Walden : Henry David Thoreaux. 1854

P22/23; Economy.

What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun: or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames: or looking at the heavens over their shoulders until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach, or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires: or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars, - even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labours of Hercules were trifling in compassion to those which my neighbours have undertaken: for they were only twelve, and had an end: but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labour. They had no friend Iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, cattle, and farming tools: for these are more easily aquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in. Who made them serfs of the soul? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy- five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labour enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.
But men labour under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost.

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Wendell Berry. 1977

“Once, the governing human metaphor was pastoral or agricultural, and it clarified, and so preserved in human care, the natural cycles of birth, growth, death, and decay. But modern humanity’s governing metaphor is that of the machine. Having placed ourselves in charge of creation, we began to mechanize both the creation itself and our conception of it. We began to see the whole creation merely as raw material, to be transformed by machines into a manufactured Paradise.”
“[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis – only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.”

Soil Fertility & Animal Health. William A. Albrecht. 1958

“The cow, then, as the symbol of all that is living in agriculture, along with all humans dependent on it, will be convincing us that not only animal health but human health too is dependent on the fertility of the soil.”
“Modern agriculture is threatening to put economics, and the mechanical mining of the soil by more plowing, so high over the cow that even the crops are not grown for her nutrition but rather for their bulk of vegetative delivery. …Machinery of all kinds to reduce the time of our contact with things living and natural, and the economic temptations to short cut natural procedures —like feeding urea in place of vegetable proteins—seem to be conniving to have us forget the cow entirely as the symbol of the living things created by the soil and of agriculture as once a noble art.”.