regenerative farming: how to begin

This email from a family just beginning to farm in VA:

Well, it’s been over a year, and if you remembered me when I first emailed after Homesteaders of America in VA 2021, certainly you don’t now, but we punched out.  I was a diplomat with the State Department, but being villanized for not vaxxing lifted the fog to the fact that I had too few values in common with the people/work around me and that life needed to change.  

So I left.  We bought 10 acres near Lynchburg, Virginia and are trying desperately to figure out this new life.  I’m working a town job running a tree business with a partner who also wants to only work three days per week (This gives me access to a lot of equipment which is great). It’s working well, and after several months we’re stabilized enough I can start focusing more on the farm. 

We are fully-fenced, three springs, with some wood/cover, pasture, and yard for growing.  We have lots to work with, but no idea what we’re doing.  We just know we have to figure it out. 

No matter how much we’ve read or watched, we are struggling hard to come up with a plan for spring.  We have a 2,000sqft garden prepped and got chickens before winter - actually got our first eggs two days after a 5deg cold snap.  We think come Spring running a few beef cows and some meat chickens will be a good start on the animal side, possibly a milk goat.  But I just feel so dumb every time I talk about it because I feel like I’m faking it all and clearly am headed for utter failure.  

We need to make some money, but have the majority taken care of through the town job.  So I’m trying to figure out the balance of finding our moneymaker idea and just learning by reducing cash dependence and providing our familial needs.  I have too many individual questions to ask, but am guessing you get flailing emails like this on occasion and may have a few common thoughts for us flailers. 

Hey, David, Yes, we remember you, good to hear from you.  Sounds like you're moving along in a good direction and have good plans.  

Maybe you're so used to getting things right at your old job that you're just stressing at the reality of regenerative, holistic farming, which is that you are not in control, you're riding a wild beast and learning to read its signals and help urge it in productive directions.  It's a different kind of wisdom, a different kind of skill, and a different kind of thrill when you get it right -- but we see no reason you should doubt that it'll come.  Farming is like riding a bike -- you can only learn by doing, but you're sure to learn, and get better every year if you stay on the bike.

You sound like you're in a good place.  Fence, water, cover, something growing -- you're good to go, right?  So you need to decide what and how many animals to put out there.  You've got a crop, so figure out what eats that (briars = goats, weeds/grass = cows/sheep) and start rotating that animal.  Just for your information, cows are the easiest of the ruminants to fence, move, and keep healthy.  Make small paddocks and move them every day -- by day 3 you'll have a good working idea of how big your paddocks need to be, and every day you'll refine that knowledge.  Start with a paddock that gives, say, 50 - 100 square paces per adult bovine (walk it out -- five steps by ten steps is fifty square paces), and check on them after 12 hours -- if there's still a good bit of forage left standing, let them go for another 12 hours.  If at the end of 24 hours there's still a whole lot of forage standing, make the next paddock smaller.

You want to remember, always, that the range of 'right', the range of 'good impact', is enormous.  There are folks out there who practice 'total grazing' and take the paddock down to dirt; there are folks who tell you the more the cows leave standing, the better.  Both practices produce good results, depending on where you are and what you want to happen, provided the cows are not brought back to this spot until the grass has recovered.  Of course, right now you think you don't know what 'recovered' is, but don't worry, you'll learn.  There are some basic rules for judging when to graze, how much to graze, and when to bring the cows back to graze again -- rules that aren't really rules, but just mantras to get you started.  If you have any of our books, you may already have this information; if not, email us back.

Just remember -- if you graze it and let it rest and recover, it will get better.  That's because cows (ruminants) and pasture are made for one another, and what is good for one is good for both.

You won't mess this up.

If you're still in doubt, we do provide consultation services and on-farm workshops, for a fee.  

As for the last part -- well, we have a strong conviction that farming for food is a good teacher and a great way hugely to improve your quality of life while hugely reducing your cost of living; the other half of that conviction is that while one is learning to farm is not the time to try to make money at it.  The processes that make an ecosystem healthy, productive, and human-friendly are not the same processes that make land yield lots of anything you can sell, and often they are at odds with one another.  You'll almost certainly save more money (and eat better, and build farm fertility faster) just growing lots of food holistically, than you could make in the first few years of any on-farm enterprise anyway.  

Best of luck to you, and do keep in touch --

Cheers!

Shawn and Beth