Top 51 Irrigation Quotes & Sayings

To suggest that organic vegetables, which cost far more than conventional produce, can feed billions of people in parts of the world without roads or proper irrigation may be a fantasy based on the finest intentions. But it is a cruel fantasy nonetheless.

Many African smallholder farmers did not share in the 'green revolution' productivity gains driven by modern seeds and techniques, irrigation, and greater fertilizer use in Asia and Latin America in the 1960s.

Of all the works of civilization that interfere with the natural water distribution system, irrigation has been by far the most pervasive and powerful.

In a record time of five-and-a-half months, we completed the prestigious Pattiseema irrigation project, linking two major rivers in the state.

Here's Iraq, where irrigation was invented, where law was invented, where writing was invented. All these things that we consider necessities of civilization started there. And the people who live there damn well know that.

There are eight or nine leading varieties of rice grown in Japan, all of which, except an upland species, require mud, water, and much puddling and nasty work. Rice is the staple food and the wealth of Japan. Its revenues were estimated in rice. Rice is grown almost wherever irrigation is possible.

All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

Some of the environmental lobbyists of the western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they would be crying out for tractors, and fertilizer, and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.

My sense is that the most under-appreciated-and perhaps most under-researched-linkages between forests and food security are the roles that forest-based ecosystem services play in underpinning sustainable agricultural production. Forests regulate hydrological services including the quantity, quality, and timing of water available for irrigation. Forest-based bats and bees pollinate crops. Forests mitigate impacts of climate change and extreme weather events at the landscape scale.

I made more money yesterday than I ever thought I'd make in an entire lifetime. But it's like somebody's going to take it all away from me and I'll be back in Texas, installing them damned irrigation wells. I didn't like that when I was sixteen. And I know I wouldn't like it when I'm eighty.

Who knows better than a peasant farmer the agricultural conditions in his country or region? It is not always necessary to send an FAO expert to tell him what crops to grow or what seeds to use. Give him the seeds he asks for, and he will do the rest. Don't tell him how to renovate his irrigation system: give him the necessary equipment and he will do the job far better than us.

Agriculture looks different today - our farmers are using GPS and you can monitor your irrigation systems over the Internet.

It takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain. As water becomes scarce and countries are forced to divert irrigation water to cities and industry, they will import more grain. As they do so, water scarcity will be transmitted across national borders via the grain trade. Aquifer depletion is a largely invisible threat, but that does not make it any less real.

Globally, the highest number of irrigation projects are in India, and within the country, the highest number is in Maharashtra.

Egypt is the largest wheat importer in the world. In some part, this is due to irrigation issues and inhospitable climes. Egypt's dependence on wheat is also partially because for decades it has been cheaper to import wheat, corn, soy and barley from the U.S. than to grow it locally.

A few little flowers will spring up briefly in the dry gulley through which torrents of water pass occasionally. But it is steady streams that bring thick and needed crops. In the agriculture of the soul that has to do with nurturing attributes, flash floods are no substitute for regular irrigation.

The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity -- then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.

Equally important is the lack of cultivable land for farmers, a profound problem when you take into account that Afghanistan has always largely been an agricultural country, and that even before the wars destroyed lands and irrigation canals, only 5 per cent of the land was cultivable.

We depend on our rivers and dams for energy, transportation, irrigation and recreation and I will continue this year to fight for what's best for the Pacific Northwest.

We take for granted the slow miracle whereby water in the irrigation of a vineyard becomes wine. It is only when Christ turns water into wine, in a quick motion, as it were, that we stand amazed.

I want to bring clean water to people who do not have it. What I'm trying to do now is think of ways to build a well-drilling machine that is low-cost so people in rural areas can afford it. People in rural places could use the water for irrigation or for drinking.

My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant from plant to galaxy. My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world

In future irrigation schemes, water drainage and removal systems should be budgeted from the start of the project. Unfortunately, adding such costs to the original project often will result in a poor return on investment. Society then will have to decide how much it is willing to subsidize new irrigation development.

