AgStacker Community Newsletter
December Edition
Welcome back to the AgStackers Community Newsletter – a monthly space to spotlight the community of writers sharing work about food, farming, and more.
If you’ve ever tried to find a home for farming, gardening, or food‑system writing on Substack and discovered there’s no 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 this space.
If this work resonates and you’d like to support it, please consider subscribing to my publication. Your support keeps this space independent and visible, and helps bring more good farming writing to more readers.
Take your time to enjoy 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: Liz Reitzig
This month I’m delighted to feature Liz Reitzig as Agstacker of the Month.
Liz is a wonderful friend of mine from across the Atlantic, and I’m endlessly grateful for her warmth, her honesty, and the way she shows up for other people doing this work. We fight similar battles, and it’s rare to find someone who can be both fiercely principled and genuinely generous at the same time.
Liz has also been one of the few writers actively campaigning to get AgStackers heard on Substack, including building and sharing a directory for agricultural writers that makes it easier for readers to find the work that too often gets buried. Alongside her writing, she hosts thoughtful podcasts and deep-dive conversations that don’t shy away from the hard questions. I’ve had the pleasure of joining her to talk about whether regenerative farming can exist within a capitalist society, and it’s exactly the kind of discussion our corner of Substack needs more of.
Here are a few pieces from Liz and other community voices that resonated with me this month:
Liz did what Substack wouldn’t: she built the thing we all needed. The Agriculture Writers Directory is a simple, practical act of community building, making it easier for readers to find farming and food-system writing and for writers to find each other, collaborate, and get seen.
“Since there is not a great way to find other agriculture writers on Substack, we need to do this ourselves!”
Liz draws a clean line between “prepping” and actual food security, and it’s one of those distinctions that sticks. This isn’t about a basement full of supplies, it’s about local skills, local producers, and communities that can feed themselves without everything depending on a fragile, centralised system.
“Prepping is more like hoarding food, while food security is making sure that as many people as possible have consistent access to clean, safe food within easy walking or biking distance and people have the ability to participate in their own food production and processing.”
This is Liz at full power: she zooms out far enough to show how policy and “progress” reshape the physical world, then zooms back in to name what’s being lost when farmland gets swallowed by data centers, solar arrays, and infrastructure. The through-line is uncomfortable and deliberate: land grabs don’t always arrive with guns, sometimes they arrive with contracts, incentives, and soothing language, and the end result is still the erosion of local food security and stewardship.
“Make no mistake, these are not farms, they are not clean or sustainable in any sense of the word. They are massive transfers of land and resources from those stewarding our land and ecosystems to those destroying them.”
From the Community:
Ruth’s anti COP dispatch is funny, furious, and oddly hopeful. She drives five hours to a Nebraska hotel conference room and finds the real climate conversation happening at soil level, not on a stage. It shows how regenerative farming spreads farmer to farmer through shared mistakes and practical fixes, because the stakes are debt, health, and whether your kids want to inherit the place.
“So while all the thought leaders gather in Belem, Brazil at yet another COP talkfest, farmers here are Getting Shit Done. With Shit. This cohort are the ones that are sick of paying bills to the fertilizer and seed companies, getting further into debt, arguing with their families and watching yields plummet and soils harden.”
This starts with beekeeping and ends up as a really useful lesson in resilience. Micha shows how a decade of “Darwinian” non treatment success can still collapse, and how the real turning point often happens months before the crisis shows up. For bees it is July pollen and the making of winter bees, built on protein and reserves, not last minute winter feeding. It is a quiet nudge for all of us to build buffers while things are still going well.
“Now I know: resilience is built in the margins we overlook, the quiet seasons, the moments that don’t feel urgent. It’s built when things are going well, not when they’ve already fallen apart.”
This is a blunt, enraging look at how “food security” gets hollowed out in real time: a rancher-owned cooperative builds regional processing capacity, then a bank calls the loan, the plant gets snapped up at auction, and the buyer shuts it down for sheep. Graham connects the dots between consolidation, foreign multinationals, and the quiet disappearance of domestic infrastructure, then lands on the only lever most of us actually have day to day: who we buy our food from.
“Once they bought the Mountain States Rosen plant, they promptly shut it down for sheep.
This led to a contraction of sheep raised in our country, and led to an increase in imported lamb.”
Leslie catches that strange late-autumn overlap where everything looks like it’s shutting down, yet the whole landscape is quietly busy with conception, rut, and next season’s milk already being set in motion. I love how she moves from deer to goats, then threads in a decade of breeding-season snapshots, equal parts practical, funny, and tender, showing how farm time is never just “endings” or “beginnings” but both at once.
