The Land
Northeast Alabama has always worked the land. This section covers the farmers, gardeners, and homesteaders of the Appalachian foothills — the people who grow things, raise things, and build a life from the ground up.
In 2017, Michele Hornsby's son Justin died by suicide at 26. The spot where he died on their property became the seed of Redbird Willow Farm — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit healing farm with 120 animals that has become a place where grieving people come to breathe.
Samuel and John Mark Sawyer turned their family's old produce warehouse in downtown Anniston into a 6,000-square-foot hydroponic urban farm growing 24,000 heads of lettuce and 300 pounds of gourmet mushrooms a week. They supply over 35,000 students through the Alabama Farm to School Program and sell wellness products from their storefront on Wilmer Avenue. Samuel also runs Chaha Outdoors, an outdoor wellness initiative for the Calhoun County community.
One in Maine, one in Quebec, a generation apart. Between them they worked out how to make a living on a hand-scale farm without a tractor. Every market garden in America runs on their method, including the beds I dug in Alabama.
She started on a few rows in the Skagit Valley and turned specialty cut flowers into a movement. My wife took her course. We built the farm Floret taught people they could build. Then we lost it.
Dispatches on dirt, chickens, and the people who perform them — from a man who farmed for real and lost the farm anyway. The Back Forty, in print.
A book about the people who taught me to love the land — and about the farm I dreamed, built, and did not keep. Half portrait, half confession.
An open letter to Wendell Berry from a man who planted dahlias on a hillside in Calhoun County, Alabama, watched it fail, and went back inside to write about it.
The man used the word 'sovereignty' four times. About chickens. My grandmother never named her chickens. She said if you name them you can't eat them, and if you can't eat them they're just pets that smell bad.
She was named one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. Then she left the parish, moved to a farm in North Georgia, raised chickens, and wrote about what she found there.
I asked him for an interview. He has said yes to essentially every interview request for twenty years, so my odds are good. Here is the letter, published before I know if he replied.
He went back to his grandfather's farm in Western North Carolina when most homesteaders were buying new land. That is the part of his story I want to ask about. Not the YouTube channel. The returning.
He is ninety-one years old and still on the farm in Henry County, Kentucky. I am a flower farmer in Calhoun County, Alabama. I mailed him a letter. I do not expect a reply. I am publishing the letter here because it is honest and because that is enough.
Salatin farms the same Shenandoah Valley land his parents settled in 1961 and has spent forty years arguing that industrial food is both an environmental catastrophe and a theological failure. He is loud about this.
His grandfather bought the family farm in 1932. Justin left, went to Honduras and Australia to study permaculture, came back broke and sick with Lyme disease, and started farming the same land again. He now has a million YouTube subscribers.
He is ninety-one years old. He is still on the farm in Henry County, Kentucky. He was right about most of it.
Wendell Berry has been writing about the South's real wound for sixty years. Not the wound of violence or poverty, the wound of leaving. The thing that happens to a place when everyone smart enough to leave does.
I grew up behind a Walmart. One world ran on six crops. The other ran on ten thousand. It took me thirty years to find the through-line.