There is a new AI adage that follows the format: “It’s not just X; it is Y.” Although this newsletter is human-written, I can’t resist but consider using it anyway. If you are about to stop reading after this short blurb, you may get the gist by saying, “It is not just about resilience; it is about relationships.”

But here you are, reading some more, and I am sincerely grateful for your (g)listening eyes in the age of attention theft.

This story might be best told from my dad’s perspective. He began his year by painfully getting his foot stuck while ice-skating outside, breaking several bones in his ankle. After being rushed to the hospital and later to surgery, he lay on our beloved couch, rather motionless for a guy who is always in motion. I expected him to be upset with this situation, as a dude who has run many marathons, biked across the country, done a half Iron-Man, and is frequently late for dinner because of his exercise addiction. He was cheery as ever, announcing his desire to pick up the guitar and watch more movies in 2026.

We all knew his involuntary sedation would eventually catch up with him. Indeed, he was sad about his lack of motion and the fact that he would have to drive to work after years of guilt-free, endorphin-inducing bike commuting. I drove him to work until his cast got small enough that he could use the pedals. We would walk around the block together, and I would drop him off at the Y so he could lift a few weights and try to get his heart rate above 100.

I was home in Lancaster City with the parents too this winter, joking that I was a climate refugee - my tiny house was quite cold, and the water stopped flowing at a certain point when it froze this cold winter. My confidence in my pipes caught up with me when the water broke off my water filter - and water flooded my house unbeknownst to me for about 10 hours.

This Spring, I moved back into my tiny home, thinking all was well. I cleaned up the water and dried most everything out. But after a few weeks, I realized there was water still under the floor. Cue the AI line: it’s not just under the floor; it was in the insulation.

This is where my dad’s and my stories connect. I had to figure out how to get lots of water out from under my floor in short order before it warmed enough to create mold and compromise the integrity of my tiny house. My dad was looking for physical activity and is someone whose primary objective in life is to help people. And we brought along the crew.

My woodworking mentors Gene Shaw and Andrew Coco came along to help. We used tools from the Lancaster Workshop and Tool Library. My friends and neighbors Zach and Emily Fedor heard about my winter woes and came through in many ways. Emilio Santos, Duncan Hopkins, Zach Medland-Johnson, Keri Weaver, Mark Broich, Emily Fritz, Cooper Honert… I feel like I am writing an acknowledgements section of a book when I think about the people who helped me with my floor. My parents helped me a lot, and my dad even came to tear out the insulation despite his broken ankle.

We had some fun moments along the way, I will admit. Squeezing the wet insulation out under my car was awesome. Lying on my new floor was glorious.

But I will fully admit, in most ways, it sucked. And I’m sure my dad would say the same about breaking his ankle this year. There are silver linings, but generally speaking, these types of things are no fun.

I will also concede that my troubles are few in comparison to others in our communities and beyond. I think this is where broader definitions of resilience start to matter. The word resilience might be defined simply as the ability to bounce back. But in the context of climate change and agriculture, two things I have been exploring, it begs many questions.

How will we care for our most vulnerable during big floods and storms? How do we ensure we all have food security for the long term? When half of Lancaster lost power and trees came down on people’s homes two weeks ago, who did you call? When you break a leg or have a flooded home, where do you find help?

There are emergency protocols, flood-resistant infrastructure, and storm protections in place, and they should be bolstered for the years ahead of us, as our weather starts to get extreme. But most importantly, it will be the people near you that you need to be able to count on.

To my dad and the many others who helped me during my time of need, thank you. I hope to repay the favor one day. I feel a bit more confident in replacing floors, but it is always nice to find the real handy-people who know what they are doing. May we all upskill not only physically but also emotionally and socially. It will take a lot of skill, care, and relationships to move through what lies ahead.

Happy birthday, Dad! Love, Aidan.

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As your local Lancaster leprechaun, I feel it is my responsibility to get the people outside. Here is my report!

