AgStacker Community Newsletter
March Edition
Welcome back to the AgStackers Community Newsletter, a monthly place to spotlight writers sharing thoughtful work about food, farming, and the wider food system.
If you’ve ever tried to find a proper home for farming, gardening, or food system writing on Substack and realised there isn’t really a category for it, you’re in the right place. Whether you write, read, or simply care about how food is grown, you’re invited to join in and help shape what we’re building.
I’m also really excited to say the AgStacker Roundtable is tomorrow. I could not be more excited, because building community always feels like a leap of faith at the start. Thank you to everyone who joined last month, and to everyone who has been replying and showing interest since.
We’ll be running this month’s Roundtable on Zoom again, so we can all talk together properly and it can feel like a real discussion.
When: Sunday 15 March at 2pm UK time (10am Eastern, 9am Central, 8am Mountain, 7am Pacific)
I’ll also post a recording and recap on Substack next week, so if you can’t make it live, you won’t miss out.
Take your time with the work shared here, and if you feel inspired, please join the conversation. This is your community as much as mine.
AgStacker Of the Month: Cheryl Queen of Markets
This month I’m really pleased to feature Cheryl Queen of Markets as AgStacker of the Month. Cheryl has spent more than two decades running farmers’ markets in London, which means she writes about food from the point where ideals meet reality, where producers, shoppers, prices, seasons, and politics all collide in the same muddy square. She was once dubbed the “Queen of Markets” by the Evening Standard, and instead of shrugging it off she has done the best thing possible with it, she has made it into a lens for telling better, more human food stories.
What I love about Cheryl’s work is how wide her curiosity is, and how grounded it stays. She is interested in land justice and food sovereignty, animal welfare and food miles, but she brings you back to the actual market, the place where local people shop and where the consequences of policy show up in ordinary decisions. Expect interviews with food writers about their favourite markets, producer stories, and food history and politics that never loses sight of the fact that everyone deserves to eat good food. If you want writing that makes you look at your next food shop differently, start here.
Here are a few pieces from Cheryl and other community voices that resonated with me this month:
This is grief written through food, and it is devastating because it is so specific. Cheryl shows how love lives in routines and small purchases and planned treats, and how death turns all of that into evidence, the unopened cheeses, the jam, the “it’s alright” compliment you would give anything to hear again. It is also, quietly, a piece about community, the way a life can be measured by who turns up to eat and remember.
“I ate them resentfully, willing my dad into the room to share their plump sweetness. More foods rattled into my presence reminding me how often food represents love.”
Cheryl has zero patience for “farmers’ market” as a vibe, and I love her for it. This is a clear-eyed look at how the label gets borrowed by markets selling imported produce and wholesale fruit, and how that confusion quietly undercuts the farmers who are actually trying to make a living selling what they grow. It will make you look harder at what is on the first stall, and ask better questions.
“What’s the harm you may ask….it harms farmers who are trying their best to make a living, selling direct to customers. It harms the integrity of real farmers’ markets that have strict rules and stick to them.”
This is the antidote to lazy “farmers’ markets are pricey” takes. Cheryl uses Stoke Newington’s all-organic market to show what it looks like when you actually hold the line, clear rules, a level playing field for producers, and a short chain where the money goes to the people doing the work. I also love how practical it is about the trade-offs, what you can’t sell, what you make exceptions for, and why those small decisions are what protect the whole thing.
“Here everyone’s on a level playing field so sometimes I like to describe this market we’ve created this little model it’s a little economic bubble, in this bubble there’s only organic stuff.”
From the Community:
This is rural politics written like a short story, funny, tense, and painfully familiar if you’ve ever dealt with rented ground. A young soil conservationist gets pulled into a land dispute, and you can feel the whole mess of pride, paranoia, and “shenanigans” tightening with every line.
“Despite Jeff’s reputation for being slightly excitable, everybody knew he worked hard, and I doubt I have ever met a farmer with a bigger chip on his shoulder. But in choosing farming, he had traded compound interest for compound problems.”
Abey Rae Scaglione tackles one of those awkward gaps between farming reality and modern food language. This is a calm, practical piece on what “lamb” actually means in meat production, and why the ethical question is less about age and more about how animals are raised and slaughtered.
“I have come to accept that it is not the length of a farm animal’s life that truly matters. Instead, we should collectively focus on the importance of how animals are treated, raised, and slaughtered.”
