment' and it meant that for one person [to go into] a nursing home, the family [ ], could go near bankruptcy, and then they'd end up with a lien on the family farm or the home. And so I wanted to change that.

Family farms and small businesses are the backbone of our communities.

Cows that are fed organic food are still kept as slaves on farms, regardless of whether it is a large corporate factory farm or a small family farm. Besides, every dairy cow, no matter what she has been fed, has her babies stolen from her shortly after birth and she will inevitably end up in the slaughterhouse.

Even people who are aware that the traditional family farm has been taken over by big business interests, and that some questionable experiments go on in laboratories, cling to a vague belief that conditions cannot be too bad, or else the government or the animal welfare societies would have done something about it.

We need to end permanently the tax that punishes American values of savings and investment and of building small businesses and family farms and ranches.

Then by the springtime, you'll see us moving an effort to cut taxes for working families, small businesses and family farms to reform our business taxes in this country so that American businesses can compete more effectively with businesses around the world.

Bill is about moving forward on a long overdue provision to protect vulnerable paid farm workers in Alberta to the same degree that they are protected in every other province in the country, and we feel confident that once people see how the bill actually applies to the regular family farm, they will see that a lot of the concerns were perhaps misplaced. And it's unfortunate that we created a situation that made people worry; that was not ever our intention.

I don't think of community as being a romantic notion. I think it's as vital as air and water, and so I think that informs a lot of what I write about. It could be a story about a couple, or a song about the slow death of the family farm or a small town.

I do think that there is a big difference between family farms and agri-business, and one of the distressing things that I think has occurred is with consolidation of farm lands. You've seen large agri-businesses benefit from enormous profits from existing farm programs, and I think we should be focusing most of those programs on those family farmers.

In the fall term of 1933-34 I was on my family farm in Maine.

The family farm is the foundation for who we are as a Commonwealth. And for over a century, the family farm in Kentucky has centered around one crop: tobacco.

I am committed to strengthening our agricultural economy by protecting the unique interests of small and medium size family farms so that they can continue to operate.

Federal overreach from agencies like the EPA is hurting family farms. I will fight against these crippling regulations, and always side with the hard working farmers and ranchers of Missouri.

The newcomers quickly learned their way about and soon felt at home. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided them, as well as many other pioneers, with an opportunity to acquire land and establish family farms. To the land-hungry immigrants, the tough prairie sod seemed a golden opportunity and they conquered it by hard work.