March 29 and April 4 | Farm Tour and Community Tree Planting, Chiques Creek Farm (2995 Shenck Rd., Manheim, PA 17545)

• We will be hosting two more days of tree planting this year! Bring boots and get ready to throw down some trees and mulch. I’ll be doing a farm tour on March 29th in the morning from 10 - 11 AM and then planting in the afternoon. Come hang out, lunch will be provided both days. Feel free to RSVP on Partiful for March 29 and/or April 4.

  

And here are some other local happenings…

March 15, 3 - 4:30 pm | Food Forest Panel! Explore Urban Food Forests with the College Park Climate Action Neighborhood w/ Aidan Fife, Clair Kaufmann, Elyse Jurgen, and Michael Meyer. Santee Chapel, Moravian University (555 West James St., Lancaster, PA 17603)

• Get hype about food forests! Ask our urban forester if we can put some more fruit trees in local parks so we can eat them together in the shade…

March 19, 5 - 7 pm | Food Forests and Farmland Preservation - Green Drinks at West Art (816 Buchanan Ave, Lancaster, PA 17603)

• Come yuck it up at West Art over drinks. We will have a contingent from the Lancaster Farmland Trust and people excited about food forests.

March 21, 1 pm - 3:30 pm | Grafting Workshop, Backyard Fruit Growers, Mount Wilson Church of the Brethren (1261 Mt Wilson Rd, Lebanon, PA 17042)

• Join the Backyard Fruit Growers for a lesson on grafting. This group has been getting together for the past 35 years!

And a fun note, my dear friend Zach Johnson Medland has started a local Land Almanac magazine. Check it out here if you have an interest in participating.

Thanks for reading the local leprechaun report! Hope to see you outside soon.

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I originally started writing this after a mid-winter’s nap, waking up from weird dreams. This season has been cold. I haven’t been able to keep my pipes from freezing these past few days. With recent battles with ICE in Minnesota, national news has felt nightmarish. In times like these, keeping a cozy and caring community close feels critical.

I have never been a winter person. In fact, my decision to go to college in Georgia was partially motivated by the fact that I hated Pennsylvania winters. As a seasonal affective disorder (SAD!) boy, I can’t help but wish for some escape from the cold and dark of this season.

Before I settled into hibernation, though, I did get to return to Georgia in December for a week-long flurry of tree planting. The big highlight was spending time with Will Harris, the owner of White Oak Pastures, who runs one of the largest diversified regenerative farms in the country.

We planted 970 trees (I have deep regrets that I didn’t add 30 extra to the plan to make it to 1,000) and established a first test phase of silvopasture at their farm, which is a casual 3000+ acre, 180+ employee operation. Their on-farm meat processing facility, solar grazing, and studies of animal impact on climate are worth checking out.

Seeing regenerative agriculture at scale with such a diversity of crops, animals, and people all thriving together was quite dreamy. I have come back with some new ideas about making hedges out of mulberries to feed livestock and a renewed sense of what is possible.

There are many dreams lying dormant that will spring alive this year. Raising turkeys is on the horizon, along with more tree planting, potential art retreats, and hopefully another barn dance. Thank you to all of those who donated to our Go-Fund-Tree - we will be able to plant more trees because of those funds.

As side quests go, the Lancaster Workshop + Tool Library is taking shape, we are getting a Lancaster resilience plan written at RegenAll, and I am focusing more on work with our tree planting crew at Trees for Graziers.

Before all of that happens, though, it is rest time. The work of farming and land stewardship is primarily that of controlling the succession of fields into forests. In the tropics, the process of succession takes place quickly. Tropical farmers are keen to carry a machete to keep weeds down at all times of the year. Meanwhile, those in temperate climates can take a break, while the plants take their mid-winter’s nap.

Annual crop farmers keep the forests at bay through pesticides, tillage, ground cover, or aggressive weeding. Farmer burnout is a real thing. We (perennial crop farmers) are letting forests grow in an intentional way, which requires extra patience and planning, but also allows us to build the investment in trees and roots over time. Ideally, this is the more ~chill~ way to grow food in the long term.

