Growing up and living on a farm is such a special thing. Not only is it very rewarding, but you also gain a respect for the world around you, build character, develop great work ethic, and make lifelong relationships.
It makes sense, then, that some of these farm life lovers would translate their love for farms into a beautiful quote that thousands have read. Below are 101 of our favorite farm quotes, containing a healthy mixture of silly, serious, and sweet quotes from prominent figures or anonymous writers.
Use these quotes for captions for Instagram pictures on your farm, share them to your fellow farm life lovers, or just have fun reading through these 101 farm quotes!
- 1“Do what you love to do, and be around things that make you smile. The cows make me smile every day.” – David Jackson
- 2“We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.” – Wendell Berry
- 3“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” – Masanobu Fukuoka
- 4“When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.” – Daniel Webster
- 5“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” – Aldo Leopold
- 6“You get to sit down at the end of the day and you know that you got through it with your family.” – Wesley Fraze
- 7“A good farm is recognized as good partly by its beauty.” – Wendell Berry
- 8“It is thus with farming: if you do one thing late, you will be late in all your work.” – Cato the Elder
- 9“A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.” – E.B. White
- 10“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” – Wendell Berry
- 11“Working with family makes what you do worthwhile, as you teach kids responsibility and the importance of life.” – John Devos
- 12“One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides.” – W.E. Johns
- 13“Life on a farm is a school of patience; you can’t hurry the crops or make an ox in two days.” – Henri Alain
- 14“You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
- 15“Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.” – Alice Waters
- 16“One of the greatest boons that can ever come to a human being is to be born on a farm and reared in the country. Self-reliance and grit are oftenest country-bred.” – Orison Swett Marden
- 17“What you see depends on how you view the world. To most people, this is just dirt. To a farmer, it’s potential.” – Doe Zantamata
- 18“Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind.” – Joseph Joubert
- 19“My work ethic is, I think, from my farm life.” – Peggy Whitson
- 20“Wherever your day takes you, and however it ends, chances are it began with a farmer.” – Unknown
- 21“If you tickle the earth with a hoe she laughs with a harvest.” – Douglas Jerrold
- 22“I was born on a farm. My strength has nothing to do with political apparatus. I get my strength from nature, from flowers.” – Ariel Sharon
- 23“They say you can’t make a living on farming… but doing anything else isn’t really living at all.” – Herman Melville
- 24“I don’t have a ‘9-5’, I have a ‘when I open my eyes to when I close my eyes'” – Unknown
- 25“Be happy with what you have while working for what you want” – Helen Keller
- 26“As a farmer, you learn quick: you don’t get anything that you don’t work hard for.” – Evan Thomas
- 27“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work” – Thomas Edison
- 28“Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.” – Unknown
- 29“Whoever said that country life was simple never lived on a farm.” – Unknown
- 30“I have come to realize that I would rather live on a farm in the middle of nowhere than live in a big house in the city.” – Unknown
- 31“We raised our kids the best we could, doing what we loved to do. It was hard work, but we always time to smile and laugh.” – Thomas Meyer
- 32“To be successful the first thing to do is to fall in love with your work.” – Sister Mary Lauretta
- 33“Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.” – Daniel Webster
- 34“The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.” – John F. Kennedy
- 35“Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. ‘Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow.” – David Hume
- 36“It’s more than a job, it’s a way of life.” – Matt Ballou
- 37“A friend of mine has a theory that those who live closer to where food is grown are more religious. Because when you see how food is actually created, instead of just seeing it in a package in a store in a city, it gives you a real sense of awe. And I love that and would like to be closer to that.” – B.J. Novak
- 38“Urban farming is not only possible, it is crucial. But it can’t be like the farming techniques of yore.” – Homaro Cantu
- 39“Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals & happiness.” – Thomas Jefferson
- 40“Farming is a profession of hope.” – Brian Bret
- 41“It feels good at the end of the day to know you made a product that other people are going to enjoy.” – Jericho Sanchez
- 42“The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.” – Will Rogers
- 43“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.” – Matthew Scully
- 44“The master’s eye is the best fertilizer.” – Pliny the Elder
- 45“A farm includes the passion of the farmer’s heart, the interest of the farm’s customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm — it’s everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism.” – Joel Salatin
- 46“This land pulses with life. It breathes in me; it breathes around me; it breathes in spite of me. When I walk on this land, I am walking on the heartbeat of the past and the future. And that’s only one of the reasons I am a farmer.” – Brenda Sutton Rose
- 47“Being raised on a farm is the best gift that you can receive” – Unknown
- 48“A new planting is like having another child, requiring patience and sacrifice and a resounding optimism for the future.” – David Mas Masumoto
- 49“Some call it the middle of nowhere… I call it the center of my world.” – Unknown
- 50“The great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” – William Jennings Bryan
