We’d always wanted to live closer to the land — to grow our own food, raise good animals, share real meals with the people we love. The more we read, the clearer it got: the only honest way to do that is regenerative farming. Working with the soil, the water, and the seasons, not against them. So in August 2025, with a lot of conviction and almost no experience, we bought the farm. Literally. And we are, slowly and humbly, learning how to be worthy of it.
How it actually happened.
We’d been talking, on and off, about a way to live closer to the food we eat and the land we walk on — to know where the eggs came from, to name the goat, to share the meal. Then one Saturday night, over dinner with friends and an extra glass of wine or two, the talking turned into deciding. We called our amazing realtor Sam right then. He met us at a property the next morning. By the time we drove home, we’d decided.
Why regenerative.
The more we’d read about how to actually do this, the more it pointed in one direction: regenerative farming — building soil instead of mining it, working with the watershed instead of against it, raising animals on the kind of life they’re supposed to have. We didn’t want to pretend to be a sanctuary, and we didn’t want to pretend to be a feedlot. We wanted to be the kind of small farm where animals have good lives, are known by name, and the soil leaves the property in better shape than we found it.
We didn’t have the experience.
We did not have the experience. We did not have the education. We had reading lists, a property we couldn’t stop thinking about, and the kind of conviction that gets you in trouble. So we did the un-cautious thing and jumped in with both feet.
“How hard could it be?”— Famous last words, Wild Roots HQ, August 2025
The answer turned out to be: very. Real farming is harder, more humbling, and more weather-dependent than anything we’d read had quite prepared us for. We have tremendous respect for the farmers who actually know what they’re doing — and especially for Kappie and Joe, our farm managers. They know what they’re doing, they teach us as fast as we can keep up, they’re learning the surprises of this land alongside us, and they somehow make every long day a fun one.
What we’re holding onto.
Choose your people. The realtor, the farm managers, the processor, the neighbor with the tractor — every person we’ve worked with on this place is part of how it’s going. The right people matter more than anything.
Name the animals anyway. We name them. We get attached. It costs us something when we lose them and it’s worth it.
Tell the truth on the website. We’d rather you know who we are now — beginners, in love with this place, learning out loud — than feel misled later.
✎ So we’re learning. Naming the animals. Telling the truth about it. Finding our way as we go.