To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.
—SAMUEL JOHNSON
During my conversation with the Vermont trooper at processing time, he’d asked me what I do for a living. A lot of people wonder. Some guess Amish carpenter. Some guess grunge drummer.
“Soil farmer,” I said.
“Soy farmer?”
“Soil. Soil building—I work for healthy yields in crops.”
He looked thoughtfully at my New Mexico license, then at the 50 pounds of cannabis flower in the backseat, then at the icy crust of snow he’d just stomped through to reach my rig.
He said, “You must really care about soil.”
It occurred to me a few hours later as I crunched to a former Vermont girls’ camp kitchen for the 13th time, just so I could process hemp by a time-consuming method, that the trooper had nailed it. That’s the starting point for connecting the dots in any regenerative enterprise. No one has a problem with a promising bottom line—hemp, globally, is going to be worth $13 billion by 2026.1 But it’s bottom line with a mission. At core, I’m trying to sequester carbon.
We who care all care for our own reasons. We all have a dog in this fight. I have a goat. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my family’s lives have now been directly threatened by the climate situation. Over the course of the five weeks that the 2013 wildfire crept toward the four people and various furry critters for whose safety I am responsible, I slowly woke to the gravity of the mission.
Praying for rain in the most primeval way from his porch each morning as he watches certain destruction approach will start to awaken a fellow. Especially when he can’t do a thing but pack. But it’s when a terrified bear sends his family hustling for safety before mauling his goats in front of his eyes that it becomes personal.
I have to say I was pleased with the responses of every one of my family members to that “this is not a drill” morning. It being June in New Mexico, we had slept outside, in the big family tent we set up near the hammocks, between the ranch house and the goat corral. In the pre-monsoon heat, its mesh roof is a blessing, even before you add the New Mexico night sky. I fell asleep in a tranquil idyll of meteors and Pooh stories, and woke at dawn to galloping goat hooves and uptight chickens. This was not the normal start-of-day song.
The only human awake, I unzipped my window flap and migrated over 10 seconds from “as quiet as my mind ever gets” to “red alert.” A large brown mass was scaling our eight-foot goat corral fence like a ladder. Before another 20 seconds had passed, we had our game plan sketched out and executed: Sweetheart brings human kids into house, then looks for gun case key (we never found it). Self goes and makes loud primate noises such as one would make to scare off a bear.
I bounded down to the horrible scene of my friends being killed, worked into a froth. I shook the corral fence, grabbed and threw a shovel over it, and generally danced around. You know how it is when you’re five feet from a black bear, screaming at him to let him know you mean business. It didn’t work for about 10 minutes, which was when my sweetheart called me up to the house and suggested I drive our vegetable oil–powered F-250 over to the corral and lay on the horn. After that came a lull in the attack. We’d exiled the bear to a meadow just north of the ranch for what turned out to be 12 hours. We didn’t know how much time we had, so my sweetheart and I hauled gear to the corral and tended to wounded goats, battlefront-triage style.
Natalie Merchant, who had given us so much milk and was my primary morning meditation partner, was hollering something awful. My sweetheart and I locked eyes and realized at that moment that our family’s survival depends on mitigating climate change. We’ve been working on it ever since.
Connecting the Dots in Our Work and Lives
Your family’s survival depends on tackling the climate reality too. But you probably know that. That means, sure, cultivating hemp and sister crops widely, or passionately supporting those who do. That’s a major piece of the puzzle, and one of the fun parts. The puzzle’s instructions are, “Figure out how to work regenerative principles into the immediate, mission critical mind-set of all industrial enterprises on the planet, while educating the mainstream customer to seek the resulting products.”
I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to plan for a broadly aware, farmer-centric buying public. Already there is widespread consumer awareness, for instance, that factory chicken eggs, produced by ill-treated animals, harvested by indentured farmers, and shipped thousands of miles, aren’t actually cheaper than local organic eggs. Our task is to map that awareness onto hemp grown outdoors by regional family farmers.
