Our Founding Farmers

On this Fourth Day of July we celebrate the independence of our great country, and I truly do believe it is a great country.  I believe we owe the freedoms that we have today to our founding fathers who built this country out of a desire for freedom and liberty.  In honor of this great day I just want to leave you with some quotes from our "Founding Farmers".

"Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens.  They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to it's liberty and interests by the most lasting bands" -Thomas Jefferson

"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts.  I must study politics and war, that our sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.  Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." -John Adams (if this doesn't speak to the importance of agriculture I don't know what does)

"Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful and most noble employment of man." -George Washington

"There seem to be three ways for a nation to acquire wealth.  The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their neighbors.  This is robbery.  The second by commerce, which is generally cheating.  The third is by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as reward for his innocent life and virtuous industry." -Benjamin Franklin