The best and worst part of that process is that it takes time. I can get antsy, but I am excited about all of the other activities that can take place while we wait - hanging with friends and family, working on side quests, doing art, and taking naps. For all of you who enjoy such activities, I hope you have a 2026 full of all of those cozy things.

Cheers,

Aidan

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There’s a term in microbiology called quorum sensing. It describes how soil microbes and bacteria don’t really come alive until enough of them are present. They wait. Then, once they hit that magic threshold (the quorum), they start the party: metabolizing, communicating, transforming what’s around them. You can see it on your kitchen table with rotting fruit. The microbes are all there, invisible for a week or so, until suddenly they’re everywhere, going to town on your peaches.

That’s how I’ve started to think about land stewardship: as reaching for a quorum. For a while, it feels like nothing is happening. Then you invite some soil, plants, animals, friends, and family into the space… and suddenly the party has started.

There are the usual party concerns on a farm, too. Invasive plants that take over the conversation and eat all the food, as an unwanted party guest might. Keeping those away is always a challenge, but a lively ecosystem and strong friends will keep them at bay. You need to keep everyone well fed and watered, and can’t let anyone get too tired. The recipe for a fun party and a good farm are strikingly similar: you need good feels, food, and friends.

The connection between functional ecosystems, yummy meals, and strong communities is the niche I am interested in. Broadly speaking, this is my goal as a farmer.

To that end, a few weekends ago, we hosted two farm-to-table dinners. Over two nights in a row, we had a pop-up barn restaurant of sorts. We had a farm tour to see all the trees and how tall they have grown, ate our (silvo)pastured chicken raised on-site, shared farm-fresh vegetables, desserts, and drinks made from what we’d harvested. Some of the culinary highlights were roasted potatoes and beets, squash soup, an elderberry spritz, and pumpkin whoopie pies - all from the farm.

This wouldn’t have been possible without Jeff and Keri, who live on the farm and have been supporting me on this project, and the many other people who came along to make this happen. At these first meals, we had a small number of people we could feed, but stay tuned for the next farm happenings - we want you to be part of our farm party.

To me, this is our quorum, and the party has started.

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The next, more pressing question becomes: what should we eat?

I won’t wade too far into the soupy morass of food opinions, but I do care deeply about how our food is produced.

Ever since I was a kid, I always loved to eat. To borrow a term I used in a recent presentation to the tech community in Lancaster, I essentially was, and still am a “food end-user” (feel free to check out the presentation below).

Slowly but surely, I have been making the hungry trek upstream of my food. I tried out work in a commercial kitchen (dabbling as a so-called sandwich artist), scratching out my long-held idea that I wanted to be a chef. Similar to the way that people who make art one day must decide to call themselves an artist, declaring myself as a farmer (or maybe land artist?) felt daunting at first. Now, after many years of being involved in agriculture, I think I officially can call myself a farmer. 

The main reason I became interested in writing this farm blog was to share some of my thought process in getting involved in our food system. In my early days of learning, I became concerned by the industrial model of animal agriculture and spent some time as a vegetarian. But as I dug into regenerative agriculture, I discovered that there are more ethical and humane methods to raise animals, ways that can even improve the land in the process.

While farming in North Carolina, I learned to raise and butcher hogs, chickens, deer, and even helped process a cow at 4 AM (a story for another time). Even as I got into the craft of animal husbandry, making awesome yummy products like kielbasa and prosciutto, I never stopped feeling the emotional weight of raising animals and being part of the end of their lives.

The first time I helped process pigs, we read aloud Wendell Berry’s poem For the Hog Killing. In preparing for the harvest of my own chickens this weekend, I returned to Berry’s work and appreciated his old country wisdom. I ended up rewriting his hog poem in the context of our chicken butchery:

Let them hold still for the knife, and let slow be smooth, and smooth be fast.

