Excerpt from The Farm: A Pocket Manual of Practical Agriculture, or How to Cultivate All the Field Crops The Romans probably derived their knowledge of agriculture from the Greeks and other older nations, adding to it from their own experience. They well understood the nature of soils and the use of manures, and practiced irrigation and underdraining. The Roman farmers, Pliny tells us, were very particular in drawing straight and equal-sized furrows. They always plowed three times at least before they sowed. The furrows in the first plowing were usually nine inches deep. In the early days of Rome, when they praised a good man they called him an agriculturist and a good husbandman; and he was thought to be very greatly honored who was thus praised. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.