Full Stack Farming

Welcome to the New Wave of Agriculture

Like any good founder/entrepreneur, I dropped out of college. In my case, art school. Why that ever sounded like a good idea, I’m not sure. I’ve always liked making stuff, but for some reason art school turned out to be not quite my cup of tea. So when I “graduated” (by leaving after one year with no diploma), I naturally embarked on a career in computers: graphics, web development, technical training. This was 1999. It was the thing to do at the time.

I never got rich from this, but also never really tried. I’ve always been content to get by when it comes to money and put my “passion” into other things. In my case, that turned into blogging semi-professionally, and I made a very modest living as a subsistence keyword farmer selling my visitors eyeballs to advertisers for years until it reached it’s own natural end.

Then one day a door opened backstage for me into the world of theatre, which really is — at its best — the marriage of all arts. It was great and fun — for a while. The nightlife, the drinks, the costumes, the sets. But it was never enough. I always knew deep down inside that it was just a playground, transitory and that no lasting sustenance would be found there for me.

So I dropped out and started over, again. Went for four years WWOOFing and working on small organic farms and homesteads to find that other way I knew in my heart existed. Something that isn’t just eyeballs on screens or stages (same difference) engaging in the spectacle. But something of substance. Something that comes from somewhere deeper than just us humans.

I’m writing about it because I know that desire isn’t unique to me. It’s epidemic today in our society that’s completely full of tweets and trending hashtags but bereft of any real meaning or direction to it all.

What’s good isn’t or least shouldn’t be defined by what’s popular in the moment.

What’s good is un-changing and universal. What is good today is the same as what was good 100 years ago, a thousand years ago. What’s good doesn’t come from us, but from what we come from. It comes from our source, and not our source code.

Which is why, for me, farming on any scale (even non-commercially for yourself, your home, your family, your friends) is a re-bridging back to that essential root of the good. Call it nature, the earth, or something meta-physical. You know it’s true, sitting there at your desk at your “corporate” job wasting away, click-click-clicking until the next and the next and the next link gets you still further from nowhere and never…

I don’t mean to shit too much on “real jobs” though, because — as they say — it “takes a village.” But I do want to find those people teetering on the edge, almost willing to take that plunge and start that crazy farm project or homestead they’ve always been dreaming of, and jettison from their experience anything that isn’t good and real and right and true. It’s you I want to lean on until you crack and the house of cards all comes tumbling down.

Because we need you. The dreamer, the poet, the inspired, the tired of all the lies and bullshit.

We need you to take all your skills and knowledge you’ve harvested from all the far flung corners of life’s many surprises and to take all that and re-plant it. Find your own way, whatever that is. And just get started. Try something no one has ever tried before. Cultivate it into something you won’t just passively accept as “the way things are”, but which you can actively partner with to bring into fruition the way things should be. It doesn’t have to be ever something unattainable unfulfilled, an impossible mythic golden age — it could be your life.

And if you don’t do it, if you don’t pick up the challenge, I’m afraid for the future. I’m afraid of where this is all going without capable hands at the wheel governed by clear minds and open hearts. I’m afraid of the powers who have crept into the vacuum of interest and engagement of a world that has turned away from Nature as the source of all riches, and values ever-greater technological abstractions and contraptions more than clean and simple food.

It’s time to drop out and re-boot. Leave the Trash Empires to their Lords of Waste and build once again something at once old and new, and something that will always be eternal. A better life awaits.