Farming with the Ancients

Food Chain Radio Podcast with Michael Olson

M.D. Usher, University of Vermont Professor of Classical Languages and Literature & Author of How to Be A Farmer:
An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land

Does the more farming change, the more it stays the same?

They are called “classics” because they do not wear out with time­ – even with thousands of years of time!

The writers of the classics captured life as they saw it with the words of their day. If one is able to translate those ancient words into today’s words– or get someone else to do the translating– one can see that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

For one example, look back, way back, to what the shepherd Hesiod had to say, nearly 3,000 years ago, about character.

“The best man of all thinks out everything for himself, mulling over what is better later on, and in the end. And yet good, too, is he who heeds words well-spoken by another. But whoever neither thinks for himself nor listens to another when he takes something to heart is a useless person.”

Now I ask, has the wisdom of that observation dimmed over the nearly three millennium since it was written? Though there are some who think there is now no such thing as a useless person, they most likely have never been a farmer.

And speaking of farming, the ancients did a lot of writing about the subject. And as I thumb through the themes presented in How to Be A Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land, I see many, if not most all, of the themes I have written and talked about in my travels up and down today’s Food Chain.

To see how the more things change, the more they stay the same, let’s open How to Be A Farmer and see how what was said about farming in ancient times is pretty much the way farming is today.

Here to help us select from all the themes, translate them from the Greek and Latin into today’s American English, and introduce them to us, we have, from France’s Cote D’Azur, M.D. Usher, the author of How to Be A Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land

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