Yes, a wartime mind-set is required, even though the work is peaceful. And everyone needs their personal climate Pearl Harbor. It looks like it won’t be necessary to drop a terrified bear into everyone’s backyard to get them into the unified spirit. The constant stream of fire, flood, hurricane, and tsunami chaos may well prove a catalyst for the sufficiently seamless migration to a regenerative economy. If the agricultural philosophy and techniques we’re spearheading catch on, if the carbon gets sequestered, the plastic crap replaced, the batteries renewable, maybe we’re in time.
There’s no way I could let up, even if I wanted to. The 2013 Silver fire, as the Forest Service calls it, still resonates. I have to drive through its skeleton every time I leave the ranch for the wider world. For miles upon miles, entire hillsides are torched but impressively recovering. Starting about last year, the fifth anniversary of the blaze, I began seeing a wildflower palette spread across the char. This spring, as we hike at high altitudes, we can trace the next stages of a ponderosa pine forest cycle: mountain mahogany, three-leaf sumac, and, along the creeks, alder, all doing the same thing that you and I are: building soil.
A forest ecosystem cycle is, like all systems that have endured for tens of millions of years, a regenerative one. Both fire and a tree’s response to it were programmed into the system long before humans entered the game, thanks to lightning. The forest has been to this fire carnival before, and it normally takes 250 to 1,000 years to recover from a fire like the Silver fire.2 The difference is that lately (since coal burning), humanity’s systemic choices exacerbate routine cyclical events into millennial ones.
In the Southwest high desert, our once reliable monsoon season would provide 40 percent of our watershed’s annual precipitation. Daily afternoon thunderstorms are supposed to begin in early July and peak in August. I’d say that happens every third year lately. Old-timers tell me my own ranch’s creek used to run nearly year-round. Now it runs maybe a month out of the year. It’s an event when it does. As in, “Creek’s running! We’ll pick up this math lesson later!”
September is our spring—a wildflower dreamscape rises from the arroyos and buttes: It’s magnificent. You haven’t lived until you’ve smelled a desert willow in bloom or nibbled on a lemonade berry, or watched a sphinx moth get drunk on datura nectar at midnight. Now, with our seasonal arc disrupted and erratic, extended dry conditions allow bark beetles to weaken millions of the majestic, fragrant ponderosas that surround the Funky Butte Ranch. The trees—some three centuries old—die where they stand, leaving mountainsides of brown-needled fuses, waiting.
I recognize we might be getting numb to these kinds of stats, but as I type, six years after the fire, 2019 has been the second-hottest April in 139 years of record keeping, according to NASA.3 Carbon was measured at—ho hum—415 parts per million that month.4 First time in three million years. We’re number one!
Beyond the morning the bear came to breakfast, this climate change is not academic for me. It has changed life on the ranch forever. Some mornings when I stumble half conscious to the corral for milking, the hair on the back of my neck stands while I snap into a sort of ancient watchfulness mode for a few moments, like a dog sniffing the air.
We all want our families to be safe, healthy, and comfortable. That’s why we work. Doesn’t matter if you’re a farmer or a real estate attorney. The issue is whether you’re looking ahead one fiscal quarter or seven generations. Since giving a dang is the secret ingredient in this industry, I’d like to petition Ms. Parton to add this postscript to her mantra: In addition to First, Better, or Different, you’ve also got to be the Most Unflinchingly Dedicated to Achieving Your Calling, Which Calling Is Tied into the Greater Regenerative Mission. Or something more concise. Maybe, “First, Better, or Different, plus Kind.”
I’m setting it down here for the record, and I guess we’ll see: A regenerative model is going to win in the coming economy. Folks who insist on what we wrongly today call “conventional” farming or wider industrial techniques, I predict, are going to be left in their own toxic dust. They won’t be able to compete, in productivity or quality.
Humans experimented with unrestrained harvesting of our divinely given resources. We saw that it didn’t work. Easy fix. At every level of society and economy, as individuals, parents, entrepreneurs, investors, dinner eaters, we’re shifting into post–Pearl Harbor single-mindedness. Ninth inning. Two outs.
