I discovered this book thanks to a review on a Youtube Channel (Luke Smith) and I bought it nearly blindfolded; it also took me a while to get my hand on it since in my country it was never published, so I had to order it at my local bookstore. Needless to say, it was worth the wait: I devoured it very quickly due to the excellent flow of its writing

The book talks about the daily struggle of an independent farmer strangled in the bureaucracy of the state: rules and laws seems to be issued by people that, in the best case, know nothing about the topic (in the worst conjecture they are probably paid by some corporation to destroy the little farmers). This is not a book about some conspiracy theories: it shows a lot of examples that will make you scratch your head in the useless effort to try to understand why certain rules even exist. This happens because the author knows REALLY well what is talking about and has been on the field for a long time: it looks at every side of the issues he faces on a daily basis and tries to overcome them in an intelligent and profitable way, just to find bureaucrats at every corner ready to entrap him

The book is a hymn to the "think with your mind" way of life. It does not promote illegale behavior but it helps the reader in habit of doubting on everything that is presented as an unique truth, and it does this bringing always arguments and personal experiences to the table that you just can't ignore. Again, this are not rants about the government installing chips to control us (even if they try with cattle) but a scream of help from a person that tries to do his best for his local community

And this, for me, is the greates part of the book: the value that it tries to bring to the local community, the absurdity of the government not helping this lifestyle (where you can buy meat and cheese from your neighbor instead of some random super-market 50 miles away) and the strength required to bear agains all of this. I find this another side of the permaculture, where the emphasis should be on having self-sustainable local communities: this is already an hard concept to sell on this days of global interconnectivity, and if you also have the government on the other side of the barricade it becomes a very hard battle. But as the book presents this as a David vs. Goliath case, you can win in the end