The HUGE breakthrough was this one thing…
When I was a kid 2 HUGE things happened that I didn’t realize were huge at the time.
1. Music. I mean MUSIC came in with a literal WHOOOSH!
2. Nature. After a day of being miserable in elementary school I would escape across the street from my house where Mrs. O’Rourke owned 40 acres of fields and woods. In exchange for taking her garbage cans out to the curb the night before pickup and then bringing them back in to their spot behind her kitchen she gave me permission to walk and wander and wonder all through her “back 40”.
I SWORE that one day I would make enough money to buy that land and protect it from development. I “FAILED” :o( 45 years later, It’s now a bunch of “MacMansions”… I never forgot that and it haunted me… I “Told myself” that as a successful musician I would be able to afford to buy land to protect it forever from being turned into “ticky tacky” houses.
But alas! (or in the best way possible) The big music money never arrived. LOL ;o)
and one day while I was checking to see if my music was being found on Youtube I found a radical farmer in the Midwest named… “Mark Shepard”… (more about him in future episodes) through him I found Joel Salatin… (more about him too to come) and eventually Greg Judy… (yep you’ll get to know him too if you stick with this project)…
One of the first things that Greg Judy said was this:
“It’s not about OWNING the land.
It’s about CONTROLLING the land.”
Now he didn’t make that up. He heard it from a guy named Allen Nation, founder of “Stockman Grass Farmer” magazine.
To make a long story short, the big thing holding back most new farmers is not having money to buy the land to farm because the price of land is so high. So the big corporations grind on with their destructive industrial food machine.
But that machine is clearly NOT SUSTAINABLE. But we NEED to eat healthy food! We NEED people ON the land who know how to heal the land and create a sustainable system!
Older landowners may not have the energy or interest in farming but they want their land to matter.
Greg’s method of regenerative ranching with LEASED land allows new farmers to work the land without BREAKING the bank or chaining the farmer to the bank. So a decent living can be made raising animals humanely and ecologically.
So with that KEY idea in my mind I’ve been working on this for over 5 years now. I haven’t talked about it much but it has always been there with the music…
This video is part one of me walking a piece of land I’m negotiating a lease on.
Walking The Land Part1 (Healing Pastures & Apocalypse Gardens Season 1 Episode 3)
– Mark
p.s. There’s another. bigger, more open part I’ll walk soon and share with you. :o)