AgStacker Community Newsletter
February 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.
This month I’m also really excited to say the first AgStacker Roundtable is tomorrow.
I could not be more excited, and if I’m honest, a bit nervous too, because building community always feels like a leap of faith at the start. Here’s to trying anyway, and to seeing who shows up!
With the interest so far, I’m going to run the Roundtable on Zoom rather than Substack Live, so we can all talk together properly and it can feel like a real discussion. I’ll email paid subscribers with clear instructions for joining, so keep an eye out for that.
I’ll also post a recording and recap on Substack next week, so if you can’t make it, you won’t miss out.
The Roundtable is for paid subscribers, but if you’d like to join this first one I’m running a 20% off promotion until tomorrow.
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: Tanja Westfall-Greiter
This month I’m delighted to feature Tanja Westfall-Greiter as AgStacker of the Month. Tanja’s writing blends hard earned experience with real humility, the kind that makes you feel braver about trying things and more willing to slow down and pay attention. After a life changing accident she stepped away from her work as an educator and consultant and found her way back to the land as a market gardener, and you can feel that teacher’s instinct in everything she shares.
What I love most is how practical and context led she is. Tanja shifted from the conventional farming she grew up with in Wisconsin to a no till approach, refining it into what she calls low input gardening, living pathways, and self sowing cultures. Her weekly newsletter is driven by what is actually happening in her garden, with a particular love for fall and winter veg, and she is not afraid to challenge bad advice when it spreads online. If you want gardening guidance that is grounded, thoughtful, and quietly confidence building, start here.
Here are a few pieces from Tanja and other community voices that resonated with me this month:
Tanja’s “low input” approach is the antidote to expensive, performative gardening. She shares the hard lessons that pushed her away from clean beds and bought in fixes, and towards living paths, self sowing crops, and a system that gets more resilient the less you interfere.
“To the untrained eye, this might look like a nightmare, but it wasn’t. It was the greatest gift a garden can give: self-sown crops. I had selected plants for seed-saving in this plot and harvested the seeds in mid-summer. All of those beautiful greens had reappeared, thanks to the many rogue seeds that had escaped.”
This is such a simple idea, and it feels like gold once you read it. Tanja treats the garden like a classroom and keeps a running “lessons learned” page each year, so her future self is not reinventing the wheel every season, especially when timing really matters for fall and winter crops.
“A garden is a classroom without walls, full of teachers.”
Tanja does not just defend no dig, she explains it, and she does it with the kind of clarity that cuts through influencer noise. If you have ever wondered whether minimal disturbance really matters, this is a firm, evidence led case for treating soil as a living ecosystem, not just “substrate”.
“No, it is not a trend. Some social media gods might have presented it as such, but low-till or minimal tillage is a viable, economical, and ethical approach to growing food.”
From the Community:
Sam cuts through the homesteading aesthetic and makes it feel accessible again. This is a grounded reminder that it is not about land or the perfect set up, it is about the daily shift from consuming to making, learning, and doing.
“It’s that shift in perspective—from consumer to creator—that makes someone a homesteader. Not the acreage. Not the livestock. Not the big farmhouse in the country.”
Kody turns a snowstorm feeding job into a proper lesson in on farm fertility. If you like the practical maths of regeneration, this is a great read on how unrolling hay can build soil, balance nutrients, and nudge pastures towards more diversity.
“Hay imports nutrients from other farms in a complete nutritional profile that synthetic fertilizers cannot compete with.”
This is the kind of post you bookmark and come back to. John has built a genuinely useful, UK leaning resource guide for anyone trying to integrate trees with crops or livestock, whether you are planning a farm scale system or just experimenting in a garden.
“This is a living document, a constantly evolving reference list for anyone who is contemplating, planning or implementing the growing of crops and/or livestock with trees, from farm scale enterprises to domestic scale gardens and allotments.”
Rachel writes from a rare vantage point, finance brain and farming boots, and asks the awkward question many people dodge. If regenerative systems work ecologically, what happens when they hit a food economy built to reward volume, predictability, and speed.
“Regenerative projects do not fail because they are weak. They struggle because our food system rewards volume efficiency, not ecosystem health.”
Jackie’s week is pure smallholding reality, mud, fencing chaos, lambing nerves, and that creeping sense that spring will suddenly arrive and you will be behind. Then she swerves into something deeper, a fierce little reminder to keep doing the work for the sake of the work, not for the audience.
“I have realised that my focus must be [almost] entirely on the being and the doing, and not going beyond. The Machine/The Devil would have me set aside my spinning wheel, pause in my writing, delay yet further my growing - in order to consider how I will sell or share or disseminate the resulting product.”
This one is for anyone who is good at winning but quietly feels hollow anyway. Daniel uses farming as a mirror for high performance culture and makes a simple case that a lot of us are not burnt out, we are underfed, not in calories, but in connection.
“You are not broken. You are not ungrateful. You are not lazy. You might simply be… underfed. Not in calories. In connection.”
This is funny, blunt, and genuinely important. Kevin digs into a problem most of us are only just clocking, microplastics in municipal compost, and makes a strong case for on farm fertility you can actually trace, even when the rules make it harder.
“We have been sold a bill of goods that doesn’t do what they promised. And they are contaminating the compost supply chain. Most larger organic growers have to buy compost and the municipal made compost is cheap and easy.”
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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Support AgStackers and join the Roundtable
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.
Oh, Helen. Thanks so much for giving me an outside perspective on my work. I sometimes can't see beyond the mirror and ask myself what the heck I'm doing here, but you just reminded me. Brought tears to my eyes! And thank you for working so hard to create an AgStacker community!
It’s a very good thing you are doing and building. I will be joining but probably not talking. Since my TBI a year and half ago, I developed a bit of a lisp and as was the case for me, even before the fall, my mind works faster than I can put it into words. I will try to read all the wonderful thinking and writing that you have put together. I’m hoping to get the interview with Peter done in the next couple of weeks. He’s a busy man. In between milking cows,raising pigs and working on his projects made of wood. My part is done and he is working on his answers. I have to be patient, which I find extremely difficult to be. I would encourage everyone to find your local farmers and buy directly from them. We get our gorgeous angus beef and chicken from the Shoemakers at “Living Traditions Farm” and our pork from our friend Peter Falk. God Bless, Al