If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming mass manufacturing things like that. The problem is our society is not organized around doing that.

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

I don't understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It's a pretty gross interference with nature.

President Obama's fight for rural America is personal. He was raised by a single mom and grandparents from Kansas. He hails from a farming state Illinois.

Farming with live animals is a 7 day a week legal form of slavery.

A paradigm shift where in addition to physical inputs for farming a focused emphasis placed on knowledge inputs can be a promising way forward. This knowledge-based approach will bring immense returns particularly in rain fed and dry land farming areas.

There are a range of associated impacts related to increasing temperatures which affect both evaporation rates and river systems which are already over stressed and these will hit farming communities and the health of crop lands.

Many talk about a guest worker program. I think most reasonable people believe that a guest worker program in the farming industry perhaps in the gardening and landscape industries is reasonable.

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily for they are all farming by proxy.

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.