Let them die with the taste of grass in their mouths and the warmth of the sun on their feathers.

Let the jugular blood spring hot and let the flow be strong and affirming.

Let us honor life and death, joy and sorrow, growth and senescence in both working hands.

Let this day begin again the change of sunlight into feed, feed into birds,

and those birds into people.

And by this act, let us build the ground we stand on, not the other way around.

For today, we celebrate again our lives' wedding with the world.

For by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew the bond.

I shared this poem with a group of a dozen or so friends who came out on Saturday to help process our first batch of chickens. For a bunch of people who had never participated in something like this alongside some experienced veterans, they did an amazing job. We sold most of the chickens on Sunday and set aside a few for ourselves and a community meal this Fall.

Some people think of the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” when they hear about chicken butchery. But the world of ethical meat-eating has moved far beyond that. We followed Joel Salatin’s model (of Omnivore’s Dilemma fame) and used “killing cones”, which gives the birds the sensation of passing out, as they are dispatched - to use the industry term.

The language around death, and the process of turning sunlight to plants to animals to food, feels quite tricky. For this reason, we often turn to poetry, art, song, and older wisdom when navigating these topics. As Stephen Jenkinson writes in Die Wise:

“The meanings of life aren’t inherited. What is inherited is the mandate to make meanings of life by how we live. The endings of life give life’s meanings a chance to show.”

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Here in Lancaster, we’re under a heat advisory for the week. I’m desperately trying to get a mini-split installed in my new cute mobile tiny house as soon as possible.

In other farm news, my chickens are growing up fast and have now made it onto pasture. The 70 birds also live in cute mobile tiny houses, these ones I built with my dad and some friends this past winter. Their coops move every day onto fresh grass, giving the chickens clean ground and spreading their manure across the field.

You may be thinking: That seems like a lot of work when you could just keep them in one place. And that brings us to the hot question of the day…

Why did the chicken cross the field?

Here is my easy answer. Chicken manure is full of nitrogen, and moving the flock is one of the best ways I’ve seen to improve soil quickly. Just days after the chickens have passed through, the grass returns far greener.

This is a central idea in regenerative agriculture—using animals to improve landscapes, rather than degrading them. I’ll explore more of this in future writings.

However, my long answer to this cheeky question is: chickens cross the field to avoid heat and violence, on their way to a fruity paradise.

Chickens descend from jungle fowl, birds that thrived in the forest. They avoided predators like hawks by moving and hiding under trees, meanwhile eating roots, fruits, and bugs. It’s a symbiotic relationship: the trees offer shelter, and the birds provide… well, their poop.

My favorite farming celebrity, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, recognized this dynamic and is putting it into practice at Tree-Range Farms in Minnesota. Drawing from his traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) from Guatemala, he’s applying it in the Midwest with a cooperative of 10 farms. There, chickens roam among hazelnuts and elderberries, enriching the soil and supporting tree crops.

I’m trying this out myself, with a diverse mix of trees which I described in my last entry. The main species for the poultry are mulberries and persimmons. Both drop huge amounts of fruit—especially now, during peak mulberry season—so keep an eye out as you cross the road!

Mulberries can have up to 18% protein (we tested it!), and their berries are perfectly sized poultry snacks. Persimmons, with high culinary value of their own, drop in the fall—ideal for finishing turkeys near Thanksgiving. These fallen fruits often attract bugs, which just adds to the chicken food paradise.

I’d argue that we’re not so different from the chickens. They seek out the trees to escape heat and violence—and we can do the same.

On these sweltering days, I think a lot about climate resilience and how we prepare for hotter summers that are already here, and seem to be worsening. Trees have long offered humans shade, shelter, and food—from back when we were climbing them to present day agroforestry.

I’ve been following stories of the olive trees in Palestine—a long-held symbol of sustenance and resistance in a region where both the trees and people are under attack. A friend of mine even started an eponymous business called Olive Tree Embroidery, which supports artisans in the area. Olive trees are a great example of how trees can provide food, shelter, and resilience, even in the toughest conditions.