“Many consider fall a time of agricultural endings; harvesting the crops, putting the garden beds to rest, mulching the berry plants to protect their roots from winter’s frigid reach, goats’ lactation slowly creeping to a halt. Yet the seeds for spring’s life—new kids, new milk—are being sown now.”
Emily’s first interview is exactly the kind you want more of: curious, warm, and rooted in the real texture of work and family life. Through Juli and Tom’s Honest Toil olive oil, she gets at something bigger than “good ingredients” a whole seasonal rhythm, a local economy, and the idea that flavour is meant to change year to year because nature does. It’s also a quietly radical piece about choosing where your money goes, and letting food be a living thing again, not a uniform product designed to never surprise you.
“As consumers we need to readjust our expectations. It is only with the recent industrialisation of food that we expect everything to be available, seven days a week, fifty two weeks of the year, to look and taste the same.”
This is the kind of farm writing that makes you laugh and nod at the same time: the first winter storm rolls in, and suddenly it’s triage, logistics, and a running commentary on how “behind the curve” you feel even when you’re doing a hundred things. It’s practical (barn set‑up, tanks, diesel, hoses), tender (making sure the old girls are dry and safe), and properly real about what preparedness looks like when your body hurts and life has been messy. Plus: “emotional support hay” is going to live in my head all winter.
“Now, is the barn ready?
Well, heck no. Why would that be ready?
Mostly cus my life has taken so many other turns this summer that getting it cleaned out has been on the back burner. I’m a bad farmer.”
John takes a deceptively nerdy question, should we be root pruning trees in agroforestry systems, and turns it into a genuinely readable deep dive into what’s happening beneath our feet. I love the way he holds the tension between permaculture’s “guild” mindset and the practical reality of alley cropping, then uses research to puncture a few myths, especially the idea that tree roots mirror the canopy. It’s a reminder that trees are adaptable, but only within the limits of soil structure, oxygen, and depth, and that good design starts with understanding the “landscape below ground”, not just what looks beautiful above it.
“In fact, a tree’s root system is surprisingly shallow, dominated by long, relatively small, lateral roots spreading out close to the soil surface… Most roots are found close to the soil surface, with 90% or more of all roots located in the upper 60cm.”
Steph writes about “cheap food” in a way that actually lands, not as a lecture but as a winter scene you can feel: flooded fields, Christmas deals, and that uneasy gap between what we pay at the till and what it really costs to grow food. She threads together farm economics, soil depletion, and public health with a clear argument that’s hard to unsee once you’ve read it. Cheap isn’t a bargain, it’s a bill shifted onto land, labour, and eventually our bodies.
“Cheap food, I’m realising, isn’t really cheap at all. It’s simply that the true cost is paid elsewhere, out of sight.”
This one starts in the dairy aisle and ends somewhere much deeper. Eric uses the “47 salad dressings owned by two corporations” moment to talk about a bigger illusion: not just how markets curate our choices, but how our own nervous systems do it too. It’s a sharp, compassionate piece about the ways survival patterns masquerade as personality, and how real freedom isn’t picking from the menu, it’s having enough safety to see more than one path.
“Choice isn’t the moment of selection. Choice is the state of safety required to see more than one real path.”
Mpumelelo takes the familiar frustration about “slow land reform” and flips it into something far more useful: a concrete plan, rooted in place, relationships, and follow-through. What I really respect here is the ethics, he names the extractive pattern of research in rural communities, then commits to returning with practical action, using his PhD as a tool rather than a trophy. It’s a call for collaborators who want to build shared prosperity by improving herds, restoring grazing, and turning biomass into fertility, with a clear “give first” invitation.
“So, when I started my research with the community in 2021, I committed myself to returning to Mozana and contribute fresh perspectives on the way forward. That’s why in 2026 we are charting a new course.”
As this is my final AgStackers newsletter of 2025, I’m heading into the new year with a notebook full of ideas for how we can make this community feel more connected, more useful, and more fun in 2026.
I’d genuinely love your thoughts. What would add the most value to you as an AgStacker?
We already have the AgStackers chat, but I’m not sure it works for everyone, so I’m toying with a few ideas as starting points, not a fixed plan. Things like an occasional AgStackers Zoom discussion to meet each other and talk themes, or a writers club style session where we swap Substack hints and tips and help each other get unstuck. But I’m really open to other ideas too.
If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.
Fantastic round up as always! I’m hoping I have time to read a lot of these articles in some down time after Christmas.
Thank you for all the hard work you’ve done on all your writing and campaigning this year Helen! You’re doing a brilliant job.