# Husbandry

Husbandry is the raising of livestock and the cultivation of crops, or agriculture, and the prudent management or conservation of resources.
    CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

## Quotes

    Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

### A - F

* Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
** Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) Chapter 1.
* To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. [...] It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal-products industry falls short: traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that human beings are capable of?
** J.M. Coetzee, Animals can't speak for themselves - it's up to us to do it, February 22, 2007.
* To the art of mechanics is owing all sorts of instruments to work with, all engines of war, ships, bridges, mills, curious roofs and arches, stately theatres, columns, pendent galleries, and all other grand works in building. Also clocks, watches, jacks, chariots, carts and carriages, and even the wheel-barrow. Architecture, navigation, husbandry, and military affairs, owe their invention and use to this art.
** William Emerson (1754/73) The Principles of Mechanics. Preface; Cited in: R.S. Woolhouse (1988) Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Essays in Honour of Gerd Buchdahl. p. 29.
* When you have decided to purchase a farm, be careful not to buy rashly; do not spare your visits and be not content with a single tour of inspection. The more you go, the more will the place please you, if it be worth your attention. Give heed to the appearance of the neighbourhood, - a flourishing country should show its prosperity. "When you go in, look about, so that, when needs be, you can find your way out."
** Cato the Elder De Agri Cultura, about 160 BC. Of buying a farm.
* An housbande can not well thryue by his come without he haue other cattell, nor by his cattell without come. For els he shall be a byer, a borrower or a beggar.
** Anthony Fitzherbert The book of the husbandry. (1523/1882), p. 42.

### G - L

* If the national husbandry of this commonwealth be improved, we may hope, through god's blessing, to see better days, and be able to bear necessary and public burdens to more ease to ourselves, and benefit to human society, than hitherto we could attain to.
** Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662) cited in: Walter Harte. Essays on Husbandry (1764) p. 3.
* Let him sensibly perceive, that the kindness he shews to others, is no ill husbandry for himself; but that it brings a return in kindness both from those that receive it, and those who look on. Make this a contest among children, who shall out-do one another in this way: and by this means, by a constant practise, children having made it easy to themselves to part with what they have, good nature may be settled in them into a habit, and they may take pleasure, and pique themselves in being kind, liberal and civil, to others.
** John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) Sec. 110.
* In the time of Cato the Censor, the author of The Husbandry of the Ancients observed, though the operations of agriculture were generally performed by servants, yet the great men among the Roman continued to give particular attention to it, studied its improvement, and were very careful and exact in the management of nil their country affairs. This appears from the directions given them by this most attentive farmer. Those great men had both houses in town, and villas in the country; and, as they resided frequently in town, the management of their country affairs was committed to a bailiff or overseer. Now their attention to the culture of their land and to every other branch of husbandry, appears, from the directions given them how to behave upon their arrival from the city at their villas.
** John Claudius Loudon (1825) An Encyclopædia of Agriculture. Part 1. p. 14.

### M - R

* Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.
** Thomas Mann Death in Venice (1912) Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke.
* When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade, and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.
** John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book II, Chapter VI, Section V. (Quoting from a treatise on Flemish husbandry): Quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), Lemma "Agriculture" p. 18-19.
* What eie doth not pitty to see the great weaknes and decay of our ancient and common mother the earth, which now is grown so aged and stricken in yeares, and so wounded at the hart with the ploughman's goad, that she beginneth to faint under the husbandman's hand, and groaneth for the decay of her natural balsam. For whose good health and recovery, and for the better comfort of sundry simple and needy farmers of this land, I have partly undertaken these strange labours, altogether abhorring from my profession, that they might both know and practise some farther secrets in their husbandry, for the better manuring of their leane and barren groundes with some new sorts of marie not yet knowne, or not sufficiently regarded by the best experienced men of our daies."
** Hugh Plat The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594. Cited in: Robert Kemp Philp. The History of Progress in Great Britain, Vol. 1 (1859). p. 72
** Text is about the "motive of the author for thus undertaking books of instruction upon husbandry."
* Perfection is a costly flower and is cultured only by an uncompromising, strict husbandry.
** Burton Rascoe in: Introduction to Chivalry (1921) by James Branch Cabell, later published in Prometheans : Ancient and Modern (1933), p. 279.
* Let us suppose that, without forge or anvil, the instruments of husbandry had dropped from the heavens into the hands of savages, that these men had got the better of that mortal aversion they all have for constant labour; that they had learned to foretell their wants at so great a distance of time; that they had guessed exactly how they were to break the earth, commit their seed to it, and plant trees; that they had found out the art of grinding their corn, and improving by fermentation the juice of their grapes; all operations which we must allow them to have learned from the gods, since we cannot conceive how they should make such discoveries of themselves; after all these fine presents, what man would be mad enough to cultivate a field, that may be robbed by the first comer, man or beast, who takes a fancy to the produce of it. And would any man consent to spend his day in labour and fatigue, when the rewards of his labour and fatigue became more and more precarious in proportion to his want of them? In a word, how could this situation engage men to cultivate the earth, as long as it was not parcelled out among them, that is, as long as a state of nature subsisted.
** Jean-Jacques Rousseau Discourse on Inequality (1754).