Connecting the dots starts at home, because everything starts at home. Here on the ranch, we milk goats to reduce the carbon miles in our milk, yogurt, and cheese. But twice in the past dozen years we’ve scaled down the herd to allow us to travel together more often. That means buying dairy again, albeit from neighbors.
What can we do besides try to improve, to keep edging forward with baby steps? The journey is a life- and career-long one, and, on the business side, too, no mortal is at the Promised Land unless her delivery vans run on solar-charged hemp batteries and every farmer in the operation is living the worry-free good life. Myself, I’ve long been engaged in a personal hypocrisy reduction project. I stand ready to be educated in the inevitable areas where I or an enterprise of mine can take it up a notch. Man, solar-powered electric commercial air travel sure will help my carbon footprint.
All this consumer-side stuff—from righteous product labeling to not ordering company T-shirts made by Bangladeshi children—is going to seem so laughably obvious in 20 years. It’s a modern rite of passage: One day we all wake up and realize, wow, all my stuff was made somewhere—I wonder by whom. I wonder what’s in it.
Carrying that awakening to the production side, what we regenerative hemp entrepreneurs offer is such a change in our manner of interacting with the earth that simply demonstrating our principles in our products embodies a successful strategy at this stage. This is why I would love to see as many of us as possible succeed—to still be in it and living well and sequestering carbon in seven decades and generations. That’s when 30 percent of Americans will be making a dentist-neighborhood living from independent farming.
For the moment, we’re still an agricultural and industrial blip. We have seven billion people to feed, house, and clothe. So every hemp sale is a sale for my enterprise and yours, probably for five more years at least. Maybe 10. Collectively, we’re a plane flying a banner over a crowded beach reading, HEMP/CANNABIS IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS, EVERYONE! ASK AROUND! KNOW YOUR FARMER!
If you worry about facing judgment for leaping in unprepared, then start small. I love it when someone tells me, “We’ve got a baby on the way, we just got out of debt, so we’re going to start with three acres. But we have twenty available for next year.” Just start.
As Jeremy Fisher, a 25-year-old first-time Arkansan hemp farmer who helped write his state’s regulations, put it when he noticed his three-acre field was, like much of Arkansas and Oklahoma in the spring of 2019—ho hum—under five feet of flooded Arkansas River, “You don’t see Pop Warner football players leaping directly to the NFL.” So much for plan A. That first crop might not look stellar, but I’d be willing to wager that Jeremy will still be planting hemp in five years.
Examining the near future marketplace with a wider-angle lens, a real sign of victory will be when those “leading economic indicators” you hear evaluated on the top-of-the-hour NPR news updates no longer catalog “new home starts” or “cost of the latest bailout,” but rather “inches of soil rebuilt” and “number of regenerative agriculture sector jobs created.” Then, maybe, millennial events will occur once a millennium again.
Lollygagging as a Family Practice
Representatives from the valley’s honeybees and at least four species of native bees circled closely around us as my family and I dropped the first seeds into ranch soil at the end of May 2019. We gave a formal prayer of thanks. The dogs panted patiently under a walnut. The time-lapse camera was rolling.
Planting our first home hemp crop was a very big moment for us. This is where our sons were born. But it was the sheer number and variety of bees that kept grabbing our attention. They ranged from housefly-sized to small delivery drone. We talk about saving the bees, but I didn’t realize how fast it would happen. The blindingly bright leaf-cutters kept tunneling their homes all around the ranch house. As folks do with turtle nests in the tropics, we set up warning signs and danced around them.
And as with the turtles on a resort beach, we kind of wondered, Why right here? These solitary native bees are surrounded by two million acres of wilderness, so there’s something they like about raising a family close to us, even with wrestling dogs and goat kids and human kids. I think they might feel they are taking care of us. Maybe they have a Save the Humans campaign going. They sure work hard in our garden.
