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Company of Farmers
The people who taught me to love the land — and the farm I dreamed, built, and did not keep. Half portrait, half confession.
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Books & Literature
Reading the South
The South has always been a place people write about — and write from. Books, shelves, and the reading behind the writing.
Forthcoming from Matt Headley
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I Was Outside
Dispatches on dirt, chickens, and the people who perform them — from a man who farmed for real and lost the farm anyway.
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Forthcoming
Tend: Before the Wedding
Five conversations before you say I do.
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Forthcoming
Plainspoken Blueprint
Message first. Brand second. Website last.
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Forthcoming
God & the Algorithm
How I became more rested and less productive.
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Forthcoming
Broken Ground
A memoir.
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The Faith & Agrarian Shelf
Faith, land, and vocation — the books that shaped how Matt thinks about the ground, and the reading behind the forthcoming Company of Farmers. Alabama titles first.
Faith & the Land
Alabama
Born-Again Dirt: Farming to the Glory of God
by Noah Sanders
The book that named a movement of faith-driven growers. Faith, family, and vocation stop being three things you balance and become one thing you do. Foreword by Joel Salatin.
I drove down from Weaver to Noah's Redeeming the Dirt conference at a camp in Coosa County, October 2018 — still a pastor, years from my own dirt, looking for permission. This is where the whole shelf starts for me.
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
by Wendell Berry
Berry's foundational argument on the cost of leaving the land. "The impeded stream is the one that sings" — the line that runs through my whole body of work.
The century. Place as fidelity — you belong to a piece of ground the way you belong to a marriage.
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
by Wendell Berry
The gathered agrarian essays — membership, the body and the earth, the gift of good land. Berry's theology of place in one volume.
The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting & Caring for All God's Creation
by Joel Salatin
Salatin's most overtly theological book — the argument that honoring the design of a pig is a way of honoring the Designer. The stand, with the reason named.
The megaphone. Where Salatin says out loud that this is about the Creator, not just carbon.
The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith
by Walter Brueggemann
Land theology from the Old Testament — Jubilee, the anti-accumulation statutes, the promise and the danger of place. The scholarly floor under the whole agrarian-faith argument.
How the Ground Works
You Can Farm
by Joel Salatin
Polyface Farm's prophet on building a real farm economy from nothing. The nuts-and-bolts companion to the swagger.
The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook
by Jean-Martin Fortier
The small-plot, high-yield method — the wheel-hoe, the permanent beds, the human-scale market garden. (That's a wheel-hoe in Noah Sanders's field.)
The New Organic Grower
by Eliot Coleman
The craft bible of tools-and-beds market gardening. Coleman is the reason the method is a discipline and not a guess.
Dirt to Soil: One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture
by Gabe Brown
The soil-regeneration story — cover crops, no-till, the five principles. How dead ground comes back to life.
Edible & Permaculture Landscapes
Permaculture Chickens & the Great American Farm Tour
by Justin Rhodes
The Abundant Permaculture homesteader — chicken-centered permaculture design, told plainly. Proof the agrarian story travels when you tell it honestly.
The homecoming. Going back to the grandfather's land, broke and sick, and filming it anyway.
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
by Toby Hemenway
The best on-ramp to edible permaculture landscapes — guilds, food forests, turning a yard into a living system. Where the backyard grower starts.
Edible Forest Gardens (Vols. 1–2)
by Dave Jacke & Eric Toensmeier
The deep manual on edible permaculture landscapes — designing a forest garden as a layered, self-renewing ecology. The reference the serious designers keep on the shelf.
Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers
by Mark Shepard
Permaculture scaled to a working farm — perennial polyculture, tree crops, an agriculture built to outlast the farmer. The commercial edge of the edible-landscape idea.
The One-Straw Revolution
by Masanobu Fukuoka
Natural farming as a spiritual discipline — do-nothing farming, the emptying-out that is also a kind of prayer. Faith-adjacent, and the quietest book on the shelf.
The Living Soil Handbook: The No-Till Grower's Guide to Ecological Market Gardening
by Jesse Frost
The no-till market-garden bible from Jesse Frost of No-Till Growers and Rough Draft Farmstead in Kentucky. Feed the soil biology, disturb it as little as possible, let the ground do the work.
I was a No-Till Growers Patreon member and learned a ton from Jesse. This is the method book behind a lot of how I thought about my own ground.