Irrigation, unscientifically conducted, would not give us such truly wonderful mathematical fitness [as we observe in the Martian canals]. . . . A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see-a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various department of our own public works.

Everyone drank to popular education and to the irrigation of Uzbekistan.

Additionally, Smart Irrigation Month serves to recognize advances in irrigation technology and practices that produce not only more but also higher quality plants with less water.

I cannot help but think it perilous to suffer these lands or the sources of their irrigation to fall into the hands of monopolies, which by such means may exercise lordship over the areas dependent on their treatment for productiveness.

The emphasis of my government is to take advantage from the Chinese experience in the fields of agriculture, fisheries, energy, infrastructure, development, health and high efficiency irrigation.

Rome is the capital of Europe; it's as simple as that. You need to see what the Romans did 2,000 years ago. They were so advanced compared to the rest of the world. They showed us how to make roads, toilet seats, how to do irrigation, and more. When you see the Colosseum you won't believe it was built so long ago.

As for now, we must not forget who would have to exchange the land? those villages which live more than others on irrigation, on orange and fruit plantations, in houses built near water wells and pumping stations, on livestock and property and easy access to markets.

Bharat Nirman was a development programme aimed at stepping up public investment and public-private partnerships in the construction of rural roads, drinking water supply, rural telecommunication, rural housing, and minor irrigation.

A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

With irrigation channels and rivers running dry and municipal water storage dams reaching record lows, California's politicians are getting desperate for solutions to a drought that seemingly has no end.

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called rain.

In the Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them.

It is one thing to say with the prophet Amos, "Let justice roll down like mighty waters," and quite another to work out the irrigation system.

My father did irrigation jobs, and I would sometimes accompany him, and that gave me a taste of what was going on in the innards of India.

Knowledge has always been important, of course. The ancient Egyptians did not raise the stones for the pyramids relying on the incantations of their gods. The waters in the irrigation canals of the great Indus Civilisation did not flow according to the laws of ignorance. Knowledge has always been power and wealth.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

Jerusalem sits on a hill surrounded by valleys. It is a dry, craggy region but ideal for olive trees, which require minimal irrigation.

Surrounded by a burgeoning human population, Asian elephants have to contend with the spread of settlements and farming, and the demands of rapidly developing nations: plantations, mines, railways, and irrigation canals have carved up former wilderness.

The man who has grit enough to bring about the afforestation or the irrigation of a country is not less worthy of honor than its conqueror.

It is my experience both as an artist and as a teacher that when we move out on faith into the act of creation, the universe is able to advance. It is a little like opening the gate at the top of a field irrigation system. Once we remove the blocks, the flow moves in.

Our fish, our recreation, our irrigation and all our uses of the Missouri River are threatened if the drought continues and the Corps of Engineers decisions aren't changed.

On the day he had colonic irrigation: 'I feel I lost my virginity that day in so many ways.'

I know how to set an irrigation tube, and I helped with the harvest. I learned the law of the harvest without even knowing I was learning it. On the farm, you learn early that you reap what you sow.

More than one-half of the world's major rivers are being seriously depleted and polluted, degrading and poisoning the surrounding ecosystems, thus threatening the health and livelihood of people who depend upon them for irrigation, drinking and industrial water.

I like colonic irrigation because sometimes you find old jewelry.

Rising oil prices have focused the world's attention on the depletion of oil reserves. But the depletion of underground water resources from overpumping is a far more serious issue. Excessive pumping for irrigation to satisfy food needs today almost guarantees a decline in food production tomorrow.

If a drought strikes them, animals perish--man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish--man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish--man writes the Constitution of the United States.

In the 1960s, I personally lived the resounding impact of President Nasser's vision of constructing Aswan's High Dam as a 'national project' for controlling the Nile irrigation and the production of electricity.