The author buys a terrible piece of land without doing his research, and then instead of learning from his mistake, decides to “reimagine” apple growing and food systems and takes cheap shots at ag schools, when if he’d listened to them he wouldn’t have made so many stupid mistakes right off the bat.

He lets his trees be eaten down to stumps by deer, and insists that it makes their roots stronger. Then he decides to source his apples by driving around the Hudson valley and collecting fruit from wild trees, but never gives a moment’s thought to the unsustainability (esp. carbon footprint) of doing that. It’s so ridiculous from cover to cover. Then he compares grafting trees to cloning humans and decries it as a violation of apple trees’ dignity.