In November of 2021, during a heavy snowstorm in Melville, Montana, my family's ranch was one of three ranches that met to discuss the future of our operations. On the surface, things were going well. Each ranch was profitable, and we felt that the ecological health of the lands under our combined management was robust and improving.
Yet we were all troubled by the trajectory of the mainstream food system we sold livestock into every year. That system was built for volume, efficiency, and corporate profit. In the same way a canal is built to get water from point A to point B, the status quo American food marketplace was built to get pounds of product efficiently to market.
The problem? It tended to treat careful management of soils, streams, and biodiversity as costs to be eliminated. This approach reduces nutrient density, turns good work into tedious labor, puts animals in crates, degrades both land fertility, and wildlife habitat over time.
We wanted to build a new kind of marketplace for food that would function like a stream, but where good inefficiencies like wends and eddies, logs and riffles support life of all kinds and the water from a stream ends up being much cleaner than that of the canal. The thing is, life makes its home in inefficiencies.
Can you think of anything more inefficient, or more worthwhile, than raising a child? Each child is different, each develops at their own pace. Patience, kindness, discipline, time spent, all of these things are part of the hard work of love. Love is inefficient, and caring for the land is like that too.
Read the rest at Old Salt Co-op
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