They LAUGHED at her for 5 YEARS when she planted COVER CROPS on her wheat fields — until 2008..

What does a widow do when every farmer in the county tells her she's lost her mind — and she plants anyway? In the spring of 2003, Eleanor Marsh walked off a soil conference in Ottawa and came home to Killaloe, Ontario with a plan that made her neighbours laugh at the co-op, at the grain elevator, and at the Thursday coffee table in Pembroke. She was going to plant cover crops she couldn't sell on 200 acres of her best wheat ground. For five years, they watched. For five years, they waited for the auction sign to go up at the Marsh place. Then the summer of 2008 arrived — dry, windy, and unforgiving — and the topsoil started moving. On every farm but one. How one Ontario farm widow turned grief into a five-year soil experiment that changed how her county farmed The science behind cover cropping that Eleanor knew in 2003 — and why it took a drought for anyone else to believe it What happened when the farmers who laughed spent a morning parked on County Road 58 looking at her fields in silence