Whether they’re olive or mulberry groves, I often wonder: What would our agriculture look like if we built it around trees? Would it be a fruity paradise? How can we seek shelter from the heat and violence of the day?

There are a lot of cold and serious questions to ask these days, but also some hot and silly ones. I’m asking not why the chickens cross the road, but why they could be crossing our fields.

And maybe, today, they just crossed your mind.

Thanks for reading.

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For all my readers, old and new, this is your friend Aidan Fife splashing into Substack with a fresh newsletter. I finally feel ready to let my ideas ripple out from here.

I was inspired to get back to writing on the internet after a chance encounter in Watkins Glen, NY two weekends ago. While admiring the sunset over a misty pond, my longtime best friend Henry Broich and I glimpsed a glorious belly flop in our peripheral vision. We then witnessed the majesty of a full-grown beaver (our first ever!) gliding on the water's surface to a chorus of spring peepers and an owl hooting, just as the night fell.

Our overwhelming question during that weekend in the woods was, “Is this what an intact ecosystem looks like?”. It was marvelous to behold.

While my days of ecology research are over, my curiosity remains. I often wonder about how to interact with the natural world. I question how best to use land for humans to live, to produce food, and to support our ecosystems. I wrestle with the reality of a changing climate and how to approach big policy questions in our current political landscape.

I certainly don’t have the answers to these questions. However, they compel me to wonder, act, and explore.

Beavers are a great starting place. Sexual innuendo aside, they have captured the imagination of many great thinkers in ecology, climate, and land stewardship.

Ben Goldfarb wrote a fabulous book called Eager which humorously describes the essential role that these keystone critters play as ecosystem engineers whose dams create habitat for other species. My good friend Sam Pierce from my ecology days has dedicated his PhD to studying how Castor canadensis (fancy name for beaver) affects water quality in Coloradan streams which so desperately need their ecosystem services.

One of my favorite beaver facts is that they coevolved with willow trees. Willows can grow back quickly because they are evolutionarily accustomed to being chewed up by beavers and then can regrow if a branch flows down the stream and gets lodged back in the soil. Essentially, beavers were early tree pruners and planters, with these trees providing helpful shade, habitat, and water filtration for aquatic animals - who could then join the party.

Beaver boosterism doesn’t stop at the stream. The policy-minded climate leader Bill McKibben rhapsodized about this water rodent’s ability to keep at it, as he paused to reflect on the work we have ahead. Indigenous author Robin Wall Kimmerer powerfully upholds “beaver people” as a metaphor for the responsibility humans have to steward land as an act of reciprocity.

As I start to write, I hope to channel this beaver energy. As Kimmerer posits, I believe that humans can, and have historically had, a positive relationship with their surrounding ecosystems. We can be participants, rather than bystanders or intruders, in our environment.

I intend to use this Substack to document my own participation in the landscape I call home.

After some time away, I recently moved back to Lancaster, PA where I grew up. Not too far away, I am starting a farm project on 2.5 acres with the support of the landowners who live there. It is on this plot that my friends, family, and I planted over 400 fruit and nut trees. At the farm, we planted plenty of willows which I hope to take “live stakes” from to propagate more trees - in true beav form.

I intend to grow plenty of perennials (including pecans, peaches, pears, plums, persimmons, and pawpaws… to name a few), raise poultry and pigs, and steward this landscape to the best of my ability. The project is adjacent to a nearby stream - so the tree shade and ecosystem services will serve as a “riparian buffer” to improve water quality and provide habitat for wildlife.

Just today, I am picking up 70 baby chickens to really get this party started. I am a nervous first-time farm dad, but I sincerely believe “the more, the merrier”. Throughout this project, I hope to bring all sorts of animal and human participation to the party. I want people to ask, “Is this what an intact ecosystem looks like?”.

So, dear reader (and dear beaver), I hope to bring you along to the party. Stay tuned for more.

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