b'estimates of the biomass of large herbivores on the cultivated part of the farm (gophers, hares, rats, turkeys and the like) and, even, the details of his 2015 federal income tax returns. The farm grows 204 cultivars (50,000 plants), including olives, apricots, figs, persimmons, oranges, cantaloupes, cucumbers, lettuce, many other fruits, and flowers. The land is divided into four roughly parallel zones: five acres of native riparian forest along the creek, seven fields of between .5 and 1.5 acres (delin-eated by hedgerows), an area planted to honeylocust trees providing shade for some shade-loving crops, and the remaining area, which is the majority of the farm, planted to orchards, with olives predominating.Here are a few examples of the competence and care with which Madison farms and accounts: On my farm, the olive mill is idle for 43 weeks of the year, and the bed shaper gets only about ten hours of use in a year. Many of the other implements are used for only a few days, or even just a few hours, per year. Some of the hand tools may be called on only once in five years. From 2004 to 2014, 71 percent of the months had rainfall below average for that month, and only 29 percent were above average. What this shows is that rainfall does not follow a Gaussian distribution, but is skewed by rare episodes of very high rainfall. The farm uses 86,616 megajoules of energy (including calcula-tion of the embodied energy represented by all the tools and machines) and produces 287,485 megajoules (including calcula-tion of the increase in the standing biomass of the fruit trees). When school children visit my farm, I make a point of digging up some soil that has not been tilled in twenty years or more and passing around chunks so that the students can see the structure of the soil, which is complex and interesting, riddled with little open channels, and fragments of roots, and the dens of terrestrial insects. If I till an acre of ground in the autumn, plant an overwintering crop, and harvest it the following spring after 30'