Back to the States- Regenerative Farming in the US
- 20 hours ago
- 11 min read
Updated: 11 hours ago
Moving Back to the U.S. for Now
In April I traveled from Mexico back home to Nashville for my brother's wedding. Then I packed up my car and headed up to northern Pennsylvania to start a new job at Two Creek Farm. Leaving Latin America for the time being was a difficult decision, but my goal is to keep learning from regenerative and agroecological farms first hand. In The United States I can gain more experience and generate some savings to keep doing what I love in Latin America in the future.
I began working at Two Creek Farm, which is a regenerative farm that focuses on rotationally grazed livestock as well as a no-till market garden. Upon arrival I met my coworker for the season, John, who is from New Jersey. We would be working and living together for the season. He is 26 years old and he studied at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). We are both passionate about regenerative, ecological farming and we quickly began nerding out about food systems ideas. He's a big fan of local futures work by Helena Norberg Hodge. This work addresses the lack of coherency in our global food and trade system and the need for locally based economies that build more just and integrated communities.
John and I were both also interested in sustainable livestock management and debates in this topic. Unsustainable livestock practices have led to deforestation and land degradation around the world. However, according to some people, sustainable livestock grazing can help restore ecosystems in some contexts. John and I were here to practice and learn about this first hand.
Two Creek Farm- Regenerative Livestock and No-Till Farm
At Two Creek Farm, a lot of our learning focused on South African ecologist Alan Savory's method of holistic planned grazing. Our boss was accredited by the Savory Institute and is very dedicated to their methodology as the best way to regenerate land and wider ecosystems. Alan Savory got famous from his Ted talk that went viral. However, he also has many critics who are worth listening to (such as this debate with George Monbiot or this article by Lyle Lewis). John and I spent a lot of time reading, talking and forming our own opinions about these topics. We had many moments of excitement and purpose as well as frustrations and disillusionment. We were grateful to have each other throughout the to make sense of our thoughts and experiences together at Two Creek Farm.
Our Day to Day Work
In terms of farm work, John and I spent a lot of time loading up and carrying animal feed as well as taking down and setting up electric fencing for the different animals (sheep, cattle, hogs, sows, hens and broiler chickens). Every morning we filled up buckets with organic feed for the animals and drove the gator to distribute the feed around to all of the animals. My hands would feel sore at the end of the day from gripping the handle of 30 pound buckets of feed over and over. Rain or shine, we always had to take care of the animals and ensure their needs were met. One day a heavy thunderstorm forced us to take a short break but I had to find a lull in the storm to go collect the hen eggs in the evening. In a mobile metal structure in the fields, the hens and I huddled in to stay dry. I pushed them away with one hand and collected eggs with the other as they attempted to peck the eggs open. It wasn't infrequent to get a call in the middle of the night and have to respond to a cattle escape. Then work would start the next morning per usual, no extra rest hour to make up for it. Having a livestock farm is no joke- you never have a vacation because you have many animals’ lives depending on you. Our boss essentially never left his farm.
There were many perks and beautiful parts of livestock farming that make it all worth it. John and I began our work as farmhands in the springtime- aka lamb and calf season! Every few days someone from the team would send a text to our group chat announcing the birth of a new addition to the farm. We watched 20 lambs and 8 calves come into this world. They first bonded with their mothers and then with their herd. My favorite part of working at Two Creek Farm was "calf duty". When a new calf was born, my boss would ask me to sit in the fields near the calf and its mother and make sure that the calf got its first taste of colostrum- the nutritious first milk of it's mother. Since the herd was made up of all heifers (females who had never given birth before), we wanted to make sure that they adapted well to their first set of calves. The first calf birth was rocky, because the heifers tried to separate the new mother from her calf. My job was to sit in the field with a red flag and wave away the other heifers if they tried to approach the new calf and its mother. This meant that I also got to hang out with baby calves and gawk at their precious first moments of life. Baby highland cattle are the most adorable, fuzzy things ever.