The Suburban Micro-Farm: Modern Solutions for Busy People
by Amy Stross
Permaculture scaled to a suburban lot — how a quarter-acre yard becomes a real food-producing micro-farm. The most practical on-ramp for people without acreage.
Edible Landscaping
by Rosalind Creasy
The founding text of edible landscapes — designing a yard that is beautiful and feeds you at the same time. Where the ornamental and the productive stop being separate ideas.
Flower Farming
Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden
by Erin Benzakein
The north star of specialty cut-flower farming — Floret is the standard the whole field measures against.
The farm Heather and I actually built and lost was a flower farm. Floret was the dream we were reaching for. This one is not just admiration.
The Imagination of Place
Jayber Crow
by Wendell Berry
The Port William novel — a bachelor barber's life measured against a river town and its membership. Berry's fidelity-to-place argument, felt instead of argued.
The reading behind Company of Farmers. Start with Matt's profile of Noah Sanders.
Ministry & Formation
The shelf behind Ecclesia Community and the Plainspoken Blueprint's formation arc. Fresh expressions, contemplative prayer, incarnational ministry.
Blue Like Jazz
by Donald Miller
The book that made it okay to be confused about faith in your twenties. Still the best gateway drug to an honest Christianity.
I passed this around like contraband in my first ministry job. Still right.
Find the book →A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
by Donald Miller
Miller's best — the story of rewriting your own story. What makes a life worth living? What makes a character worth following?
This one hit harder than Blue Like Jazz. Story as the shape of a life.
Find the book →The Forgotten Ways
by Alan Hirsch
The missional DNA argument — Apostolic Genius as six elements every healthy movement embeds. The ecclesiology that shaped how I think about Ecclesia.
Find the book →The New Parish
by Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens, Dwight Friesen
Place-based church. The theological case for rooted, neighborhood-anchored ministry. This is what a fresh expression looks like grounded.
Find the book →Everything Belongs
by Richard Rohr
Contemplative spirituality as the center — not the edge — of Christian formation. The non-dualistic prayer that makes room for the real self.
Find the book →Flesh and Bone and The Church
by Hugh Halter
Incarnational ministry — showing up in bodies, in neighborhoods, in the mess. The theology of the limping guide.
Find the book →The Sacred Overlap
by J.R. Briggs
Ministry in the margins — the between-spaces where most of the actual kingdom work happens.
Find the book →Liturgy of the Ordinary
by Tish Harrison Warren
The sacred in the day's small acts. Morning prayer that starts with making the bed. The most honest spiritual formation book of the last decade.
Find the book →Affiliate links support Southern Legends and independent bookstores via Bookshop.org.
Business & Messaging
The reading behind Gather Studio and the Plainspoken Blueprint methodology. Message clarity, solo business, the war against resistance.
Building a StoryBrand 2.0
by Donald Miller
The framework behind Plainspoken Blueprint. Clarify the message or be ignored. The hero is always the customer, never the brand.
The foundation. Message before brand before website — in that order, every time.
Business Made Simple
by Donald Miller
The daily operating system for a small business. Part business school, part field guide. Miller's most practical book.
How to Grow Your Small Business
by Donald Miller
The six steps — every small business doing more with less. Read after StoryBrand.
This Is Marketing
by Seth Godin
Marketing as service, not manipulation. The smallest viable market. Minimum viable audience. Godin's clearest statement.
Company of One
by Paul Jarvis
Why staying small is the smartest play for solo builders. Growth as a choice, not a default. This is the Gather Studio operating posture.
The War of Art
by Steven Pressfield
Resistance is real. Shipping is the answer. The internal battle every creator fights — and the pro mentality that wins it.
Perennial Seller
by Ryan Holiday
Building work that lasts — the antidote to the dopamine algorithm. Ship the thing that will still matter in ten years.
Affiliate links support Southern Legends and independent bookstores via Bookshop.org.
Southern Publications Worth Reading
Magazines and journals doing serious work on Southern culture and literature.
Reading Notes
Matt Headley
I'm Writing a Book About the Land. And the People Who Perform It.
I Collected Farmers Before I Ever Kept a Farm
Flannery O'Connor Kept Peacocks
Jesmyn Ward Stayed in DeLisle
The Grotesque Is the Gospel
The Trail at Night
Wendell Berry Has Been Saying This for Sixty Years
I'm Writing a Memoir. Here's What It's About.
The Book About AI and Faith That I Didn't Know I Was Writing
I'm Writing a Book About the One Thing Most Businesses Get Backwards
The Book I'm Writing for the Year Before the Wedding
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