I’ve always been drawn to farmland. I find fields of green plants or amber wheat or flowers to be extremely beautiful. I think rice paddies are particularly wonderful, combining waving rice stalks with reflective pools of water. They are also intellectually exciting, since they embody a brilliant and ancient form of pest management – by creating an ecosystem that is flooded part of the year and dry for another portion of the year, the rice paddy is an environment in which very few pest species can survive.