A Book of the Land

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From the Sumerian Farmer's Instructions to Solarpunk: 5,000 years of what the land has always said.
Meditations on Agriculture cover — an ancient olive tree on a terraced hillside at golden hour
Meditations on Agriculture

Meditations on Agriculture

From the Sumerian Farmer's Instructions to Solarpunk: 5,000 Years of What the Land Has Always Said

What follows is not scholarship. It is what the land has always said, gathered from the oldest voices we have and offered again, in plain words, for anyone willing to listen.

The Romans wrote it down. The Sumerians wrote it down before them. The Indians, the Arabs, the medieval English, the Byzantine compilers, all of them wrote it down. And what they wrote down was always the same thing: pay attention, work with what you have, plant for your grandchildren, and do not let the greedy tell you the soil belongs to them.

These meditations are drawn from three thousand years of agricultural writing, from the Sumerian Farmer's Instructions (c. 2500 BCE) to Thomas Tusser's verse almanacs (1580 CE), with stops in Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Mesopotamia, India, and the medieval fields of England and Italy. The wisdom has not changed. Only the language has.

$9
Formats: EPUB + PDF. Delivered by email after purchase.
How delivery works: After you pay, the book is emailed to you from lupinialbus@gmail.com within a day. You will get both the EPUB (for e-readers, phones, tablets) and the PDF (for print and desktop). If it does not arrive, check your spam folder, then email us directly.
There are two ways to work the land. The farmer knows the soil, works with nature, saves seed, feeds the ground, and grows a diversity of crops. The crop specialist knows the market, works with machinery, buys seed, treats the ground as a substrate, and grows what the chemicals require. Both work the land. Only one of them is farming.
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What's Inside

Agriculture is older than writing. Older than money. Older than the idea of property. The oldest surviving complete Latin prose work is not about war or law or the gods. It is about farming.