I grow flowers for a living. Grew, anyway. For several years, in clay soil, in hundred-degree July heat, on nine acres near the Chief Ladiga Trail. Nobody ever watched me pull a drip line through a field and described it as reclaiming something ancient.
Then I lost the farm.
That's a different book — the memoir, Broken Ground, is about the losing. This one isn't about me. This one is about the land, and the enormous industry of people who have decided that having a philosophy about chickens is the same thing as raising them.
The Back Forty is a collection of essays and — I'll be honest — some deadpan reporting on the homesteading-influencer complex. The thirty-seven-minute video about chickens in which a man uses the word "sovereignty" four times. The eggmobile. The merch table behind the eggmobile. I am not here to tell you Joel Salatin is wrong; I wrote a whole profile explaining why he mostly isn't. I am here to tell you that somewhere between Salatin and the internet, something happened, and I was outside when it did.
Underneath the jokes is the part I actually believe: the impulse is correct. People want to grow something, know where their food comes from, put their hands in dirt that hasn't been processed. Wendell Berry has been saying so since before YouTube existed. The land is trying to tell us something and most of us are filming ourselves not listening.
The first chapter is already published — I Watched a Man Explain Chickens to Me for Twenty-Two Minutes. The rest are coming, one at a time, here first.
If you want to know when the book is finished — and read the chapters as I write them — put your email in below. No money, no pledge, no "support my writing." Just the next chapter when it lands.
Matt Headley is a former pastor, flower farmer, and classically trained singer from Northeast Alabama. The Back Forty runs at southernlegends.blog/back-forty.
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