The Savory Method of Holistic Planned Grazing
I could talk about cute baby lambs and cattle for a long time, but back to the methodology and ideology of planned rotational grazing. So, what exactly is the purpose of rotating the animals around the farm and putting up new fencing every day? In brief terms, we were rotating these animals around the land to regenerate the soil by mimicking grazing patterns that wild animals like bison used to have (before they were nearly driven to extinction in the 19th century). The purpose of the electric fencing or paddocks is to replace the role that the predator would have played-- keeping the animals in a tight group, grazing on one section of the land at a time, which gave other areas of land time to grow and recuperate (preventing overgrazing). In contrast, free grazing allows the animals to trample everything and go around picking out what they like the most. This doesn’t allow pastureland to grow back and regenerate.
Holistic planned grazing is promoted by Alan Savory to reverse desertification in barren places such as areas of Zimbabwe and Zambia and restore vegetative growth in their ecosystems. Alan Savory presents this as a way to not only to restore land and ecosystems, but also to improve people’s lives and livelihoods in impoverished areas. In his book Holistic Management, Savory states, “Poor land leads to poor people, social breakdown and war.” I was interested in how his integrated grazing methods was meant to create a better society for people in poor and degraded environments, not just a new and improved way to move your cattle around. As a development studies major, I’m interested in the relationship between ecologies and society. We as human beings are part of a greater ecology and the way we impact the environment impacts ourselves and our ability to live well. However, critics of the rotational grazing craze as a panacea for all environmental issues argue that it has merely become a way for big ranchers to justify large-scale ranching.
Challenges in my Experience- A Critical View
While I learned a lot from this experience working on a regenerative livestock farm, I also felt disillusioned by parts of it. I think the part that most disillusioned me about this experience was the lack of community. When I was living in Nicaragua and Mexico, a lot of the work in regenerative agriculture and agroecology was related to community development and collective work. I definitely underestimated how much the context and culture of a place impacts what agroecology and regenerative farming means.
The mentality of my boss in Pennsylvania was more isolationist and to “get off the grid” away from the ills of society. Farming is a business and set of methods first and less a livelihood rooted in culture. "Efficiency" was the keyword driven into our brains, and our team meetings were mainly about how we were not being efficient enough for this farm to be profitable, despite working unpaid overtime every day. Community wasn't a word that I heard while I worked there and there were few efforts to collaborate with our neighbors or other farmers. I think this also had to do with political differences and the individualist culture that we live in. Neighbors and farmers in the area don't share resources, public and private spaces, practices, transportation, celebrations and meetings, etc in the way they do in communities we worked with in Mexico and Nicaragua. Of course I didn’t expect Pennsylvania to be the same as Latin America, but the contrast is starker than I imagined. I was still adjusting to being back in the United States again.
Ultimately, the underlying goals and values of regenerative agriculture are to create a food system that meets human needs while also caring for the lives of animals and maintaining and restoring ecosystems. However, one of my favorite voices in the farming world, Chris Newman, a first generation farmer and critical thinker in these spaces, primarily asks “who can afford this organic, regenerative food?”. How can we pool efforts and resources together to bring down the price a little bit, even if that means not being 100% organic? Is there enough land for everyone to consume regenerative raised meat? If not, who gets to enjoy this exclusive product and who doesn’t? How can we pay workers well and not drive small-scale farmers to burn out? How can we work together to do this collectively in order to cut down costs?
This farm in Pennsylvania was trying to do everything themselves, depending on a high-income clientele in nearby New York. It seems like that's what small-scale farmers must do to get by.
First Generation Farming- The Challenges of Small-Scale Farming
Over the months we spent together, John and I grew to resonate with the work of author Chris Newman, also the owner of Blackbird farm cooperative in Virginia. We bought his ebook- “First Generation Farming” which we devoured in just a few days. While Newman supports first generation farmers, he is a critical thinker about privilege, as well as histories of racism and shortcomings in the small farmer movements in the United States. Newman points out how many small farm influencers often make their money from workshops, online courses, inheritances, retirement money or some type of off-farm income to cover the overhead costs of farming. Our boss at Two Creek farm, for example, inherited land and worked overseas for international banks in most of his career, and now in his mid 50s has decided to use that money to begin his farm. For most people (specially young people without land), however, starting a farm is nearly impossible, and Chris Newman states that 90% leave farming due to burnout.
