2004 NOFA Summer Conference
Selected Quotes

Quotes from Eliot Coleman:

"Organic agriculture, with absolutely no support – in fact total opposition – from all of the agricultural places that you would normally expect, managed to come from nowhere to a point now where it is the fastest growing part of the food industry and the only part of farming that is actually growing. It did that with absolutely no help – just a bunch of hippies reading books. On the other side you had every land grant university in the country, the USDA and their huge budget, and every agricultural chemical company in the world. Now if your Junior High football team split a pair of games with the Steelers, this would be all over the news! But that is what has happened. With absolutely no help we beat these people!"

"We [the organic movement] are the last bastion between a world of inedible, industrial food and the world that we would like where the food tastes good, has unbelievable nuances of flavor, and offers delights that everybody wants. We are the last thing in the way of them [agri-business]. We scare them to death because we are showing that these things work. More power to us!"

Quotes from Vandana Shiva:

"I want to thank all of you for the work that you do. That's the only reason that I'm here. You are the heroes of the future."

"I think it [organic farming] is the most revolutionary activity of our times and you are the ultimate revolutionaries, you and organic farmers everywhere."

"And that's why I'm so thrilled in NOFA at all of the lovely sounds of babies in this hall. It just says that these babies, and these children and these teenagers, are going to be the real -- I guess probably the only -- wholesome human beings around. You can run workshops on how to be a human being."

"I do believe the organic movement is holding the germplasm of freedom in its hands."

"The real Green Revolution is the organic revolution. I believe the beauty of this freedom movement that we are building is that it is simultaneously so deeply local and so global. It has to be local because it is that bit of the earth with which you work. You can not farm through remote control or at least you can not do good farming through the remote control. It is also very very global in the sense that the skit that was performed here tonight was the kind of skit our farmers perform. It could be Tamil, it could be in Telegu, it could be in Marathr, but the spirit is the same and it is those universal values that we carry."

"Our dream is to make organic the only way farming is done because it is the only true way farming should be done."

Many thanks to Jack Kittredge for transcription.

This page was last modified on August 23, 2004 at 5:19:30 AM.

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