Georgics, book 1, lines 43–70

When spring is new, when icy water trickles down
from snowy mountains, and the warm west wind
breaks up the crumbling clods, that is the time
my groaning bull should drag the plough deep through the earth
so that the ploughshare glistens as it rubs the furrow.
Only a field which for two years has lain fallow,
under sun and frost, will grant the anxious farmer’s prayer;
it yields the mighty harvests which will burst his barns.

Before your iron cuts into an unfamiliar plain
make sure you’ve studied well
the winds which blow there and the changing humours of the sky,
the nature of the ground,
the ways that men have worked the land before —
what prospers in each district, and what fails.
Corn thrives in this place; there is good for grapes;
elsewhere fruit trees spring up; here grass grows readily, no need to plant.

Surely you know: Mount Tmolus sends us fragrant saffron;
India, her ivory; the epicene Sabaeans, frankincense;
the Chalybes, who labour naked at the forge, supply our iron;
Pontus sends the beaver’s pungent oil;
and Epirus provides victorious mares at our Olympic games.
These laws, these everlasting covenants,
were laid on certain lands by Nature from the earliest times,
from when Deucalion threw stones into an empty world
from which men sprang: a hardy race.

So, where the soil is fertile, let your sturdy oxen
turn it over early, in the year’s first months,
and let the dusty summer bake the fallen clods
in its increasing heat. But if the land is poor,
then you can wait until September,
when Arcturus rises; lightly lift the soil,
leaving a shallow furrow. Otherwise, in rich ground,
weeds may choke the hopeful corn; and, in poor,
the barren sand may lose the meagre moisture that it holds.