How did you get interested in agriculture? And what are you hoping to gain from your apprenticeship?
May 2025
If you don’t feel inspiration or curiosity or even the slightest nostalgia when looking out over a well managed pasture with diverse plant and animal life then you should stop reading after this paragraph. Go stare into some rangeland, lined with a rickety old 5 strand fence, filled with four legged black dots, singing meadowlarks, whoomping grouse and the smell of sagebrush. Maybe even look over a hay meadow with some other four legged black dots but this time an electric poly wire lining the nearby riparian zone with a few frolicking beavers enjoying their space given back to them. Go for a drive through the “country” and slow down at that old barn, then stop to admire the rusting john deere on the side of the road. Not feeling it? Maybe when you have your next meal ask yourself how it got to your table and see if that sparks curiosity. If you’re still not feeling inspired or nostalgic or even just a little curious, well, no need to read further because what I want to convey is that I believe agriculture is in most (if not all) humans and that those deep guttural aches in your stomach from staring at what’s left of our working lands is because of that same reason. Agriculture was a part of many of us at some point and those feelings are the residue of a divorce between us and the land that may have happened generations ago or for some it could have been just yesterday.
All this to say what got me interested in agriculture were those same feelings. Growing up in the west I’ve always been attracted to those forgotten fields that lay idle until development arrives only to bury our historic agricultural ways of life (and future potential) underneath the next “greatest” suburb. Consequently, having my heart broken enough this way I decided after 25 years I should probably stop ignoring that gut feeling telling me I need to be a good husband of the land and of those that depend on it. To summarize, here are a few personally inspiring catalysts that changed me from observer to participant;
- Practical Tradition (Think: Progression through regression.)
- Healthy Foods
- Healthy Ecosystems
As I think about what I would like to get out of this apprenticeship I have a checklist of skills to acquire and experiences that I hope to live here with the Mannix Family but in fear of drying your eyes out from reading another list about another kid who wants to know another way to saddle a pony or rotationally graze goats, just know this; What I hope to learn from this apprenticeship is a deeper capacity for understanding how to work WITH the land in a way that provides for me and the greater ecosystem that I am apart of.
Final Reflections
November 2025
The ways in which I could describe how the NAP program impacted me and how it informs my ideas regarding my future life path bounce around my skull like grasshoppers in late August. With my eyes closed I see green spring days, still frosty from last winters’ tendrils hanging on to the crispy morning. In the hay meadows laying in the steaming grass a newborn calf with a slimy sheen wobbles its way to its feet while mom coues and moos to its new partner in rumination. In the following season they will encounter grizzly bears and snowshoe hares all in search of good grass and water. In the fall when the frost creeps back, they return home with the herd in slow migration, following their instinct to where an old Irish family will take care of them over the winter. I see the glaring sunny summer days bouncing along on a ‘59 ford tractor, raking rows of timothy and foxtail. I see friends in the smiles of my mentors laughing at me getting chased by angry cows in the corrals. I see the reflection of a naive young man in the luminous eye of a horse named Hoodoo. As this growing season has passed, I feel the melancholy of loving a place and its creatures so much that being awake in the place isn’t enough, because it creeps into my dreams each night and when I wake up I am reminded of the reason why I will dedicate my life to this work.
This program is a conduit for providing experience, and since experience is a foundation from which to build, this year has been a cornerstone in my foundation to be. I approach this apprenticeship as a journeyman; I’m here to learn from everything so that I can apply it to achieving my goals, like managing a ranch in a way that combines western tradition with regenerative agriculture to heal and maintain working lands, revitalize rural communities and produce healthy food. Since I’m still a novice however, this experience has provided me with the reps to solidify the skills needed, no matter if I’ve done it before I am at the stage to be humble and to keep working hard; to search for nuggets of wisdom and knowledge, to attack weakness and to follow the path I’ve set out on knowing full well that I still have much more foundation left to build.
This apprenticeship has also re-instilled and re-enforced my personal and professional values, due in large part to my mentors, and since they have gifted me with their time and energy I owe them a thank you; each one of you are inspirations to new agrarians like me, thank you for the opportunity and for doing what you do.
However, if not for my own lived experience through NAP, my belief in these values would not be as strong. Values like those found in husbandry– what ties land and animals together. Over the season I’ve come to see modern societal paradigms as very transactional, which has leaked into everything including our relationships with land, animals and other people. No longer do we work hard for the things we love strictly for the love of them, treating others, including the land, the way we want to be treated. Instead we patronize and never loyalize. We extract but never give back. We are losing the ability to be partners and the selfless reciprocity of nature is evercalling. So, my values lead me to be a good person, to take care of the ground I stand on with creatures I stand by and hope that as a tiny spec on this earth, I can regenerate some working lands and take care of the animals I so desperately love. This leads me into the role of agriculture in society because not only is agriculture an indispensable industry for feeding people (although industrialization has surely tainted ag), a powerful economic sector and a way to sequester carbon to save the world from burning itself to death, what I see agriculture as from a cultural lens is a way to preserve tradition and conserve working lands as places to provide habitat and hope for all living things. Considering this, the New Agrarian Program plays a vital role in carrying on and improving the role of agriculture in society by holding the door open for people like me, so we too can care for land, creatures and cultures and in some way, what little we have left can be carried on to future generations instead of being buried and forgotten underneath another subdivision.
So, what next?
The giddy glittery stuff includes schooling through clinics and workshops and yes, another year with NAP! But at the start of everyday what is next is the same; show up, put the work in, learn, apply, repeat.