He held close, every day, the layers of his farm – the livestock, each species; the fields at their readiness or usefulness or at the fallow; the ripenings, the remainders, the margins, the rottings, the seeds, the pollen races, the droppings, the absorbent chaff, the everything of his, this farm world. Close as it all was to him it required and earned his attention. He could tell you what piece of that field had a shallower top soil, he could tell you the history of the grandmother of that Guernsey heifer and how it might influence the coming parturition, he could predict the bloom of different crops and talk of how the bees affected it all passing one to the other, he did speak of this strain of legume seed he had carefully gathered and replanted for a quarter of a century, and he could wax poetic about plowing.

As an example of Research & Development, this study is actually an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment where most farmers already know from experience what the study’s findings will be. The lobbying and advertising dictates of Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill notwithstanding, their products don’t make good economic sense, and haven’t for a long while. Where we find ourselves is eye-deep in Roundup-resistant superweeds, with no easy fixes in sight.