AgStacker Community Newsletter
January 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 share something new for the AgStacker community: The AgStacker Roundtable.
Starting in February, the Roundtable will be a monthly live discussion on Substack for paid subscribers, built for proper conversation, the kind that’s hard to have in comments. I’m hoping it becomes a place where we can share what we’re seeing, swap useful tips and tricks, and, where it makes sense, help each other promote our work or even spark collaborations.
It’ll run on the first Sunday after AgStacker, at 1pm UK time (8am US Eastern), and I’ll always share a recap afterwards for anyone who can’t make it live.
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: Sally Morgan
This month I’m delighted to feature Sally Morgan as AgStacker of the Month. Sally brings that rare mix of real world experience and deep care for the details, the kind of voice that makes you feel both more grounded and more capable. She’s thoughtful, practical, and quietly radical in the way she keeps coming back to what actually works on the land and in the garden.
Sally has worked with organisations like the Soil Association, which gives her a valuable inside view of how food and farming systems are shaped, and where the gaps still are. What I love most is how she translates all that into something usable for the rest of us, especially around regenerative gardening and small-scale food production. Her writing is full of the kind of hard won clarity that helps you grow better food, and think better about what growing is really for.
Here are a few pieces from Sally and other community voices that resonated with me this month:
Sally connects the dots between what we spray on fields, what we spray in gardens, and even what we put on our pets, and it’s hard to unsee once you’ve read it. This is a clear, evidence-led piece that asks a simple question, why are we still normalising chemicals that ripple through soil life, pollinators, and the birds right outside our windows.
“Chaired by Helen Browning of the Soil Association, the ORFC debate kicked off with Michael Antoniou, Professor of Molecular Genetics at Kings College, London who said glyphosate was deceptively toxic and the only safe dose was zero.”
This is a gorgeous little autumn wander that turns into a genuinely useful mini guide. Sally shows you how to “read” a hedgerow by its fruits and colour, then walks through a simple way to estimate its age, with just your pacing and a species count.
“Basically, you pace out a 30 yard stretch of hedge and count the number of native tree and shrub species in that stretch and then repeat this a number of times along different lengths of the hedge to get an average.”
If you’ve been side-eyeing the word “regenerative” in farming, Sally does the useful thing and brings it back to first principles, then shows how it translates to a garden. This is a practical, hopeful guide to moving beyond “less harm” and towards soil, water, and biodiversity that actually improve because you’re there.
“I think it means a shift in mindset, from simply maintaining a garden to actively restoring and enhancing the health of the soil, ecosystem, and climate.”
From the Community:
Laverne captures that moment every grower knows, when you realise you’re back on the annual treadmill again. This is a practical, encouraging case for edible perennials that actually feed you, not just “nice” landscaping, and it’ll have you eyeing your garden like a long term investment.
“I want a garden that’s less work, but still produces legitimate amounts of food for my family.”
Emily’s flour field trip is the best kind of food writing, part memory, part economics, part proper craft lesson. You’ll come away understanding why organic bread flour behaves differently, and why knowing your miller matters more than ever.
“This year I want to focus on making food for people I know with ingredients from people I have a relationship with.”
Adam takes apart the “$3 healthy meal” claim for what it really is, a spreadsheet answer to a lived reality. This is a sharp, humane read on why affordability is not accessible, and why food policy keeps failing the people it’s meant to serve.
“The simple fact is that affordability on paper means nothing if it can’t be practiced in real life.”
Julie turns a very real smallholding headache into a useful lesson fast. If you’ve ever had mysterious missing eggs, this is the practical, slightly brutal read you want, and it lands on a bigger truth about fixing the problem behind the problem.
“It’s like that with so many things in life.
There’s the problem. And there’s the problem behind the problem.
Until you address them both, you still have a problem.”
Matteo reads the Ozempic headlines and answers with a full-throated rallying cry for real food. It’s fiery, funny, and oddly energising, a reminder that the natural food movement is about freedom, not perfection.
“I believe that the imprisonment which industrial food places over our health, our environment and our communities, means that the movement for natural food is one of greatest freedom struggles of our time.”
Steph writes the most honest version of “eat local” I’ve read in a while, practical, imperfect, and grounded in real budgets and real fatigue. If you’ve ever felt guilty for buying oranges or supermarket bread, this is the permission slip you didn’t know you needed.
“Local, for me, is a patchwork.
What local does not look like is consistency. It shifts week to week, month to month.”
Carrie explains Biodiversity Net Gain without the jargon, and then shows how quickly it’s being hollowed out in the name of “growth”. It’s a clear, slightly furious read about why nature is an easy scapegoat, and why building homes and protecting habitats should never have been framed as a trade-off.
“If development takes from nature, development should help put something back.”
Jackie’s January catch up is part seed clear-out, part gentle wrestle with “analogue” as a trend, and part ORFC debrief with the sessions that actually felt useful. It’s a warm, honest read about staying grounded while still letting yourself be inspired.
“It has always had the ability to over-inspire, and cause me to dream up extravagant futures which really aren’t mine.”
This is a calm, bracing reminder that “simple” is not the same as “easy”, and that convenience often just hides the work somewhere else. If you’ve ever felt the mental load of modern life but couldn’t quite name it, this will land.
“Simplicity is not a lifestyle aesthetic. It is a commitment to carry the weight of what sustains a life, whatever form that may take.”
AgStackers is a community effort, and your voice is what will shape it.
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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.