A picture perfect day in Vermont.
It's the end of May. Sunny. 77 degrees. There is a slight breeze in the air.
But look a litle closer. The lawn over there looks like an August lawn. It's dry and turning brown. The Spring flush of grass hasn't come and I look to the blue skies for rain.
Over the winter I’ve seen a lot of posts from farmers “battling” mother nature in their farm practices. Across the midwest, I see the desertification of land that used to be fertile grasslands with nine feet of topsoil thanks to the Buffalo. I’ve seen the videos of the wind whipping away what topsoil is left, the ground bare.
And I had a thought. How would we ever win against Mother Nature? A being that has been learning and evolving over billions of years?
Deep Roots Farm. It’s been my identity for the past five years. It was inspired by a pillow an old roommate in Oakland made for her Mom.
In the beginning of August I got taken down hard by a mystery GI problem. A day in the emergency room yielded nothing but, “We’re not sure what it is so we’re discharging you.” I spent most of the month in bed with Ben holding down the farm, and taking care of me.
When I was 18 and had just started college, I read a book called The Skinny Bitch. The book highlights the horrors of industrial livestock farming and essentially tells the reader that vegans are cool and skinny, and non-vegans are unhealthy, terrible, and fat. My young, ignorant mind of course wanted to be the former.
Over the past six years I’ve called our beautiful farm business many things, sustainable and regenerative being the two most popular.