Misty morning over the farm.

Mowing nettles. #farming #sheep

Just soldered back together the radiator on the old tractor. Not the cleanest job, but it should hold 7psi. #farming

Grateful for the work ahead of me today.

#darkwisp

I miss Wisp. #nosigner

Moving the flock to greener pastures. #foodfreedom #farming #sheep

Why is no one talking about bitcoin's fungibility problem?

I love the bear.

The memes! Think of the memes! #58k

Here's a cute one. #sheep #farm #farming #cute

#67... Get it? #sheep #farm #farming #foodfreedom #sorrynotsorry

The human economy is a natural system. Cities are natural expressions of human networking using technology and tools. So is the internet. So is Bitcoin. Using technology as a tool of natural expression doesn't make a system unnatural. Bitcoin follows the power law we see in natural systems because it is one.

Lambing season is off and running. Meet 26001. 9.6 lbs. Strong and healthy. A single. Katahdin/Texel cross. Great mama. #sheep #farming #agriculture #grownostr

I hope it's a happy Friday where you are.

GFM y'all.

“'Kindly let me help you or you’ll drown,' said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree." -Alan Watts There is a quiet arrogance embedded in the phrase "regenerative agriculture." It implies that regeneration is something we do—a practice we perform, an outcome we engineer. But regeneration is not a human achievement. Regeneration is what living systems do when we stop preventing it. A grassland is not waiting for a management plan. A forest is not waiting for a grant cycle. These systems have been regenerating themselves for millions of years—building soil, cycling water, sequestering carbon—all without a single human input. The complexity that makes them resilient is not designed. It emerges. What humans have done—with remarkable consistency across centuries and continents—is impose control structures on top of that bothersome and confusing complexity. We reduced ecosystems to monocultures. We replaced biological fertility with synthetic inputs. We removed the animals whose behaviors and biology evolved in symbiotic relationship with the grasses...and then watched the land degrade to desert while calling it "natural." The work of our generation is not to "create" regeneration. The work is to remove the obstacles we placed in its path. Sometimes that means stopping the reductionist control— stopping the tilling, the spraying, the confinement—and sometimes it means repairing the damage we have done—returning livestock to a grassland dying from misguided "preservation." The animals are not an imposition on the system. Their absence is. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek understood this. He spent his career arguing that the most productive orders in society—functioning markets, stable money, resilient communities—are not designed from the top down. They emerge from the bottom up, through the distributed decisions of individual actors operating in their own self-interest within a shared system. No central planner possesses enough knowledge to replicate what that process creates spontaneously. Hayek called the belief that they could "the fatal conceit." An ecological system works in the same way as Hayek's economic free market. Every organism in the system—the grasses, the grazing animals, the dung beetles, the mycorrhizal fungi—is acting on its own imperatives. No individual member comprehends or controls the whole. But together, operating within the relationships that evolutionary iteration shaped over millennia, they produce something no planner could design and no individual participant could produce alone: deep soil, clean water, a stable climate, abundant life, resilience. The wisdom is embedded in the system, not in any one part of it. Unfortunately, Hayek's "fatal conceit" is the foundation of modern agricultural policy. This is a hard pill to swallow for a culture that treats human ingenuity as the solution to every problem. We want to fix things. We want to optimize and control. But complex systems do not flourish under control — they flourish when free. The most powerful thing a land steward or economist or anyone working within a complex system can do is learn to see what the system is trying to become, aid it if necessary, but mostly get out of its way. @Saifedean Ammous #foodfreedom #regenerativeagriculture #farming #sovereignty

I drive trucks two days a week as my off-the-farm job to keep things stable. While I drive the trucks, I listen to @jack mallers Mailbag Monday. I appreciate his macro takes and his ability to see the truth of so many different situations. But one thing he keeps saying rubs me the wrong way: it's a moral imperative for a company to be profitable—that profit means you're producing more value than you extract from the market. In a free market, he's right. But we don't have a free market in food. Four meatpackers control 85% of U.S. beef processing. Ranchers now take home less than 30 cents of every retail beef dollar. Since 2015, cattle prices have dropped while grocery prices have climbed. The processors in the middle are recording record profits. That's not value creation rewarded by a free market—that's extraction protected by a captured one. The rancher raising the best grassfed beef in the county often can't legally sell it. Federal law requires USDA inspection for retail meat sales, and there are only about 90 USDA slaughter facilities in the entire country. Some states have none. Custom-processed meat must be stamped "NOT FOR SALE." So the highest-value local beef either can't reach the consumer at all or gets funneled into commodity channels at undifferentiated commodity prices—prices set by the same four companies that control the market. In this system, profitability doesn't measure value. It measures compliance with the captured and extractive system. The ones most able to externalize their costs (on the land, on the animals, on the workers, on their families, etc.) are the most "profitable." The median American farm household earned negative $1,830 from farming in 2024. Negative. Ninety-six percent of farm households earn off-farm income to survive. Statistically, ALL OF THEM. The median farm family brings in $87,000 from off-farm jobs—not government handouts, but second and third jobs—to keep farming and feeding people. That's not a moral failing. That might be the most noble act in the American economy: someone who knows the math doesn't work, keeps feeding people anyway, and drives to town to work a second job to make it possible. They're not extracting from the market. They're subsidizing it—with their own labor, their own time, their own bodies. If profitability is a moral imperative, then we need a market worthy of the morality. #foodfreedom #farming #ranching #foodstr #farmstr

My boy is playing hookey and Chuck Berry. I'm his first and biggest fan. #music #guitar 🎸🤟

My boy is participating in a charity fundraiser this weekend to feed at-risk kids in our region. He thought the #nostriches might enjoy seeing some of the newest riffs he's been working on in exchange for some zaps. Any zaps that come in from this post will be saved to his cold storage and I'll give him an equal amount of fiat in current USD rate for the fundraiser. So your zaps do double-duty! #neversell Would you be willing to help feed kids, support my boy's efforts, and help him learn #v4v? #fundraiser #electricguitar #music