- 51“Most things, except farming, can wait.” – Jawaharlal Nehru
- 52“A farmer’s work in many ways is like setting a stage. In theater, stage managers lay out furniture and props, set up lights, and clean to get a set ready for actors to take over and create a show. Farmers plow, fertilize, set up irrigation systems and fences, and otherwise prep the stage of their farms for the real actors — the sun and the life within the seeds and animals — to create the show.” – Ben Hartman
- 53“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted” – Ecclesiastes 3:1-2
- 54“Agriculture is the greatest and fundamentally the most important of our industries. The cities are but the branches of the tree of national life, the roots of which go deeply into the land. We all flourish or decline with the farmer.” – Bernard Baruch
- 55“Life is good when the barn is where your best memories have been made” – Unknown
- 56“For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well-bred man than agriculture.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
- 57“A farm is more than land and crops. It is a family’s heritage and future.” – Unknown
- 58“And into the field I go to lose my mind and find my soul” – Unknown
- 59“Farmers work in acres, not hours.” – R.S. Unknown
- 60“It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn” – B.C. Forbes
- 61“The farm is part of me.” – Erich Wehrenberg
- 62“My grandfather used to say that once in your life you need a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, and a preacher, but every day, three times a day, you need a farmer.” – Brenda Schoepp
- 63“Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.” – Samuel Johnson
- 64“Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful and most noble employment of man.” – George Washington
- 65“Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. Chemically grown vegetables may be eaten for food, but they cannot be used as medicine.” – Masanobu Fukuoka
- 66“What is a farm but a mute gospel?” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- 67“Agriculture for an honorable and highminded man, is the best of all occupations or arts by which men procure the means of living.” – Xenophon
- 68“The corn is planted first, followed by beans, then squash between the rows.They are called the Three Sisters. They sustain each other, the earth, and us. But the Big Ones do not know that. They do not care for the earth, and its children, properly.” – Elizabeth Haydon
- 69“Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.” – Malcolm X
- 70“Agriculture is the noblest of all alchemy; for it turns earth, and even manure, into gold, conferring upon its cultivator the additional reward of health.” – Paul Chatfield
- 71“My teachers used to say that no one is ever going to pay you to stare out a window. They sure got that wrong.” – Unknown
- 72“For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well-bred man than agriculture.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
- 73“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.” – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- 74“Going back to a simpler life is not a step backward.” – Yvon Chouinard
- 75“A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather than change the earth to suit a crop it would diversify its crops to suit the earth.” – Verlyn Klinkenborg
- 76“No race can prosper until it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” – Booker T. Washington
- 77“Agriculture is civilization.” – E. Emmons
- 78“Those too lazy to plow in the right season will have no food at the harvest.” – Proverbs 20:4
- 79“An agricultural life is one eminently calculated for human happiness and human virtue.” – C.L. Allen
- 80“When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.” – Daniel Webster
- 81“The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- 82“I had rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world.” – George Washington
- 83“In undertaking farming we undertake a responsibility covering the whole life cycle. We can break it or keep it whole.” – Lord Northbourne
- 84“The story of family farming underscores a legacy of sustainability.” – Amanda Zaluckyj
- 85“I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman’s cares.” – George Washington
- 86“Agriculture was the first occupation of man, and as it embraces the whole earth, it is the foundation of all other industries.” – E.W. STEWART
- 87“I wasn’t born in a barn… But I got there as fast as I could!” – Anonymous
- 88“For we must farm or die.” – Lord Northbourne
- 89“Not a moment of life is wasted on a farm. Others may have been more places but haven’t outlived me.” – Jim Fisher
- 90“A fertile soil alone does not carry agriculture to perfection.” – E.H. Derby
- 91“I think that if you were raised on a farm, you were born with dirty in your shoes. and once you get dirt in your shoes, you can’t ever get it out.” – Mark Thomas
- 92“The mud will wash off but the memories will last a lifetime.” – Unknown
- 93“On the farm, rubber boots go with everything. Especially pajamas.” – Unknown
- 94“Some people grow up playing with trucks and tractors… the lucky ones still do.” – Unknown
- 95“You say ‘raised in a barn’ like it’s a bad thing?” – Unknown
- 96“Nobody works harder than a farmer… except maybe a farmer’s wife” – Unknown
- 97“Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind.” – Joseph Joubert
- 98“Like a gardener I believe what goes down must come up.” – Lynwood L. Giacomini
- 99“There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.” – Bill Bryson
- 100“Farmers only worry during the growing season, but townspeople worry all the time.” – Edgar Watson Howe
- 101“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.” – Andy Warhol
Did you connect to any of these quotes? Which one of these quotes was your favorite? Do you have any fun farm stories that you want to share? Leave a comment below for us and other farm life lovers to read!