The Opus agriculturae is a treatise on farming in 14 parts or books. The first book is general and introductory. Books 2 to 13 give detailed instructions for the typical activities on a Roman farm for each month of the year, starting with January. The fourteenth book, De Veterinaria Medicina, was rediscovered only in the 20th century, and gives instructions for the care of animals and elements of veterinary science. Most of the work is in prose, but the final part, formerly considered to be book 14, De Insitione, on Grafting, consists of eighty-five couplets of elegiac verse.
The agricultural writings of Palladius may be compared to those of Marcus Priscus Cato, Marcus Terentius Varro and particularly Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, whose De re rustica appears to have served as a model for Palladius, to such an extent that the Opus agriculturae has been described as an "abridgement" of Columella.
The work of Palladius was well known in the Middle Ages. A translation into Middle English verse survives from circa 1420, entitled On Husbondrie; it can be seen as part of a genre of instructional agricultural writing that was to develop in England into works such as those of Thomas Tusser and Gervase Markham. Two notable thirteenth century works that draw on Palladius are the Commoda ruralia of Petrus de Crescentius, written c. 1305 and printed at Augsburg in 1471; and the Speculum Maius of Vincentius Bellovacensis (Vincent de Beauvais) written about 1250, printed in Strasburg, 1473. There are a number of other incunabula or early editions.
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