We love watching them burrow back home after a day drinking catmint, horehound, lavender, and bee balm. And, any day now, hemp. We keep trying to film them digging in slo-mo.
The prayer done, we started working around the field, hand-planting. Almost immediately I found myself in conversation with the local rabbits, of which the 2019 batch was stereotypically prolific. My position was basically a standing invitation to treat this crop more as an appetizer than a main course.
“We’re over-planting,” I said evenly, my mouth pressed close to one of the two softball-sized warren holes that had already opened inside our half-planted field. “Just so you, the birds, and the grasshoppers can have a taste. We request that you treat this year’s hemp as a sometimes food. So there’s enough for everybody.”
This crop, if all went well, would provide a good portion of our human and goat protein for a year. Zero carbon miles. Only good additives. And very few of those. I was trusting the rabbits understood the concept of pace. It was a small crop, under half an acre. I’d rather not have to go through the song and dance of circling each plant with chicken wire.
It also became clear in the days leading up to planting that our hemp would be sharing soil space with the native vegetation. We were, in fact, unintentionally companion planting with spectacle pod, horehound, and even—shocking as it would be to Dan Townsend—mullein. So far it was working out fine. Seemed like there would be room for everyone, as I shook seed into my loved ones’ palms.
The effort at interspecies cooperation set me thinking for a moment about the squabbling we’re starting to see in the cannabis farming community, among fans of one or another of the supposedly different sides of the plant. Obviously, as we’ve been discussing, throughout nearly all of humanity’s relationship with this plant, there have been no different sides. It’s always been one plant, no matter how you chose to grow it, and no matter what your intended final products. Formal THC irrelevance will make that return to equilibrium official. Communication is what’s required among different styles of cultivation, old and new, and among various desired cannabinoid harvests. I mean, if rabbits can grasp this …
I realized with a laugh that in my discussion with the Funky Butte Ranch leporids I was employing the same advice I give to farmers growing the hemp/cannabis plant for any application: Follow the example of farmers throughout the ages. Call your neighbors. Communicate. Bring your work gloves to one another’s farms and learn about one another’s techniques, dreams, and kelp sourcing.
I breathed deeply, exhaled, and let non-field issues escape through my muddy fingertips. It was easy to do. I got back to business. We were approaching June. Spring training was over and the real season had begun. Records were being kept, which ate into cartwheel time. I try to allow for about an hour of bureaucratic BS per day.5
18 Days Later …
The first thunder of the season, rumbling in a long diminuendo, hints at a functional monsoon. Two ravens court in a graceful daredevil routine not far overhead as I and my kiddos water at dusk. I’m taking a brief break to make these notes:
The family crop itself is small enough that I know the quirks of each soil area; no FLOATER delays in this field. In my twice-daily meander through the field, tucking in keikis and tweaking drip lines, I recognize every plant. We each already have our favorites. As the desert cools this evening, I report joyfully on the progress of Magu, named for an ancient wellness goddess associated with hemp across Asia. My oldest just shouted, “First serrated leaf on the Purple Wonder Twins by the currant bush!”
These keikis are strong; able to stand up to searing midday desert heat (they love the sun, and follow it devotedly), and to ignore some rabbit nibbles. Once again the plant is showing me that there is nothing like the strength of hemp sprouted from seed in outdoor soil.
Based on their robustly dark olive-green stems and rapid growth, they seem, like the bees, to feel very comfortable in their homes. Which is important. The top three keys to contentment in life, the Realtors correctly advise us, are location, location, and location. I’m no exception. I’m in the soil with the people I love.
There’s something about farming that mitigates the profound neural changes that have been brought about by our interaction with zeros and ones. Or maybe even since writing. The desire to ranch and farm stayed with me through four generations of city life, suburbia, and a transatlantic steerage voyage. It is who I am, at a fundamental genetic level. It’s where I am healthiest.
