“Our family’s dream to start farming began with a suburban lawn.  We had just moved to St. Louis, MO from Albany, NY so I could start my PhD in philosophy, and we bought a quaint ranch at the end of a cul-de-sac with a big yard in a subdivision where everyone mowed their lawns every weekend through the summer.  It fell to me to do the mowing, raking, and trimming, 

and it quickly became a chore I hated, not just because it was so hot and humid for my northern tastes, but because I would dump gasoline into my machines just for the purpose of perpetuating the vanity of Medieval kings and keeping my neighbors happy. Fed up with participating in this pointless waste of a precious resource, I decided that I needed to turn as much of my lawn into a garden as I could get away with.  My wife allowed a small portion of land on the south side of the house where I used a sod remover to pull up the grass, and bought topsoil to fill in the 2” of material I had (stupidly as it turns out) removed and put up on the hill behind the house. I toiled for hours and hours that summer, but we had a decent yield of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and broccoli. Getting such a huge harvest from a few seeds, water, and sunshine was inspiring—almost intoxicating, as it showed that it is possible for even a know-nothing farmer wannabe to get a decent yield.

Around that time, I ran across Michael Pollan’s work through Food Inc., and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I quickly became convinced that Joel Salatin’s farm in Virginia was the model for agriculture, and no matter what happened in my career as a philosopher, when I finished my PhD, I NEEDED to start a farm like Salatin’s. 

I got my first shot at this when we moved back to Upstate New York in 2012.  We bought a 7 acre, mostly wooded property, whose soil was mostly clay. I had no idea what that would mean for agriculture, but I knew that if I was going to model my farm after Salatin’s I needed some pasture, so I cut back and burned (fool that I was!) acres of brush and trees to make space for goats to finish the brush clearing.  We eventually added pigs to the mix so we could start to use them to improve the soil quality and get some pastured pork in the process. Having no experience with livestock , grazing, slaughtering, and butchering, my family plowed in anyway, quickly learning that making your own mistakes is as expensive and frustrating as it is informative. 

After a full season of this, I knew I needed to speed up my learning curve at the risk of utter failure and going broke.  I listened to almost every episode of Diego Footer’s Permaculture Voices podcast and ran across an interview with Mark Shepard.  My initial impression of Mark’s work is that he was taking the basic model that Salatin had developed and was just adding some perennial crops to it.  This was intriguing, so I found his Acres USA talk on Youtube where he soundly criticized the permaculture movement for failing to adequately generate models of their systems, manage water, create living soil, or think about how to provide food for humans at scale.  It was this talk that changed the trajectory of my thinking about farming, and in many ways my life. Mark’s approach to breeding hazelnuts and chestnuts, alley cropping, keyline design, silvopasture, and co-op formation was so much more visionary, systematic, humanitarian, democratic, climate-change-proof, and scaleable than what I was seeing in Salatin, that this was what I wanted to do.  I was sold on the vision. But there was only one problem. I had no idea how to implement anything Mark was talking about, and I had made enough mistakes that I knew that unless the infrastructure and design of the farm was done right, I’d be fighting the system for the rest of my life. 

My family had recently moved to a 14 acre piece of degraded corn and soybean land and I knew I had an opportunity for a fresh start here so it was a perfect opportunity to implement Mark’s vision of restorative agriculture. 

I was convinced that there was no way I could possibly afford to hire Mark to consult on the farm design, but I was determined that we would work with him one way or another.  Thankfully I was wrong. Part of the beauty of working with Mark is that he understands where the client is starting from, and he is more interested in getting regenerative ecosystems up and running than filling his bank account, so he has designed creative plans to make the consultation, design, and implementation affordable for anyone who is willing to put in the work. 

Mark and his team spent hours on the phone, email, and even visited from Wisconsin to guide my family through a wide range of decisions about layout, expectations, plant selection, business plans, ecological  research, and the pragmatics of the workshop and installation. By the time our installation was ready to get going, we had over 20 attendees, an excavator, a tree planter, and over 3,000 trees to plant. While Mark was tirelessly going over the theory and field training of Restoration Agriculture with the workshop guests, his team worked long days to do the keyline layout on contour, installed swales, berms, and a pond, and helped to plant every single tree.  The coordination and teamwork was inspiring and a real privilege to be a part of. 

But beyond the final farm design, the experience of installation, the workshop, the perennials in the ground, etc., the best thing about working with Mark is that you gain friends who treat you like family.  Mark, Karen, and others have stopped by repeatedly to check on how the project is progressing and have offered invaluable troubleshooting for problems that have come up. But we also made many new friends at the workshop that we would not otherwise have met were it not for Mark bringing us all together.  In fact, through this workshop, we have begun work on a nut growing co-op in the area, and several other projects are in their infancy. I fully believe that this has started a community, a movement, and a mission in the area around where I live that will ultimately bring together more people wanting to do restorative agriculture.  Working with Mark and his team put us on the fast track to doing the kind of work that I dreamt of back in St. Louis, and it is just a matter of time before we can scale operations from our relatively small site to something that will have regional impact.”