AgStacker Community Newsletter
April 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 12th April at 2pm (UK time). That’s 10am Eastern, 9am Central, 8am Mountain, and 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: Tim Connolly
This month’s AgStacker of the Month is Tim Connolly, a US based food security supporter and a steady presence in this community. He does not work in food or farming, but he shows up with real care and curiosity, and he is brilliant at spotting the writing that deserves a wider audience.
Tim publishes Mile Wide and Inch Deep and runs Grange Hall, where he shares and boosts other voices across the food and farming world. One of my favourite Tim lines is that growing your own food or buying locally produced food is a quiet act of rebellion, and that spirit runs through everything he does.
Here are a few pieces from Tim and other community voices that resonated with me this month:
There is something both funny and infuriating about watching no till and soil health get treated like a fresh scientific revelation, when plenty of people have been proving it with their own fields and their own finances for years. If you want a quick reminder that the old knowledge still matters, and that the “new” solutions are often just the ones we stopped valuing, start here.
“Big Sigh from me - Folks who farm and grow their own food using regenerative practices that have been around for a long time have to wait for Science stamp their approval of what we already know.”
This is a proper love letter to what you are building with the Roundtable, and it also shows why Tim matters in this space. He is not just recapping, he is translating the feeling of it, the mix of hope, frustration, and determination, and he is doing what community builders do best, connecting people, naming what is at stake, and inviting more people to step in. I also love how he lands on the practical theme that kept coming up, local food and home growing as a quiet rebellion, and then pushes it one step further by asking the harder question, rebellion against what, and what do we actually stand for.
“Growing your own food as a quiet act of rebellion was a theme that seemed to resonate in our discussion. Perhaps that is where our strength lies.”
This is basically the AgStackers origin story in post form, the frustration of being scattered across vague tabs, the sense that agriculture writing is everywhere on Substack but weirdly hard to find, and the refusal to stay invisible while crypto and comics get neat little signposts. Tim is doing two things at once here, pushing Substack to take food and farming seriously as a category, and building a practical workaround in the meantime with Grange Hall as a free, open noticeboard for writers who want allies and readers who want to find them.
“What about all things Agriculture? There are a bunch of us. A big bunch who write across the spectrum of all things growing and planting and harvesting and raising our food.”
From the Community:
This post from Eli is one of the clearest explanations I have seen of how small farms survive, not through vibes or virtue, but through ordinary people showing up week after week with cash and appetite. The “Grey” character is the perfect example of a customer who does more than buy, he stabilises the whole system by taking the risk out of harvest day, and turning leftovers into plans instead of losses. It is also a reminder that when you buy direct you are not just shopping, you are helping keep a whole alternative food network alive.
“Customers don’t just take part in CSAs, farmers markets and online small farm sales. Customers create these fresh food networks.”
This is lambing season as it actually happens, the day you thought you had off, the dash through snow in whatever you are wearing, the relief of a healthy wobbling lamb and the gut punch of the one you cannot save. Farmer Sam👩🌾🐑🌱 is honest about the emotional arithmetic of a small flock, where losing one is both normal and still a real loss, and she captures that strange mix of exhaustion and purpose that keeps you checking cameras at 2am anyway.
“Sure, there is exhaustion in this life, and worry—the particular kind that has you checking cameras for new lambs at 2am...
But there is also joy, and beauty, and a connection to nature that I wouldn’t trade for anything.”
This is a thoughtful piece about natural capital that does not fall into either easy camp. Aimee Graville can see why investment models are tempting, because restoration needs money and scale, but she keeps returning to the uncomfortable bit, land is not just an asset class. When carbon and biodiversity credits start outcompeting crops and grazing, the question stops being whether nature can be priced and becomes who gets to decide what land is for, and who is left living with the consequences.
“Land produces food, carries heritage and sustains communities. Land holds cultural identity and intergenerational knowledge. Land connects soil health, human health, and local economies in ways that are not easily captured in financial models.”
This is a light, warm little provocation that still lands a real point. Red Jasper Farm & Sanctuary nudges us away from the lazy hierarchy where humans are “obviously” the smartest, and instead pays attention to the kinds of intelligence we tend to ignore, body language, collective problem solving, and the quiet competence of animals who do not need a manual to be themselves. The ant section is especially fun, because it reminds you just how much of what we call civilisation is not uniquely ours.
“According to current scientific records, humans began farming about 12,000 years ago. It’s believed that ants began farming around 66 million years ago, so needless to say we were a little late to the party.”
This is gardening as a messy, funny, slightly feral ecosystem, not a tidy checklist of tasks. Ruben’s big point is simple and true, if you want crops you need allies, lizards, sparrows, bees, whatever can help you keep the balance when the pests and weather turn up. It is also a great reminder that “failure” seasons are often the ones where you finally see how the whole system actually works.
“Gardening isn’t about pruning, deworming and fertilizing per se, it’s more about managing an ecosystem.”
This is comfort food writing with real grit underneath it. Emily starts in the dark of a migraine week, where even cooking feels like too much, and somehow turns eggs and a gently poached chicken into a kind of care you can actually manage. Then she goes deeper, into the joy and responsibility of keeping “The Ladies”, the way chickens give you rhythm, patience, and ridiculous laughter, and also the blunt lessons of loss when you get one small thing wrong.
“Rhythm- The daily rhythm they bring to your life is like a metronome beating out routine anchoring you to the here and now. I am grateful to them for this constant they bought into our lives.”
This is the kind of piece that makes you sit up because it is not sci fi, it is a very practical warning about trust. Kristin argues that the food system is uniquely vulnerable to deepfakes because video already carries so much weight in agriculture, and because disgust and outrage travel faster than corrections ever will. The most useful part is that she does not just panic, she gives a clear, doable defence that is basically old school, document your real operation, know your “tells”, and have the relationships in place so third parties can vouch for what is true.
“Deepfakes don’t need to compromise a SCADA system or get anywhere near an Industrial System to cause real damage. They go after what I’d call the perception layer, the part of any system that decides what is true, what happened, and what should happen next.”
Abey Rae Scaglione writes from the inside of a shift a lot of people are quietly making, from trying to opt out of harm, to trying to take responsibility for it. I like how she does not sneer at her younger self, she explains the pull of diet culture, the confusion, the moral discomfort, and then lands on a steadier argument, you cannot eat without impact, so the question becomes which systems you fund. It is a humane case for informed demand, and for supporting the farmers who are actually doing the hard work of raising animals well.
“Just because it’s sad, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. This truth calmed my inner struggle, finally untangling the mental and emotional push-and-pull I had been experiencing.”
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.
Spread The Word
Please share this post so the brilliant work featured in this newsletter reaches more readers, and so more ag writers can find their people here.
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.
I LOVE, LOVE that you're rounding up all the ag writers! (Substack should be doing it, but as per usual, everyone forgets about ag despite needing them at least 3 times per day!)
You've made it much easier for me to get to know my fellow ag writers with your Agstacjer Community Newsletter- thank you for putting g this together ❤️❤️
Hi Helen, I'm very honored to have my substack (aboutthefarm) be included here, and thank you for the introduction to all these other wonderful ag writers too! --Eli