My family’s life is centered on getting our fingers in the soil, every day. Tomatoes, eggplant, elderberry, hemp, currant, mulberry, locust, broccoli, onion, corn, and arugula. My own fingers are browning the phone’s keyboard as I type. Seems like our only hope, to live this way. I can’t say I’m sure of the odds, but it seems worth a try at least. Beats the pants off the alternatives.
Watering and weeding the hemp field now constitute my only waking-life writing breaks—this book is due in 10 days. I extend my tasks here as long as possible. I can’t get enough of the sudden cicada crescendos, the complex canyon wren trills and, of course, the miracle of germination.
I use two fingers to buttress a keiki emerging from the goat-poop-and-alfalfa compost we’ve been building. In that motion, I accidentally brush the fuzzy back of one of the wild bees—a carder I think, they all look so similar in the insect book. An earthworm hulas a brief good evening before disappearing back into the microbe condo. Nobody gives the impression of being disturbed.
My eye is pulled to a green shimmer radiating glossier than any graffiti tag. Its nail polish name would be “Neon Flux.” Ah, it’s a beetle shell, itself suggesting a spot where I might start extending the radius I’m giving to this Samurai plant of which my sweetheart is particularly fond. (We’ve named her the Hemp Yeti.) She’s bifurcating at the origin point of the hemp spiral we’ve planted in this place that means everything to us.
As I gently move a clump of compost in the spot suggested by the beetle shell, I find it. The white mycelia streak. A lightning bolt. A helix. A fractal. Population: 10 or 20 million, all living upper-middle class mycelial lives in the highest desert landscape you’ve ever seen. Nurturing this fungus is something that, regardless of any entrepreneurial result, feels positive for the cosmos. For another year, the bees are here, my family eats superfood, and the soil is alive. This is a feeling all humans had until recently, upon watching a crop come up: We will survive.
I scan for my sons, thinking I’ll call them over to see that our spring fungus gathering has paid off. They are off examining a curved-bill thrasher nest in a cholla not even close to the hemp plants they are supposed to be tending. Strangely, I find that my greatest appreciation in this moment is for the endangered practice of lollygagging. It feels like a key part of the joyfulness woven into these past weeks in the field.
Most of us rightly subscribe to the pop science belief that emptying your mind, at least for a few minutes, resets the creative side for when you head back to “work.” It’s a neural yin-yang thing. We all do it, because it works. Iginia, she’ll be delighted I’m disclosing, enjoys watching champion lip-synchers. I’ve seen Cary unwind by watching the Tiger Woods of snooker, Ronnie O’Sullivan, run the table. YouTube has been helpful to the modern version of this concept. But the value of zoning out was well known prior to mobile networked devices.
I love watching my sons trip out on leaves in a breeze, or whatever it is that captures them for 6 or 7 minutes at a time. When we’re quiet is when we most often see a member of the fox family with whom it looks like we’re going to be sharing our hemp and tomato crops this season. Plenty, plenty, plenty to go around. In the final analysis, that’s what regenerative living is: the rejection of “us or them.” And of worry.
How did the stress and the overscheduling happen? Many, of course, blame the mobile networked devices themselves. Regardless of the cause, neural recharging is real. It’s why I so appreciate its encoding in a day of rest. Otherwise there’s no end. It’s always hemp o’clock somewhere. I’ve set some crazy alarm times for conference calls with Kenya and Western Australia. That’s when you see moonrise and sunrise.
Today is not one of those days. But more than a few recent ones have been, and, if trends continue, many forthcoming ones will be too. Armed with that awareness, I find myself wanting to end this story of a season in regenerative hemp with the invocation that while you’re jamming to help humanity (including your kin) survive, you’re also enjoying the ride.
I hope you check yourself every couple of days to make sure you’re prioritizing your family over all else, and even taking the odd afternoon off to get on the lake or whatever. Because, as John Lennon says, “pretty soon you’re gonna be dead.” To my human kids who are two of this book’s proofreaders, I’d like to officially say that, no, this praise of lollygagging does not mean that you can skip homeschool lessons today.
Unless, of course, it does. There’s always a plan B. And where there is a plan B, there is hope.