Dear Big Team—

So I took a five-week sabbatical like eight months ago. My apologies on that. Things have been wild and weird (more on that below), and writing the second book and getting it across the finish line was a much heavier lift than I expected.

First things first though. Part two of the book, Big Team Farms, is published and in a few short days will be on its way to you.

If you participated in the IndieGoGo at the softcover reward level and your mailing address has changed since December 2020, please provide me with updated info here.

Secondly, if you supported the IndieGoGo and are expecting an ebook copy of the second book, that will be arriving in your inbox shortly. Look out for an email from me (outside of substack).

Finally, if you did not get the chance to participate in the IndieGoGo and would like to order the ebook, you can do so now on Amazon or on Kobo. If you’d like to order the softcover, you will be able to do so in a couple weeks wherever books are sold, or you can respond to this email if you’d like more info on ordering a signed hardcopy from me directly. Also look out for a podcast version of both books later this year— part audiobook, part behind-the-scenes and bonus content. It’ll be exciting. More to come on that.

Ummm… so where have I been?

I’ve been thinking about how to write this email for months— waiting to feel ready, excited, and inspired again, about the subjects and ideas that first motivated me to start this whole project. But I won’t lie to you. The readiness, the excitement, and the inspiration have not come.

It’s hard to explain why, but I’ll try. So I ascribe to a very particular belief in reincarnation (bear with me). Basically, I feel like it’s not just at the end of a person’s life that they die, but also many times within it. I’ve experienced the death of many versions of myself, and the birth of many new ones. The problem is, those deaths and rebirths don’t always happen at convenient or predictable times. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when they’re happening at all.

What it pains me to report to you is, the Sarah who wrote Farm (and Other F Words) has passed. She lived a bright and joyful life, full of openness, gratitude, and hopefulness for the future. She was a bit arrogant, a bit prone to conflict, and with a flair for boisterous social media activity. She lived long enough to see the book, her pride and joy into which she poured her whole heart, come out, to share its ideas with many, many people she got to meet and care about. Unfortunately she faced a slow decline thereafter— a deadly combination of exhaustion, lack of reserves, and being ill-prepared for the feelings that come at the end of years of focus and dedication, of being suddenly directionless, uncertain, and exposed.

That Sarah did not have the chance to finish Big Team Farms before she moved on. Posthumously, then, it fell to me to do what she could not. That is the source of my anxiety. When you receive this book, I fear, you’ll be hoping to hear the loud and ambitiously optimistic voice of my former self. She wrote a book that took the current US agricultural system to task, dissected some of the most cherished myths of our culture to reveal their emptiness, but did all of this with the promise that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. She dreamed of elucidating that alternative— and then she left me holding the bag. So that’s pretty annoying.

Honestly, I’m not her. She took her rose-colored contact lenses with her into the afterlife, because when it was my turn to revisit what she wrote, through the shade of my own experiences, I found her ideas blissfully naive.

Maybe in the end, that makes me an okay person to shoulder this mantle. If at least part of her legacy is loving and ruthless skepticism about the “big solutions” in agriculture, she was probably the wrong person to write about the very big solution she favored, given how thoroughly she believed in Big Team Farms, and how immune she was to seeing their flaws. I have no such immunity. I have seen their flaws first hand— been beaten and bruised and slashed to ribbons by them, lost friends and felt the sharp sting of shame for being unable to predict the ways in which this idea is imperfect, and nearly impossible.

So yeah, this email has been a long time coming. I knew I had to tell you, but I didn’t know how. Your support and encouragement has truly meant, and continues to mean, the world to me. I hope the news of her passing doesn’t trouble you— it was her time, she hung on longer than she should have, even. And I hope you aren’t too disappointed that you’ll be stuck with me for Big Team Farms. Compared to her, perhaps, I’m a bit more private. I’ve needed to spend time building up the reserves she depleted, and doing the work she ignored of caring for my inner and near-community self. My voice is a bit quieter than hers— a bit more measured. She forgot, maybe because she had to, that life is long, that patience is something that must be practiced. I, on the other hand, remember.

Most importantly though, I think, she forgot that she was a whole person— beyond writing and thinking about the future of the food and farming system. She neglected her life, the one beyond the books, the calls, the emails. Call me stingy, call me selfish, call me what you like; I won’t do that.

