The Feed Store 110

He who has a piece of ground to call his own is not truly bereft, no matter what else is lost.

Though we may choose to live out our lives differently upon the land, there remain in both places people who still care for and respect land and community. I have…

Every year that we farm in the old ways, more of nature returns, despite the mistakes we make. Each return teaches hope.

I’ve heated with wood for a winter, and I am pleased to do so, but it’s backbreaking labor to warm this way for a lifetime

I am happy that the boys enjoy the garden too. But who knows how it will be in five years?

The lessons of murmuration are clear. There is power and safety in community

Within five years you could have a tiny piece of managed nature, in which more birds sing than you would have thought possible

Turbo burns in my imagination. But I can only imagine now in hypotheticals.

After I collect them, I scatter the seeds on a likely spot in my one-acre garden

Like the wonderful American writer Wendell Berry, Adrian Bell’s desire for a return to a more sympathetic agriculture is not born out of nostalgia

I know it… But we do need a barn.

There’s little appetite for a response that begins with taking up our axes to clear the land for something better.

I had to understand life and nature not as something to be mastered, but as gifts afforded to me to steward by a God abundant in goodness.

There are much easier ways to make money than farming. The primary goal of a good farmer is to find success in caring for one’s land, community, and family.

And so the shotgun sits in our home like a quiet benediction. It dreams—as I do—of long walks in the valleys of my youth and whispers of future pastures that…

Pruning is difficult because we are forced to make a conscious decision to remove something that has been part of a growing plant. But these cuts are necessary and even…

Our modernist mindset too easily leads us to the comfortable notion that ‘they’–the government, the scientists, whoever–are going to save us with the latest whizz-bang techno-fix. They’re not. Nobody is…

A chief virtue of sheep is, indeed, that they are content with remarkably little, and—this is key—they are rooted and aware citizens of their locale.

Rushing to enslave themselves like animals in a cage, the animal rights and climate activists who think they are on the “right side of history” are unwittingly reinforcing their dependence…

Do we treat the created order as if it belongs to God or exclusively to ourselves? Is dominion the same as domination? Is stewardship the same as subjugation? Such notions…

If we imagine that the fate of our times hangs upon our efforts, we’ll deceive ourselves and miss out on the goods and pleasures that are at hand waiting to…

The true virtue of a hobby farm is that it gives us the space to confront that tension between natural and artificial.

If I’m honest, I am skeptical that the localist approach I advocate will bring about a quasi-utopian future of widespread flourishing, at least within my lifetime. But at least localism…

What struck me most in reading the book was the role of risk-taking and personal leadership in an organization’s founding phase, and the necessity of consolidating and institutionalizing its vision,…