16 September 2026
We thought the answer was organic
Before we got here, we were chasing organic.
That’s not a dig at organic. It’s just where we started, and we suspect it’s where most people start, because it’s the one word the supermarket gives you for “grown the way you’d hope”. We were reading, doing courses, working out how to grow food without the sprays. Organic was the goal.
Then Anthony read Dirt to Soil, by a farmer in North Dakota named Gabe Brown.
What landed wasn’t a technique. It was that the label isn’t the thing that separates a good farm from a poor one. You can avoid every chemical on the list and still have bare ground, soil moving off it in the rain, and fertility trucked in from somewhere else every season. You can also have a place that’s covered and green and full of roots, with animals moving through it, that gets better every year. The label doesn’t tell you which one you’re looking at.
Some farms build soil. Some don’t. That’s the split that matters.
Gabe Brown calls it regenerative agriculture. We read it and thought: that’s us. That’s the thing we’d been reaching for without having a word for it.
It left us with one question, and we still use it:
Is the land getting better or worse because of the way we farm it?
Here’s the part we’d rather skip over. Knowing all that didn’t change what we did, not for a good while. We kept gardening. We kept improving beds. Reading a book and rearranging a farm turn out to be quite different activities.
What actually moved us was duller and more accidental than that. The vegetable garden stopped working. Around the same time we’d started running sheep and shifting them on before they ate a paddock out, mostly because that’s simply what you do with sheep. And it worked. The grass came back thicker, and we wanted more of it.
So the book came first, but it took us the best part of three years to start farming the way it described. Only later did we notice we’d arrived at it by the back door.