Daily Inspiration Quote by David R. Brower

A slogan disguised as nostalgia, Brower’s line is really an indictment of modern farming’s amnesia. “Bring diversity back” sounds like a gentle restoration project, but the target is sharp: monoculture, consolidation, and the brittle efficiency culture that treats soil like a substrate and farms like factories. The punch lands in the second sentence. “That’s what made it work in the first place” frames diversity not as an aesthetic preference or moral luxury, but as agriculture’s original operating system. He’s arguing that resilience predates industrial optimization and that the “progress” story is, at best, selective history.

The intent is strategic: diversity is an environmentalist’s value, but Brower translates it into farmer logic. Diverse crop rotations, mixed livestock, polycultures, hedgerows, and regionally adapted varieties are presented as practical technology, not sentiment. The subtext says: if your system only works when propped up by heavy chemical inputs, subsidies, and global supply chains, it doesn’t really work - it performs.

Context matters. Brower came of age as American agriculture moved hard toward mechanization, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and a seed economy built on uniformity. By the late 20th century, “efficiency” had become the culture’s trump card, even as it created ecological fragility: pest outbreaks that spread like wildfire, eroded topsoil, depleted biodiversity, and rural economies hollowed by scale. Brower’s rhetorical move is to reclaim the word “work.” Not profitable on paper, not high-yield in a single season - workable across time, weather, disease, and human communities.