I lived a normal life for a number of years. I had kids. I lived up on a farm in Gloucestershire in rural England, and just kind of got back to reality again.
I want to see the farm piece passed, but the nearly a trillion dollars in SNAP spending for food stamps is way too much.
I grew up on an organic farm in England. And I was a vegetarian from an early age – not just for health, not for the environment – just because I didn’t believe in killing animals to eat them.
Daddy had a farm – cows, pigs, OK, a big garden, OK? We did live off the land, and then we would supplement all that with whatever we could kill or catch. Whether we’d kill squirrels, deer, duck, or caught catfish or brim, that was what went on the table.
When I lived summers at my grandparents’ farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours.
I came from quite a free background living on this small holding farm, getting on my bike and running round the field and going on little adventures and always felt like a very independent person.
The whole tax code should be looked at, all the way from farm subsidies to carried interest to – to corporate loopholes, because we really need to raise more revenue.
According to the ‘food waste pyramid,’ ensuring that food is eaten by people is the top priority. Failing that, the next best thing is to feed it to farm animals.
It has long been a childhood dream of mine to have a farm.
As a son of Jamaican immigrants whose father cut sugarcane as a contract farm worker for over a decade and whose mother was a cook who fed those migrant workers out in the fields, the odds have always been against me growing up in rural South Bay, Fla.
Farm workers are society’s canaries. Farm workers – and their children – demonstrate the effects of pesticide poisoning before anyone else.
Since I was a little girl, I’ve collected ladybugs. Not real ones – I never had a weird ladybug farm!
I was writing country songs, but I wasn’t listening to country yet. I grew up on a farm in East Tennessee, so my roots are country, you know? But I didn’t know where those songs came from or where they fit.
‘You have chickens?’ That’s what nearly everyone asks next, after they find out about our family pets. They just need to make sure they heard me correctly. Perhaps it’s because I don’t come across to most as a rural-loving farm girl.
I thought I’d love to be a gardener because I grew up with a vegetable garden and I love being close to the Earth and growing things. At my home in L.A., I have a great garden and I grow all kinds of things. I even have a worm farm! The worms help create organic compost out of kitchen scraps.
I think the extent to which I have any balance at all, any mental balance, is because of being a farm kid and being raised in those isolated rural areas.
Yes, agriculture subsidies are far too generous. They need to be reined in because they cater to special interests while distorting free market competition. Yes, the farm laws are an anachronistic mess.
All I really want is a three-room house. The home I have designed at my new farm in Bedford, New York, is a three-room house: bedroom on top, living room in the middle, and kitchen on the ground.
Fortunately, unlike my teachers and classmates, my parents never forced gender roles or even a ended identity on me. I grew up on a farm, so all that mattered was working hard.
As a parent, I tell my boys to keep away their smartphones and go outdoors and play. I take them to our farm where my father does a bit of farming, where they get their hands dirty. It is their digital detox.
We started Marley Coffee from a farm perspective, and ever since, we’ve been doing things in a sustainable way and organically.
My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.
I came from a dirt farm, now I’m filthy rich.
I farm – there is something visceral about being attached to the land. I am a recording engineer. I do my own laundry most days, and I get on with the business of living.
I was working on the farm to get in shape, about a mile away from my parents. You know, I did everything as a kid to stay in shape – jogging, work on the farm, driving the tractor. I’ll never forget.
I was brought up on a council estate in the countryside near Stoke Prior in Worcestershire, but I adored visiting the farm where my father worked.
I remember Farooque Sahab would bring volumes of nice food on set for the whole unit. Not just that, he would send sackfuls of mangoes from his farm in Gujarat.
Growing up on a farm was the best. I remember loving that expanse of space. The sky at night was so clear, I could see every star.
Missouri farm and ranch families are the backbone of this state.
I was raised on a farm in Kansas where we lived next door to my Grandma Dew, and I was her shadow. We went everywhere together – to the bank, the doctor, the Early Bird Garden Club, and to an endless procession of Church meetings.
Upon the farm of the uncle with whom I lived, we did know of the mortgage as some dreadful damper on youthful hopes of things that could not be bought. I do have a vivid recollection that the major purpose of a farm was to produce a living right on the spot for the family.
I was born in Mumbai and raised in Mangalore at my grandmother’s home which had a farm with animals.
I want to feed my kid something that is real and not processed. It’s hard to do. People are working and busy. The question is: Is it worth it? Is it worth stopping at the farm stand or supermarket to buy fresh ingredients?
My sister was three years older than me, and she was like the stone-cold ’70s fox. I looked like a short Polish farm woman, and so our journals were wildly different.
I moved to Princeton, Indiana, and became a professional Farm Manager for that Princeton Farms.
I was a farm kid from the plains of South Venezuela, from a very poor family. I grew up in a palm tree house with an earthen floor.
If you fill your Agriculture Committee with representatives of commodity farmers, and you don’t have urbanites, you don’t represent eaters, okay? You don’t have people from New York City on these committees, you are going to end up with the kind of farm bills we have: a piece of special interest legislation.
I had bought a farm, was trying to rebuild my life and just looking to be left alone. Then I get charged with perjury strictly for political purposes.
I’m comfortable in any situation. I don’t have fears about a lot of things. It’s not a survival thing, but on a farm, you always look after yourself. You’re very independent, but you’re still very family-oriented.
Many small business owners want to pass their family legacy on to their kids and grandkids, but they are turned over to vulture funds because the family may be asset rich but lacks the cash to pay the estate taxes. I have met people who literally sold the farm to pay the taxes.
After the first Olive Farm book was published, in 2001 I got a three-book deal with Orion for a large sum of money. Obviously it did not come all at once, but it made the difference to living here on a shoestring to being able to turn the whole place around.
Passing on a full scholarship to MIT would be irrational for me, but to my father and his parents, what would have been the point of spending five years at one of the world’s most prestigious universities if he just ended up back on the farm?
It’s a character I’ve created. Actually, that’s pretty much the opposite of me, off a farm in the Midwest.
I was in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas. I’ve argued for Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, the United Farm Workers. I’ve been a radical for a long time. I guess it’s too bad. I’d be more marketable as a right-wing redneck. But I got into this to tell the truth as I saw it.
I grew up on a farm – it was a lovely life; we’d make tree houses all day – and my parents worked from home.
When I was 13 years old, my family and I lived on a farm in Puerto Rico that didn’t have clean, running water all the time.
I grew up on a farm. The worst-looking chickens are the best layers. The ones that are the scraggliest… those are usually the ones that are really cooking.
Fans of the hit HGTV show ‘Fixer Upper’ are well aware that its stars, Chip and Joanna Gaines, live on a farm in Waco, Texas. Nearly every episode features some kind of montage of their four kids romping outside with various kinds of farm animals, from pigs to horses to goats.
I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.
What I learned growing up on the farm was a way of life that was centered on hard work, and on faith and on thrift. Those values have stuck with me my whole life.
At 12 years old, I raised a premature baby cow on our farm because her mom had died. I bottle-fed it every day, let it suck on my chin, and babied it until it was stable.
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.
