Cows Save the Planet Quotes

“biodiversity actually begins in the soil.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“They say farmers need a safety net. I think the soil should be our safety net. If you add up the dollar figure for improved health, carbon sequestration, lower fossil fuel bills, and resistance to weather extremes, it’s a lot.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“proverb from the Sanskrit Vedic Scriptures of around 1500 bce: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Science has never succeeded by burying the manifestations of unintended consequences. It has succeeded when we recognize them and deal with those issues. That’s hard to do when you have a belief system that becomes a religion.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“tucked into the 2012 Farm Bill was a clause indemnifying Monsanto if the use of their products happens to mess up someone’s land.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“ultimately, quality of health depends on the quality of food, and food can only be as good as the soil on which it is grown.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“People need to manage land with water circulation in mind,”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“The most urgent challenge of present civilization is to understand that the drying out of landscapes has a much more serious impact on climatic change than an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Water for the Recovery of the Climate: A New Water Paradigm,”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“One farmer I met, Gene Goven of Turtle Lake, North Dakota, put it more succinctly: “You build soil where the roots go—down!”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Humans can’t eat grass, but cattle, thanks to their microscopic partners, are performing the service of turning inedible grasses into protein that we can eat.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Because when we have a system in which wealth depends on processes that destroy natural capital, we're only kidding ourselves.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“To put this as plainly as possible, what we're dealing with is a corporate appropriation of the world's soils. Which is occurring on two levels: the known and potential effects that chemical/biotech products have on the soil, and the question of who owns the land and therefore controls the soil and what it yields. This in the context of diminishing resources, including projected widespread food and water shortages, when all we've got is a capitalist system through which to allocate them. Something that in itself is problematic, since free-market capitalism currently construed promotes the goals of the corporations (market domination and profit) even when it violates the wishes of ordinary people and their desire for sovereignty over the food they eat and the crops they cultivate and feed to livestock.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Soil may be considered as the conversion of rock by two processes. One is a process of aging, the other is a process of living. —P. A. Yeomans3”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Kurt Vonnegut’s iconic comment: “We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“are doing is “managing for” photosynthesis over oxidation in several ways: encouraging diversity, avoiding tillage, using cover crops, and generally improving the soil.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“promoting ways to: build carbon stores in the soil; keep water on the land; stop and reverse desertification; focus on ecological systems rather than individual species; reduce chemical inputs; and maintain diversity in crops, native plants, and microbial life. And—we can’t forget our cows—bring herbivores back onto the landscape.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“soil health, soil biology, plant diversity, resilience to weather fluctuations, fertility, quality, and economic vitality all go together.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“bushels. I get fed up when I hear, ‘We’ve got to increase production to feed the world.’ What’s the good of increasing production if it’s not healthy? Let’s look at wealth in the context of the human health crisis. If it’s a healthier product we’re growing, we’re lowering costs.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“The stark fact that appears now, and which wrote itself across the Roman Empire, is that debt and taxation increase as the soil declines. —G. T. Wrench, from Reconstruction by Way of the Soil, 1936”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Slaps in the face like this provide opportunities for change. A drought definitely gets people thinking about how they can manage resources better. It’s easy to see then that our ranch has more grass and more animals, and makes more money. A flood is a harder link for people to make. People think they have no control over it. We actually do.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“using Holistic Management (with cattle, sheep, goats, horses) or other restorative models (agroforestry, pasture cropping, natural sequence farming), and those islands of resilience expand and connect and, in time, are no longer islands but rather large intact areas of revived ecology. Floods happen less frequently and droughts aren’t as severe.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Allan Savory’s belief that drought and floods are man-made and therefore not inevitable opens the way for a different response. With this principle in mind, Grasslands, LLC, seeks to apply Holistic Management to thousands of acres of land, creating islands of ecological resilience with regard to the water cycle. So that perhaps when, say, an inordinately heavy rain comes in the spring, the pasture can absorb the water and there’s little runoff.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“This leads to drought and runoff, which then causes erosion and floods. However, this situation can be reversed by managing land in such a way that the soil’s ability to retain water is restored.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Allan Savory has said that floods and droughts are man-made. At first glance this seems a bold, even brazen statement. But here’s what he means: When it comes to the water cycle functioning in a landscape, the condition of that land is as important as what descends—or not— from the sky.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“Here the goals of improving land and making a profit would not be mutually exclusive: Holistic Planned Grazing requires a lot of animals, and in turn bolsters the carrying capacity of the land, sometimes two to four times. The more animal impact, the better the land—higher soil carbon levels, greater biodiversity, better water infiltration—and the more animals it can feed. This means greater income and a boost to local economies. It’s “impact” investing on many levels.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“In 2010 Grasslands, LLC, was launched as a “triple bottom line” enterprise with the conjoint goals of creating a high-quality product (well-nourished beef cattle), generating equity and financial return to investors, revitalizing rural economies, sequestering carbon, and regenerating land on a large scale.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“I’d read and heard so much about the model; it was my reporting on Holistic Management that drew my attention to soil as a hub for the ecological cycles whose disruption is leading to environmental crises—and whose restoration can bring aspects of our planet back into balance.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth

“He suggests connections among plant disease, animal morbidity, and human health problems: “Look at what’s happening with autism. With chronic disease and infertility. All of those have always existed but there’s been a 600-fold increase within the last fifteen years.”
― Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth