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. And the enemies.