What I like about this book is its practical approach: it is clearly aimed at professional farmers, and the author is not saying "do this because it's ✨ good for the planet ✨" but "with these techniques, you will save energy while continuing to earn a living; by the way, let's meet professionals who have been doing this for years/decades now".

I learned several things:

• Using cover crops requires careful timing: if you cut them before they bloom, they may regrow, and if you cut them after they bloom, you basically reseed them. The book also recommends using them before transplanting crops with large leaves (such as squash) because cutting cover crops prevents weed regrowth for about 6 weeks only (but much longer if a layer of mulch is put on top).
• For transplanting plants, cardboard is very good (this fall, I'm going to advocate for cardboard SO MUCH in our community garden, we spent way too much time and energy weeding/mulching the beds last year, with a mulch that had almost completely degraded when spring came 😭).
• The need for soil fertility should not be underestimated. As in the Manuel Pratique de la Culture Maraîchère de Paris, farmers add compost season after season, until it is no longer needed (before reading these books I think I went a little to far into the "do nothing" direction, which quickly turned into "don't harvest much" :P)
• You can... actually get rid of weeds? As long as they're removed via various techniques (stale bedding etc.) and by being careful not to let them reseed. I thought we were condemned to remove them forever from the beds.

There are, however, some limitations to the author's very practical approach: how do farmers deal with slugs, for example, which are often a concern when you cover the ground? Most of them don't mention it, and the last ones talk about a commercial anti-slug product, but if you read this book because you're looking for more respectful farming practices, you probably don't want to use this kind of products. This is the limit of the author's practical approach: it's mostly about cultivating more efficiently.

Also, interviews with professional farmers, which make up the majority of the book, could probably have been shortened: they read like transcripts of conversations "as is". I read them all so as not to miss any tips or information but I didn't get that much out of them.