Laudator Temporis Acti

W.S. Merwin (1927-2019), The Mays of Ventadorn (Washington: National Geographic, 2002), pp. 60-61:

One attractive element in the farming life that had evolved by then in the Quercy was an unobtrusive independence of spirit, a quality rooted in the practice of polyculture — the growing of more or less everything. It was an immemorial system encouraged by the variations of the crumpled landscape with its small irregular fields fitted into the stony contours, but deplored by theorists as inefficient, an impediment to the abstraction of agriculture and the relegation of it as a way of life. Its assumptions included having extended families loosely clustered in and around the small hamlets, each family owning plots of land of several kinds scattered within walking distance of where they lived. Most families possessed a few hectares of upland woods, a few hectares of open pasture in different places, a few hectares of arable land, which they farmed on a careful four-year system of rotation, a sizable number of ritually tended walnut trees, at least one vineyard, and at least one vegetable garden, besides which they grew their potatoes, often their peas and green beans, pumpkins, squash and corn for pigs, fodder beets for pregnant ewes and for lambs, in the fields closest to home. They grew much of what they ate, and all that they fed to their animals. They sold walnuts, plums, milk, wool, calves, lambs, cheese, and they raised tobacco some years as a cash crop. They thought that was the way it had always been. In the valleys the walls were beginning to be leveled year by year to enlarge the fields for mechanization, but on the slopes and ridges and out on the limestone plateaus the thin soil was spread unevenly in the waves of stone, and although in the sixties the planners in the capital inaugurated programs designed to eradicate the peasantry altogether, the imposition of a rational grid on the uplands was hampered and delayed by the terrain.

Related post: Dapes Inemptae.