I came into farming really, as I got into it, being like--I'm a grower. That's where I want to grow my expertise; how to be a better caretaker for these animals, how to be more efficient with my time, with the land that we're using. To lean on people who are in processing, lean on them because their resources, their expertise are in processing or on the kosher side, lean on those people who really know what is required for it, bring them in and have them apply their expertise. The growth for me ...

There is a legacy throughout my family of having at least one member who served in all major conflicts back to the Revolutionary War. The other side of that coin is they were all farmers, homesteaders and innovators of their time from Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. In 2009, my wife and I kept grew our first garden in a community growing space in northern Vermont. There was a moment of clarity and renewed sense of purpose after being recently discharged from the Marine Corps with multiple com...

We could actually look into the animal, the live animal, see intramuscular fat and tenderness. We also had these tools, linear measurement tools that we could actually physically measure the animals and began to find almost in any group of cattle the right kind of cattle that would make a delicious piece of meat. Ridge Shinn is the Executive Director of the Northeast Grass-fed Beef Initiative (NGBI). He also is the co-founder and CEO of Big Picture Beef, recently launched to produce Northeast gr...

I'm excited that the pandemic--for all its negativity--also said, “Hey, wait a minute. We need to concentrate on food resiliency”. We need to encourage these small diverse farms because the big operations, the five huge companies that sell 99 % of the meat in this country, failed us. For what reason? The structure, this food system structure failed us. John Roberts was appointed by the Biden Administration to serve as the State Executive Director of the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) in Vermont...

We'd rebuilt the milking parlor, which hadn't been operating. We've done all of this sort of stuff. When we came to close the sale we had two years of numbers to show that we actually knew-vaguely knew--what we were doing. We were off and running. We were here from 1977. We’re still here. We sold the farm, and we kept 10 acres, but we farmed until 2012. John Roberts was appointed by the Biden Administration to serve as the State Executive Director of the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) in Verm...

“I'd watch the deer, how they would interact with the cows and turkeys and, you know, other animals. I've always been a keen observer of nature. That started young. That's kind of like the foundation. I didn't realize that's what laid the foundation, except for like, 20 years later.” Currently Cameron is the farm manager of Anchorage Farm - Registered Romneys. For the past 6 years, he’s been farming the Hudson Valley, NY, following 4 years of service in the Navy and then pursuing his bachelor...

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"My buddy Rock Langone, he runs my ice cream store up the road here. Him and I were the young farmers of the county, we were the chosen ones. We had high herd averages, you know, just got out of college. We were making milk, we were doing what we're taught, you know. I went to college, I made a lot of milk. I had good cows. I had good husbandry skills, but it wasn't enough, because the price…the price wasn't enough. So then you start saying, “Well, how am I going to survive as a dairy farmer?” S...

Nick and his family have a productive history as small business owners, investors, and planners. After getting his construction management degree from Michigan State University in 2009, Nick returned to join the family construction company fulltime as a general contractor and supervisor. Starting in 2013 Nick interned on a sustainable livestock farm in New Jersey gaining invaluable knowledge. Nick is not only handy in the sense of being able to fix things, but in being young-ish while already ha...

“I think that you have to listen to what everybody has to say, and then just pick and choose different parts of their advice. That's complicated for some people; they just want a How-To Guide for starting their farm. It’s not that simple--at least it hasn't been for us.” Shannon and Matt raise waterfowl and grassfed sheep on leased land in Maine. After working on farms for other people in North Carolina after college, they gained experience before heading to Maine to start their own venture. Wha...

“I am very delightfully holding on to the things that I hold dear about myself that are a part of my life as a farmer, and not integrating that into my life going forward, where I'm not commercially farming. I really appreciate being remembered, and that people still value the thoughts that I've had over these years.” After falling in love with farming as a young boy on his grandparents farm in Pennsylvania, Brent Beidler dreamed of starting his own dairy farm in Vermont. He worked on many fa...

“I didn't have mechanical background, I didn't grow up fixing tractors. I had never driven a tractor. I wasn't good with equipment. Grazing was very approachable. It just really appealed to me. You're outside, you're working with the environment. It just grabbed me really fast.” Jascha Pick is a sheep farmer based in Northern Vermont, who didn’t set out to be a farmer but caught the farming bug. He fell in love with farming, and especially with grazing. He’s used a lot of creativity to get st...

“Go and work for a bad boss. Go and spend some time breaking somebody else's machines, losing tens of thousands of dollars on their payroll, before you're doing it on your own payroll. That timing is probably somewhere between, two years at a minimum, and maybe ten years at a maximum. If you do it for much longer than ten years, you're probably going to be so dependent on that salary, it's gonna be really hard to step away from that and make some bold moves.” Dallas Mount is the CEO of Ranch Man...

“I think that climate change, and the collapse of so many of our ecological systems is the pressure that's going to push human evolution into a new phase. And I think that has to be the story. “ Part 2 of my conversation with Vermont farmer Jesse McDougall ranged a little more widely than just the choice to farm, but that choice shouldn’t be something made within a vacuum. Processing, marketing, aggregation, and broader environmental impacts are all part of the picture in a farm ecosystem. We...

“It was the next generation for the farm…and so it came to [my wife] Cally or nobody. And we thought, well, hell, we might be better than nobody. So we raised our hand and said, “Let us give it a shot.” Jesse McDougall had never farmed. His wife Cally had grown up adjacent to her four-generation-family’s farm, but neither had any idea what might happen when they decided to shift from coding web sites to managing land. Through their painful introduction, they learned firsthand what happens whe...

“I think part of the reason that I have pursued a career in real estate development in addition to being involved with my family’s [ranch] business is because there’s so much overlap…if you don’t understand the land piece, then you’re missing a big piece of the picture. Christian Wiedemann is the 5th generation on his family’s ranch, located near San Francisco. He grew up hosting school field trips for cattle branding events, and watching the increased interface between the suburbs and their ...

“Rangeland science is this crazy complex combination of living and non-living things and people. It’s not simple at all.” While the Art of Range host Tip Hudson is an experienced rangeland ecologist on the technical side, I was deeply interested in his take on the value and importance of “long form conversation”. We chatted about brain science, new and old(er) ranchers, who should be listening to and learning from (both of) our podcasts, and the fact that our grazing ecosystems require both k...

On first thinking about ranching bison, Matt said he thought “I’m a kid from suburban Chicago, I could never do that.” And then he went on with his day. As he describes it, “I didn’t entertain the thought of it, really. But then months later, it was still there.” Matt Skoglund didn’t start as a ranch kid or even a kid from the country. He had a couple of different careers before deciding in 2017 with his wife Sarah to find a ranch and begin raising bison outside Bozeman, Montana. In 2018, Nor...