I believe that small farms are important. They bring us back to a proximity with nature, ourselves and each other, but they are often pressed financially (due to structural barriers like high land prices, high organic animal feed prices and labor costs) and are not accesible for the average person. John and I both agreed that this perspective is really important to balance out the romanticism of rebuilding the local food and small-scale farm movement in the US. John and I both felt burnout and talked about whether we should leave or stay. We weren’t the first workers to feel this way. Our boss has never had a worker stay for the whole season.
My Decision to Leave
After three months, I decided to leave Two Creek Farm in Pennsylvania in July. The culmination of my decision to leave came one day when I asked my boss if I could be more involved in the no-till market garden. He asked to speak with me alone, and when we were alone he pulled out his phone to show me a picture of a cracked egg. Over the weekend at the farmers market, he had found that one of the eggs in a carton was cracked. I had been in charge of washing eggs, a task which involved hours of me checking for hairline cracks and cleaning off hundreds of eggs with a damp cloth. My boss told me that he had never encountered someone so incompetent in basic tasks like washing eggs.
He went on to say that I could not be trusted to do tasks in the garden until I proved myself capable of washing and packaging eggs. And he added that if I didn't improve overall then he couldn't keep me. I felt a painful, sinking feeling in my chest. I didn't know what to say. I nodded and went to my morning task of moving the hens on pasture. For a few more weeks I continued to do my routine tasks. I mulled over everything my boss had said to me, had quite a few long hard cries as I questioned my competency as a worker and as a person... Then I decided to make the difficult decision to move on to another farm.
I’m grateful for my experience on the farm. Livestock farming is beautiful and hard and sometimes heartbreaking. There is no time to bottle feed a weak lamb. Nature has to work in its own ways. Sometimes our attempts to intervene cause more problems, like the time we carried a newborn calf to the barn to try to warm her up because she was born on a cold, rainy day. Her mother got anxious from being separated from the herd and wouldn't let her nurse. Lambs and hens and chicks didn't survive for one reason or another and their material bodies decomposed into the composted soil we used use for the garden. As someone whose only experience with animals had been as house pets, the life and death of a livestock farm in springtime was a lesson of detachment and surrendering control. We don't think about the animals who nourish us every day or the hands of workers who pick our vegetables. We are too separated from the very sources of life. Working on a farm is an experience I think we should all have in our lives.
I’ll never forget my first experience of a chicken processing day where we processed 500 broiler chickens that we had raised since they were a day old. I’ll always cherish the nights we got back to the house after a cold day on the farm and built a wood fire in the living room to warm up. I’m grateful for the day John roasted a whole 15 pound turkey using his grandmother’s recipe, filling the house with delicious smells. I’m grateful for a view from my window where I could watch a herd of giddy, hopping lambs finding their first freedom from their mothers. I’ll never forget the way a compost pile takes the tragedy of a stillborn lamb and converts her into living soil to build more life on the farm.
I started this experience with wide eyes and enthusiasm. I felt relief and sadness as I left the farm and drove the winding roads of upstate Pennsylvania and New York. It was an intense three months on the farm. My coworker John was also ready to leave but pushed through for another month. We learned a lot from each other and from the experience. It was hard, fun, beautiful and frustrating. I'm glad I did it. And while I had wanted to stay for the whole season, sometimes you have to know your limits. Unfortunately, my boss and his girlfriend were ultimately very challenging to work with. The stress of trying to maintain a financially viable small farm was leading them to burnout and transferring that burnout to their workers as well. From Pennsylvania I drove up to Maine where I started working on a vegetable farm called Hancock Family Farm. This was the perfect next farm for me. The owner, Geof, had a very people-centered and community-centered focus to agriculture, which was exactly what was missing at the farm in Pennsylvania.
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