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...

"I get a lot of people saying, you're living my dream life. I'm so jealous. I know it's a compliment. But I'm not living your dream life. I'm living my dream life. And I know what it comes with. I know all the s-h-i-t it comes with. And it's still my dream. But for most people it's not. It's not their dream." Former vegan and marketing communications professional Katie Steere was 2,000 miles and ten years away from her family's longtime-shuttered farm in Rhode Island. A TED talk convinced her to...

“I think sometimes the choice to farm also means that folks choose not to have a life. They may not recognize it as that. Sometimes the choice to farm or ranch doesn't necessarily automatically set them up for that. Responsibility weighs really heavily on the shoulders of farmers and ranchers. I think everyone deserves to have a life but I really think that farmers and ranchers deserve to have a life. I just don't know if that always happens. And I don't know if the choice to farm is actually en...

“Since coming back, it's been sort of this really challenging and interesting evolution to understand how a working mother who is not farming with her partner can take over an operation that has traditionally been run by four to six people. “ Abbie Corse grew up hating cows. She went to school for journalism and got involved with arts administration. Then she realized what a lack of seasonal work and attachment to a land base was doing to her mental health. She and her husband chose to move h...

“It feels scary to work with a dangerous animal, but it's within our wheelhouse. To do something that is unknown--to reach out, to ask for help, to admit we don't know--to go into that sort of dark place outside of our circle of control and our circle of knowledge into some nebulous “out there”, so that we can make that circle bigger--THAT’s scary. I gotta tell you, once you open that door, once you open that circle, it's COOL. It's really cool. You sort of see the world in a different way. And ...

“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...

“People who don’t farm don’t realize how much it really governs what you can and can not do with the construct of your lives. Unless you’ve got the systems in place to manage that stuff.”—Chris Sargent When I had the idea to start this podcast, my husband Chris Sargent was fully on board and very supportive of my goal to share the stories of first-generation and other farmers making the conscious choice to make livestock farming a serious part of their lives. After a few interviews and a ques...