Hung in my grandparent's house was a black-and-white photo of my great-grandmother, Esther Melamed, wearing dirty working clothes and a bright white headscarf, maternally hugging a young calf. During the 1920s, the time the photo was taken, Esther raised milking cows in her small Zionist settlement in northern Mandatory Palestine. I grew up staring at the picture, hearing stories about Esther and her deep love for cows and people. My grandparents never mentioned the calf, which was most likely a female. It was left unidentified, with no name or history. Tamar Novik's new book Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land is an excellent example of how people like Esther and bovines like her calf could (or, rather, should) be leading characters in the history of agricultural settlement in the region.