Agriculture (n.) run capitalistically, oriented to the most immediate monetary profit, contradicts agriculture itself, which must concern itself with the permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations.
Agriculture (n.) pure and separate from industry is not natural and spontaneous but a product of social development, and a very recent one.
Agriculture (n.) made capitalist — turning the independent peasant into a wage-labourer — is the final conquest of the capitalist mode of production.
Agriculture (n.) loses natural productivity even as technique advances, so that progress there may only keep bread from getting dearer, not make it cheaper.
Agriculture (n.) productive beyond the worker's own needs is the basis of all society: unless a day's work feeds more than the worker, there is no surplus at all — and no "free hands" for capital to exploit elsewhere.
Agriculture (n.) separated from manufacture looked, to people raised in semi-feudal society, like a foolhardy social venture — an incomprehensibly risky way to live.
Agriculture (n.) on a large scale does to the soil what large-scale industry does to man; in the end they join hands — industry exhausts the farmhand, and trade hands the farmer the means of exhausting the soil.
Agriculture (n.) keeps the illusions of circulation at bay, because there economic reproduction is always intertwined with natural reproduction, whose plain conditions light up the rest — Quesnay saw it thanks to the very narrowness of his horizon.