"This book results from a month of daily conversations that were tape recorded in the spring of 1980 at the farm that lies at the center of its subject matter: Agricola Cornelia... One of the essential themes of this book is the relationship of the private to the public, and the book is itself the product of a moment in which an entirely personal experience was first communicated to an entirely external ear. Gianfranco Baruchello, the owner and operator of Agricola Cornelia, found the sense of his activities on his farm to be shaping itself towards some larger general feeling that he wanted to explore, and he chose to explore it by telling a story and he told that story to Henry Martin. The story as presented here is thus an encounter between an active voice and an active ear -- a voice that said as much as it found it possible to say, and an ear that took it in with all the clarity it could muster."--from the Preface.