The AgStacker Community Newsletter
July Edition
Welcome back to the AgStackers Community Newsletter, our monthly place to spotlight 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. I took a break in June, which means this month’s community newsletter is bigger than ever, so please take your time with it and enjoy the work from so many wonderful writers.
I’m also really excited to say the AgStacker Roundtable is tomorrow on Zoom. 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.
When: Sunday 12th July at 2pm UK time, which is 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: Adam Cohen
This month’s AgStacker of the Month is Adam Cohen, who writes Growing Is Half The Battle from Texas. Adam doesn’t just comment on broken systems, he has built inside them, from farming to urban agriculture projects, and he writes with the hard-earned clarity that comes from seeing where things actually fail up close.
What I keep coming back for is his focus on redesign over rhetoric. He is less interested in tidy “best practices” and more interested in real constraints, agency, and what it takes for good work to survive reality without burning people out. If you’re tired of pretending the status quo is inevitable, Adam’s newsletter is a smart place to start.
Here are a few pieces from Adam and other community voices that resonated with me this month:
A sharp, overdue pushback against the idea that acreage is the entry ticket to being taken seriously. Adam reframes the whole argument in a way that actually helps, because it asks what a farm does in a food system, not what it looks like on a brochure.
“If a small farm is producing food, serving customers, creating income, training growers, feeding families, building soil, educating students, strengthening a neighborhood, or keeping food dollars circulating locally, then it is doing real food-system work. I do not care if it is on 100 acres, 10 acres, half an acre, a rooftop, a school campus, a greenhouse, a warehouse, or a backyard.”
This is such a useful corrective for the local food conversation, because Adam stops treating “more farms” as the goal and starts naming the stuff that actually makes farms survivable. If you’ve ever watched great growers burn out after harvest, this will feel uncomfortably familiar.
“The farms weren’t struggling because they couldn’t produce food. They were struggling because they were being asked to solve every other problem in the food system by themselves. That realization changed how I think about agriculture. The bottleneck was rarely production. The bottleneck was everything surrounding production.”
This one goes deeper than “local food” as a lifestyle badge and asks what scale has erased, culturally and nutritionally, and what it would look like to rebuild a sovereignty loop on purpose. I love that it’s not abstract, it’s rooted in a real place, a real school, and a plan that can actually be repeated.
“Scale has a shadow: what can’t conform gets replaced. That’s why colonialism didn’t stop with a land grab. It rewrote the grocery list. Sweet potatoes? Too sacred. Millet? Too culturally rooted. Sorghum? Too resistant to empire-building. So the system pushed them out.”
From the Community:
A furious, brilliantly explained look at how supermarket “specials” are often paid for upstream, and what it means when suppliers are charged for the privilege of being on the shelf. If you care about farmer viability and real competition, read this.
“Six billion dollars a year, flowing backwards up the chain, from the people who make and grow the food to the two companies that sell it.”
A cheerful little reframe for anyone who has ever waged war on dandelions, part weed appreciation, part “maybe your lawn is the problem”. Practical too, with a reminder to harvest away from sprays and roads.
“I find dandelions quite inspiring, really. I mean- think about it. They potentially offer a solution to some of our biggest problems, casual supplements for a daily basis, a tasty food source, a pretty flower, and they are one of the first food sources of the year for bees, yet so many want them out of their lawns and lives.”
A provocative mini manifesto arguing that hybridisation is not a weird edge case but a powerful engine of evolution, and that our obsession with tidy species boundaries might be blinding us to what actually happens in nature.
“Perhaps species are mortal by design, and as such the discontinuation of species today is vital for the creation of new species tomorrow.”
If you keep sheep, or you’re thinking about keeping sheep, this is the kind of practical, confidence-building guide you want bookmarked before breeding season arrives. It’s detailed without being intimidating, and it treats reproduction as something you can learn properly, not a mystery you’re meant to muddle through.
“The goal of this article is to help you develop, or further develop, a breeding program which, while challenging (because there is nothing worth having that isn’t), is also incredibly rewarding. Sheep reproduction is complex. Let this information be a spring board for you to deep dive into whatever you find interesting, confusing, or helpful.”
A fascinating and infuriating look at why supermarket honey can be cheaper than it should be, and what “more honey sold than made” really means for beekeepers and buyers.
“The single most revealing fact about the global honey market is that the volume of honey traded internationally consistently exceeds the volume of honey the world’s bees produce. There is more honey sold than there is honey.”
A powerful piece about what “development” erases when it only counts minerals and money, and ignores homeplaces, livelihoods, and the stories people use to survive. The menopause and seaweed cooperative section will stay with you.
“In my opinion, the meaning and significance of our seaweed harvesting cooperative cannot be reduced to monetary value alone. It should embody our midlife womanhood and emotions — things that only women can truly understand.”
Farm physics, but make it funny and genuinely useful. If you have ever lost time to a kinked hose or a snarled extension cord, this will feel uncomfortably accurate.
“Tangle factor increases as length goes up and diameter goes down. This means you need to make a larger loop. Entanglement is a real danger.”
A quiet, sensory walk through a winter garden that somehow makes compost, fog, pumpkins and broccoli feel like a small kind of restoration. If you need a reminder that good soil changes everything, this is it.
“Isn’t that true of everything grown in healthy, thriving soil? It returns to its true taste.”
A darkly funny rant with a serious point underneath, about what happens when we breed animals for purpose, then pretend purpose does not matter. You will laugh, wince, and probably argue with him in your head, which is half the point.
“Have you ever seen a herding dog rounding up sheep? A retriever retrieving? A hound with a scent? These are the happiest animals you will ever see. There’s a light in their eyes that is unmistakeable to me.”
A smart piece on why “regenerative” is becoming less a philosophy and more a market specification, and why the real fight is over who gets to define it, measure it, and capture the premium.
“The real distinction isn’t between regenerative farming and conventional farming. It’s between regenerative farming and regenerative marketing.”
A lovely, grounded reflection on “progress”, and why choosing an agrarian life can be both practical and deeply satisfying, even when you are still juggling jobs, bills, and modern life.
“On the one hand it is practical - food sovereignty, resilience from a collapsing system, building future wealth (of skill and resources), building a life that allows our son to learn how to sustain life. On the other it is idealistic and romantic - for the joy of using my body under the sun as humans have since we first walked this earth, for the beauty and taste of home grown, chemical free food.”
A punchy rebuttal to the idea we should just accept industrial food as the best we can do, and a clear argument for real food, local producers, and keeping animals in the picture when we talk about resilience.
“Celebrating the reliability of industrial food misses the fact that reliable garbage is still garbage.”
Aquaculture is one of the most automated food systems on earth, which means cyber risk can turn into real world loss fast. This is a sharp, readable look at the digital blind spots behind the seafood on our plates.
“A sector that took on sophisticated connected technology quickly and built security around it slowly, or any at all.”
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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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.
Thank you so much for including my winter story Helen. I too love reading the others. Also great to see my friend Fiona’s piece there too 🙌
Thanks for including my story! I enjoyed all of the stories and I think this is a wonderful way to build a community aimed at improving agriculture around the world.