Farmland Birds

The golden grains glowing in the sun send these little bird's mouths salivating. An opulent offering to the springtime singers, standing the fate of the farmer in good stead with the earthly mother and father sky. Wandering along the edges of your pasture, you can't help but be in awe of the power this little patch of earth brings into the world when it bears its fruit unfailingly year by year. The word farm, in the sense of an agricultural land-holding, derives from the verb "to farm" a revenue source, whether taxes, customs, rents of a group of manors or simply to hold an individual manor by the feudal land tenure of "fee farm". The word is from the mediaeval Latin noun firma, also the source of the French word ferme, meaning a fixed agreement, contract, from the classical Latin adjective firmus-a-um meaning strong, stout, firm. As in the mediaeval age virtually all manors were engaged in the business of agriculture, which was their principal revenue source, so to hold a manor by the tenure of "fee farm" became synonymous with the practice of agriculture itself. Alternative etymologies state that the word farm comes from Old English feorm, farm ("provision, stores of food, supplies, possessions; provisions supplied to the king or a lord by a tenant or vassal; rent, feast, benefit, assylum"), from Proto-Germanic *firmō, *firχumō ("means of living, subsistence"), from Proto-Indo-European *perkwu- ("life, strength, force"). It is related to other Old English words such as feormehām ("farm"), feormere ("purveyor, grocer"), feormian ("to provision, sustain"), and feorh ("life, spirit").