Today, he sits, his name truncated; his prospects nil

Tony Benn has risen in place. He now sits high on the Opposition backbench, In 1959, he was known as 'Anthony Wedgewood Benn', soon to become, as was the nature of things, Lord Stansgate. Today, he sits, his name truncated; his prospects nil. Were socialism a religion, Tony Benn would be a saint. In a previous incarnation a century back, he would have been an Anglican divine whose erratic progress to the gates of Rome and back would have been the cause of much comment.

J. Critchley, The Palace of Varieties (1989), 114

As much as a third of all the greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow

A diverse enough polyculture of grasses can withstand virtually any shock and in some places will produce in a year nearly as much total biomass as a forest receiving the same amount of rainfall. This productivity means Joel's pastures will, like his woodlots, remove thousands of pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year; instead of sequestering all that carbon in trees, however, grasslands store most of it underground, in the form of soil humus.

In fact, grassing over that portion of the world's cropland now being used to grow grain to feed ruminants would offset fossil fuel emissions appreciably. For example, if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road. We seldom focus on farming's role in global warming, but as much as a third of all the greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow.

M. Pollan, The omnivore's dilemma (2006), 197-8

Small farms are actually more productive than big farms;

It's simply more cost-efficient to buy from one thousand-acre farm than ten hundred-acre farms. That's not because those big farms are necessarily any more productive, however. In fact, study after study has demonstrated that, measured in terms of the amount of food produced per acre, small farms are actually more productive than big farms; it is the higher transaction costs involved that makes dealing with them impractical for a company like Kahn's — that and the fact that they don't grow tremendous quantities of any one thing. As soon as your business involves stocking the frozen food case or produce section at a national chain, whether it be Wal-Mart or Whole Foods, the sheer quantities of organic produce you need makes it imperative to buy from farms operating on the same industrial scale you are.

M. Pollan, The omnivore's dilemma (2006), 161

All the usable nitrogen on earth had at one time been fixed by soil bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants

Until a German chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to turn this trick in 1909, all the usable nitrogen on earth had at one time been fixed [combined with other elements] by soil bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants (such as peas or alfalfa or locust trees) or, less commonly, by the shock of electrical lightening, which can break nitrogen bonds in the air, releasing a light rain of fertility.

...

[Vaclav Smil calls this] the most important invention of the twentieth century. He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention.

M. Pollan, The omnivore's dilemma (2006), 42-43

There are forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn

The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn.... There are forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.

M. Pollan, The omnivore's dilemma (2006), 18-19