Factory farming came about from a moral race to the bottom, with corporations vying against each other to produce more and bigger animals with less care at lower cost.
I have no doubt that President George W. Bush - a man, in my experience, of extremely kind and generous instincts, and back in Austin even a rescuer of stray animals - would be appalled by the conditions of a typical American factory farm or packing ...
A friend of mine has a big farm in the desert, and she picks up feathers and roadkill for me, then makes it into clothes. I think it's cool to wear roadkill. If I died and somebody wanted to wear my teeth around their neck to VMAs, I'd feel honored.
Meat production is one of the leading causes of climate change because of the destruction of the rainforest for grazing lands, the massive amounts of methane produced by farm animals and the huge amounts of water, grain and other resources required t...
I grew up on a farm. I didn't have health insurance until I was 24 years old. So, I didn't even know I was poor until the government told me I was poor.
I'm very organized and tidy in my home life and I generally do something myself rather than farm it out to somebody else. I don't have an assistant or anything because I think I can do it myself.
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.
For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.
Let me pose you a question. Can farm-raised salmon be organic when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet, even if the feed itself is supposedly organic, and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens, swimming in their own filth?
Nicaragua is a World Bank and International Monetary Fund designated 'heavily indebted poor country,' with little legal ability to control its economic future: Everything is for sale. And once Nicaraguans decide to cash in and sell their houses or fa...
Remember, the Arctic didn't have any ice. And the Northwest Passage was wide open. They were raising grapes in Scotland for God sakes, had a huge winery. Iceland was a farming community. As some of the glaciers retreated they found villages that were...
The simple life on the farm was everything to me. Nothing was more relaxing after a long plane flight than to reach the winding driveway that led up to my house. The quiet of the night was more soothing than a sleeping pill.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment.
I guess the big thing to say about 'Pig Farm' is that none of us knows if it works, and we're going in blind. It's in the tradition of 'Urinetown,' kind of - but that's a pretty small tradition. It's possible that it can fail.
Print-on-demand publishing is the new farm system for new voices in fiction. Authors who have compelling things to say, who can market their stories in compelling ways, will succeed.
The Farm Bill is one of the only bills that provides substantial deficit reduction that passed the Senate this year. It only makes sense that this deficit reduction bill would be included in a larger deficit reduction agreement.
I remember driving the tractor on our farm, and Tim McGraw would be on the radio. I'd find myself walking out of class, singing his songs. And then Tim ended up playing my father in 'Friday Night Lights.' It was surreal.
When I visited Ireland with my father and heard the people on the farm talking, I couldn't believe the gift of language they had. I felt very untalented.
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.