### S - Z

* But, poor old man, thou prunest a rotten tree, That cannot so much as a blossom yield In lieu of all thy pains and husbandry.
** William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c.1599-1600), Act II, scene 3, line 63.
* Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine ownself be true.
** William Shakespeare Hamlet (1600–1) Polonius, Act I, scene iii.
* Now 'tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted; Suffer them now, and they'll o'ergrow the garden And choke the herbs for want of husbandry.
** William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act III, scene 1, line 31.
* There's husbandry in heaven; Their candles are all out.
** William Shakespeare Macbeth Banquo, Scene I.
* Facts are stubborn things.
** Tobias Smollett Translation of Gil Blas. Book x. Chap. 1. (1749); Also used by Jared Elliot in Essay on Field Husbandry, p. 35 (1747).
* Thaer's Principles of Agriculture, 2 vols. 4to. an excellent work. The author, though he never was in England, wrote on English husbandry so exactly that the board of agriculture in England sent him, by Mr. Sinclair, a patent as associate member of the Agricultural Society. He is a physician, but has now established a practical academy of husbandry near Berlin.
** Samuel Cooper Thacher, ‎David Phineas Adams, ‎William Emerson. The Monthly anthology, and Boston review. March 1811. p. 212.
* Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber
** Henry David Thoreau Walden: Chapter 7: The Bean-field.
* February, fill the dyke With what thou dost like.
** Thomas Tusser, Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, February's Husbandry (1577 Edition "With what ye like").
* Ill husbandry braggeth To go with the best: Good husbandry baggeth Up gold in his chest.
** Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, Chapter LII. Comparing Good Husbandry: Quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), Lemma "Agriculture" p. 18-19.
* Ill husbandry lieth In prison for debt: Good husbandry spieth Where profit to get.
** Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, Chapter LII. Comparing Good Husbandry: Quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), Lemma "Agriculture" p. 18-19.
* Is it practicable, on the soil and in the climate of Massachusetts, to pursue a succession of crops? I cannot question it; and I have entire confidence in the improvements to our husbandry, and the other great advantages, which would accrue from judicious rotation of products. The capacities of the soil of Massachusetts are undoubted. One hundred bushels of corn to an acre have been repeatedly produced, and other crops in like abundance. But this will not effect the proper ends of a judicious and profitable agriculture, unless we can so manage our husbandry that, by a judicious and proper succession of the crops, land will not only be restored after an exhausting crop, but gradually enriched by cultivation.
** Daniel Webster On the Agriculture of England (January 13, 1840).
* I was an apprentice to a linnen-draper when this king was born, and continued at the trade some years, but the shop being too narrow and short for my large mind, I took leave of my master, but said nothing. Then I lived a country-life for some years; and in the late wars I was a soldier, and sometimes had the honour and misfortune to lodg and dislodg an army. In the year 1G52, I entred upon iron works, and pli'd them several years, and in them times I made it my business to survey the three great rivers of England, and some small ones; and made two navigable, and a third almost compleated. I next studied the great weakness of the rye-lands, and the surfeit it was then under by reason of their long tillage. I did by practick and theorick find out the reason of its defection, as also of its recovery, and applyed the remedy in putting out two books, which were so fitted to the country-man's capacity, that he fell on pell-mell; and I hope, and partly know, that great part of Worcestershire, Glocestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire, have doubled the value of the land by the husbandry discovered to them; see my two books printed by Mr Sawbridg on Ludgate Hill, entitled, Yarranton's Improvement ly Clover, and there thou mayest be further satisfied.* I also for many years served the countreys with the seed, and at last gave them the knowledg of getting it with ease and small trouble; and what I have been doing since, my book tells you at large.
** Andrew Yarranton England's Improvement, (1677) p. 193; cited in Patrick Edward Dove (1854, p. 405-6).

## See also

* Agriculture
* Agronomy
* Management