That, in short, is why this email is not the first of a recurrence of weekly Big Team Farms newsletter. I have loved this space and the interactions I’ve had because of it, but the cost was very high. I spent several hours a week (nights and weekends) crafting it, and while it was always a labor of love, the love did not negate the labor. Today, tomorrow, and for the next little while at least, I’d prefer to spend those hours away from the screens that already swallow up so much time and attention. I want to spend them going on walks and making new friends, learning to dance and touching plants, breathing fresh air and soaking in vitamin D. All to say, I may publish newsletters/stories I work on here periodically, when the time is right. But shipping a weekly newsletter just for the sake of consistency or clout or to add subscribers is not something I’m up for right now.

One of the reasons I started this newsletter (beyond communicating with the folks who originally bought my books) was because I crave a community of people who share my interests, who are impassioned by the same ideas, and who want to work together to make change where they can. For all of the amazing things that have come out of this exercise, including connecting with so many of you, I can’t say that this craving was ever satisfied. I think I’ve learned why, and that has been one of the biggest learnings for me.

At its core, I think content as a catalyst for community is a broken idea, and for a lot of reasons. For one, I think a community is a group in conversation, not one where one or a few people speaks and everyone else passively consumes. That is a performance, not a community. This, to me, is also why writers/researchers/journalists/content creators writ large often feel boxed in to very narrow topics. People want to hear from you about, say, agriculture, and literally nothing else.

Real community, the kind that I’ve craved (and I don’t think I’m alone here), demands interest in whole people, not just one subject or facet. That’s what makes is magical and meaningful, inclusive and responsive. Groups defined by common interests are affinity groups, and might even be cradles for genuine community, but interest in a shared topic is not enough. It has to be combined with a desire to build lasting relationships, to be vulnerable, to engage, and perhaps most importantly, to stick together. To evolve as individuals and altogether, without falling apart.

I guess I thought for a while that this newsletter, etc. could start as a content/performance and become a community, but it hasn’t worked. If I were trying to make a living off selling books or writing a paid newsletter, maybe the performance would be of interest to me, even absent the community, but I’m not.

Speaking of which, I did also want to report, at least briefly, on the financial return on the first book after one year in print (given that many of you were backers of the project). By my calculations, after printing and shipping costs (about $9k for each of the two books), committed donations, IndieGoGo and publisher fees, four years of writing and research (including travel!) and months of non-stop envelope stuffing and Post Office runs, I’ve thus far netted a little more than $11,000 (without paying myself for a single hour of labor). Which, yes, comes to about $2,500 a year for the last five years. And the thing is, the book is successful. I sold more than 5,000 copies in the first year, which put me in the top 2% in the US for book sales. Like most writing jobs I’ve come across, book writing is simply not a rent-paying gig unless you’re at the very top of the heap. I’m still so proud of the work, but yeah, it’s come at a cost.

So much of this just is what it is, and more than anything, it’s forced me to reckon with the fact that if I’m going to be doing things without meaningful pay— I’d rather they be things that make me feel good physically and emotionally, that make my heart sing and that deepen my connectedness to the people around me and the place where I am.

With all the shit that’s happening in the US and in the world, I’ve been working really hard to focus on my sphere of influence in order to keep my sanity, which involves recognizing that my sphere of influence is small. In fact, the most demonstrable impact my ideas and voice have had in agriculture thus far has been to broaden the range of ideas that a small group of people thinks of as practical and reasonable. I’m learning to embrace that win.

I also want to say thank you and I’m sorry to all the people who have reached out to me via email or elsewhere in the last eight months who haven’t received a response. I never delete an email, and I will respond one day, but for context, I recently responded to an email I received in 2018— so. Yeah. Thanks for your patience.

All this is a very, very long winded way to say— this newsletter might become more active again one day, and it might not. It might be active regularly again, and it might be a sporadic thing. What I promise you is, I’m not going to phone it in here. I’m not going to write something just for the sake of it. If I have something to say, I’ll boot this up. If I don’t, I won’t. And if any of this has made you think, “meh, this isn’t for me anymore” my feelings won’t be hurt by an unsubscribe. I’ve unsubscribed from so much stuff recently, and it’s been awesome. I’m learning that it’s okay to know where my community ends and where the rest of the world begins, and to say that I can learn about the rest of the world without forcing myself into the deluge all the time. I can also turn away from it when I need to, and remember that to me, what happens in my community is often many magnitudes more important, and my participation more essential, than anything happening outside it.

I hope that wherever you are and whichever you you are now, there is some joy and peace in your life. I want to thank you for like the one millionth time, from the very depths of my soul, for your care and support throughout this book journey. It’s been a tremendous privilege and largely a joy.

I’ll see you when I see you,

Sarah

Big Team Farms

The Sequel to Farm (and Other F Words) is…