A few weeks ago, I couldn't get electricity into the ground. Let me explain… By training, I'm a hydrogeologist, and over the last year or so, the work kind of found me without me actively searching for it. Croatia is in a drought, and since I partnered with my college colleagues on helping people find water underground, my inbox is full of people asking us to find water for their wells. So we've been out in the field all across the country. Part of what we do is geophysics: we push an...
9 days ago • 5 min read
Every late summer, I walk into my food forest with pruners and commit what looks like a tree massacre. I put on an interesting podcast and start cutting hard on my nitrogen-fixing black locust trees. I must say, over the years I've come to really enjoy this practice as it puts me in some zen-like state. But I’m sure the whole thing looks quite odd to my neighbors, who, when walking by, wonder at what I am doing and stare. There are branches everywhere, and trees with only stems standing, and...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Here's a farm worth studying. In 1994, Mark Shepard bought 110 acres of worn-out corn and hay ground in southwest Wisconsin. The land had degraded soil and no surface water within a mile and a half. It was the kind of land most people walk away from. Today it has 250,000 trees growing. It’s roughly 98% perennial, and Mark uses no synthetic sprays and no fertilizer. Completely justified, his land is now valued at around $4.2M, while his neighbors’ land (who continued conventional crop...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
A few weeks ago, someone on X shared what she learned after buying a small farm during the lockdown era (w/o a rural background). One line stood out: “Everything is default inconvenient and manual.” Her days involve hauling water, moving feed, and caring for animals in all kinds of weather. Some of that work is unavoidable, but a lot of the unnecessary back-and-forth can be designed out by connecting the right elements. One of the main characteristics of a regenerative property is that all of...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
One of the key characteristics of a regenerative property is resilience. In practice, this implies that your property has inbuilt redundancies for its main functions - such as food, energy, water, etc. Meaning... Food is produced in a multitude of ways, Energy is generated in a multitude of ways, Water is provided in a multitude of ways… You get the picture. If one option fails, there are others to take its place. (Redundancies = resilience = ability for your farm or homestead to sustain...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Yes, the summer was brutal. I’m jealous to hear other people had a normal one. Subscriber Janet emailed me this morning to commiserate about the same thing: Anxiety over flooding one year and extreme drought the next. ===== Last year, during our mega-drought, I couldn't look at the weather anywhere else, because occasionally I would see rain happening in other places, and it just made me want to cry. The new bone I'm chewing on?..... The residual trauma that gets lodged in the body after...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Besides focus, the hardest part of having a homestead is accepting that saying no is ok. I got a ton of replies to “The acre I should never have cleared” email I sent last week. So I think I’m going to circle around this topic for a few more emails. Speaking of which, today I want to feature something that one of my subscribers, Michael, sent in (emphasis added): ===== Hi William, You shared a lot of wisdom in that one post. We started on our homestead a few years ago after decades serving in...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader Last week I came across a post on X that stopped me mid-scroll. A homesteader admitted they deeply regret buying their homestead property. The conversation around it racked up over 40,000 views, and the replies rolled in. Reading through them, I noticed something. The regrets people were complaining about weren't really about the land or a lack of knowledge. They all came from the same mistake, one I see constantly in my consulting work: building the dream before you have one...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
26 million people across England and Wales were just told they can’t water their gardens with a hosepipe. It's a strange sight in a country famous for rain and grey skies. Meanwhile, across Europe, the Rhine, the Danube, the Po, and the Loire rivers are all sitting at record lows, and we are baking through our fifth heatwave of the summer. Almost exactly a year ago, I sent an email about running some water math. Back then it was back-of-the-envelope theory about how much water you need. This...
2 months ago • 2 min read