This is one of those pieces that changes how you see a supermarket staple. Demi 🐾 lays out the scale of shrimp farming, explains what eyestalk ablation actually is, and makes the case that better welfare is not just possible but often better for producers too, if we stop falling for “welfare washing.” I’d genuinely love to read more about what high-welfare shrimp farming looks like in practice, on a real farm, from breeding through to slaughter.
“Eyestalk ablation (ESA) occurs by cutting, crushing, or burning one or both eyestalks. It is carried out without pain relief and causes extreme distress to the animal, as indicated by their aversive behavioural responses.”
John Klar lays out the case for local meat processing as a food security issue, not a niche farming debate. Using New Hampshire’s HB 396 as the hook, he argues that decades of federal rules have centralised slaughter, hollowed out local infrastructure, and left small farms and consumers with fewer choices and higher prices.
“The New Hampshire bill reflects a revolt by states against longstanding federal laws that have centralized U.S. meat processing, crushed small producers, and prevented citizens from transacting with one another.”
This is a smart, readable dispatch from the London Vet Show that gets past the hype and into the real question, what happens when AI starts mediating the human animal relationship on farms. Theodore Whyte sketches both the promise (better monitoring, earlier interventions) and the risk (tech enabling more intensity), then lands on the big issue, regulation is not keeping up.
“We are at a crossroads I think. There’s one positive direction where we genuinely put animal welfare first – where this technology is about empowering farmers to make better decisions.
“But there’s also the dystopian direction – where it allows farming to become more intensive and, in effect, takes the human out.”
This is a quietly beautiful reminder that resilience is built in tiny, unglamorous habits. Soil Sister - Kylie Woodham writes about heat, water, and the daily choreography of keeping a garden alive, and somehow makes buckets under the sink feel like a kind of devotion.
“In our kitchen sink sits a “sink tub” - a smaller tub inside the sink that catches all the water you use throughout the day. I’m careful to collect as much as possible. It’s amazing how it adds up.”
Liz Reitzig makes a clean, persuasive link between food security as a principle and the reality of who gets protected when policy gets written. The piece is part call to action, part reality check, and it lands hardest where she points out that legal immunity is not a neutral move, it is the state choosing who carries the risk.
“Bayer has spent over $9 million lobbying for exemption from liability for harm its chemicals like glyphosate might cause. The Constitution guarantees a trial for those who are harmed.”
This is one of those posts that stays with you because it refuses the easy story. Ben Raskin names the institutional failure without turning his son into a symbol, and he shows how recovery can look like tiny, stubborn steps, a safe place, a bit of paid work, and adults who actually listen. Farming is not presented as a cure, more like a bridge back to confidence and belonging.
“As time went on Ivan would get out of the car more often and even help for half an hour mulching trees or removing old plastic tree guards. This may not seem like much but he had had so little exercise for more than a year, and this was really the only time we got him out of the house and active.”
This is a gentle but bracing dismantling of the self sufficiency badge, especially for anyone who has ever confused doing it all with being strong. Seasons of a Simple Life makes the case that the old ways were never solitary, they were networks, and that real resilience is built when food, skills, and help are allowed to circulate instead of being carried like a private test of worth.
“What truly sustains- what has always sustained- is interdependence. The web of relationships that allows each household to be capable without being alone.”
This one has that rare mix of bite and tenderness. Adam starts with resentment and rotisserie chicken, then quietly flips the whole thing into a love letter to the kind of intelligence you only notice when you stop treating farming like a “sector” and start listening to the people inside it. It is also a reminder that agriculture holds a lot of people up, even when they are too tired or angry to admit it.
“Some of the most pungent brainpower hides in farmyards and old quonsets, and you only find it if you shut up long enough to listen.”
AgStackers is a community effort, and your voice is what will shape it.
Get Involved
Reply to this post with your links, ideas, and anything you want me to see for next month’s AgStacker. If you’ve published something you’re proud of, or you’ve read a piece you think the community would love, drop it in the comments and I’ll pull from there when I’m curating the next newsletter.
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If you find value in this community and want to help it grow, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support keeps AgStackers thriving and independent, and it also gives you access to the monthly AgStacker Roundtable if you’d like a more connected space to talk, swap ideas, and help shape what we build next.
Thanks for being part of the community. Let’s see where we can take this together.
Until next month,
H x
If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.
Great collection. Thanks for doing this. Sure does make finding relevant stuff on Substack easier!
Delighted to be featured in this, Helen! Thanks so much! 🦐