Lovely day up here.

26006 & 26007! Fast & Furious. #farming #lambing #sheep #growstr #foodfreedom

26004 & 26005! Welcome to the party. #lambs #farming #farm #foodfreedom #lambing

The Wisdom of Pattern... Somebody arrives on a piece of land with no one to tell them how to work it. They start moving across the landscape the best way they can think to—growing food here, moving animals there, tending to what seems to need tending. Some of what they do works and some of it does not, and so they adjust. The next generation follows the first around and learns the pattern—not from a textbook or a manual, but by copying the way their elders move through the landscape. The second generation inherits that pattern. But they grow within a changing world: new tools are introduced, weather evolves, economics change. They keep what works and discard what no longer does, and the pattern of stewardship evolves. The third generation learns the adjusted pattern and refines it again. By the fourth and fifth generations, the family is managing the landscape in ways that work remarkably well, but the people doing the work may not be able to tell you exactly why they do everything they do. It is just the way things are done—the way their grandmother did it, the way their grandfather's father did it before that. Much of the wisdom embedded in the pattern has become invisible to the people who carry it. That invisibility is not ignorance. It is inherited wisdom operating below the level of explanation. It is muscle memory. It is gut instinct. It is tradition. A farmer who moves cattle off a particular hillside every August may not know that three generations ago the family lost topsoil by grazing that slope during a late-summer storm—and that the generation that followed rerouted the grazing pattern to prevent it from happening again. And that's just how it was. The knowledge is not in anyone's head. The knowledge is in the pattern itself—encoded in the way the family interacts with the land, tested by decades of consequence, and passed forward through repetition rather than theory. Learning to steward one piece of land properly requires generations of humans. The repercussions of decisions made on a landscape can take decades to become visible. A tree planted today will not shade livestock for twenty years. A wetland drained for pasture may not reveal the consequences until the water table is empty a generation later. No single human lifespan is long enough to observe the full cycle of cause and effect on a living landscape, and so the pattern accumulates what no individual could learn alone. The same mechanism operates whether the stewards are indigenous peoples who have moved through a landscape for thousands of years or a farm family entering its fifth generation on the same hillside. The specific knowledge differs, but the process is identical: generations of careful observation encoded into practice, refined by consequence, and passed forward as pattern. When a farm family or a community lose access to land they've stewarded—to debt, to economic pressure, to a system that makes it impossible to stay—the pattern of stewardship leaves with them. The next owner arrives and starts in a unique and powerful landscape that lacks a manual—and now there is no one left to follow around. Decades or centuries of accumulated wisdom vanish in a single transaction. The land does not forget, but the people who evolved specifically to care for that place are gone. This is why it matters—economically, ecologically, and in every sense that counts—to endow generational land stewards with the means to remain in their landscapes. The knowledge these families carry cannot be replaced. It lives in the pattern, and the pattern lives only as long as the generational stewards stay on the land. The best thing we can do for the land is make sure the people who understand it never have to leave. #regenerativeagriculture #stewardship #farming #farm #foodfreedom

Lambing season is off and running. Meet 26001. 9.6 lbs. Strong and healthy. A single. Katahdin/Texel cross. Great mama. #sheep #farming #agriculture #grownostr

I hope it's a happy Friday where you are.

GFM y'all.

GM.

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs warned that disruptions at the Strait of Hormuz could spike global food prices by constraining the nitrogen fertilizer supply that industrial agriculture depends on to function. That warning is now reality. On February 28, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks across the Gulf and closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping. Traffic through the strait fell from roughly 130 vessels per day to single digits—a decline of more than 95%. The largest disruption to global energy supply since the 1970s is now also the largest disruption to global fertilizer supply in modern history. The Gulf region produces nearly half the world's urea and 30% of its ammonia. About one-third of all seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz. That trade has effectively stopped. Urea prices have climbed 50% since the war began. The global fertilizer supply chain has contracted by a third. China has restricted fertilizer exports until August to protect its own domestic supply. India—normally the world's second-largest nitrogen fertilizer producer—depends on Iranian and Qatari natural gas to run its plants, and those gas fields have been severely damaged in the conflict. None of this was unforeseeable. All of it was structural. Modern industrial agriculture has been engineered around a single assumption: that synthetic inputs manufactured from fossil fuels will always be available, always affordable, and always deliverable across global supply chains. Nitrogen fertilizer alone accounts for roughly 60% of global fertilizer use and 20–30% of total crop production costs. When one shipping lane closes, that assumption collapses—and food prices, planting decisions, and the ability of entire nations to feed themselves follow. The word for this is counterparty risk. Every regional food system that depends on petrochemical fertilizer shipped from the other side of the world has stacked its ability to feed people on top of a chain of dependencies it cannot control: natural gas extraction, ammonia synthesis, refining capacity, international shipping lanes, maritime insurance markets, and the foreign policy decisions of governments thousands of miles away. Remove any single link and the whole chain breaks. The consequences are already materializing. U.S. corn farmers are in their fourth consecutive year of negative margins, and many delayed fertilizer purchases waiting for prices to drop or for federal assistance payments to arrive. They are now exposed to sharply higher input costs at the worst possible moment—the start of planting season. Analysts expect U.S. corn acreage to fall from 98.8 million acres in 2025 to roughly 94 million in 2026 as farmers shift toward soybeans, which require less nitrogen. Spring wheat acreage is expected to decline sharply. Some farmers who cannot source fertilizer at all may skip planting entirely—including producers of watermelons, cantaloupe, and pumpkins in states like Texas and Indiana. And the United States is relatively insulated. It produces about three-quarters of its own fertilizer. Countries that depend on Gulf imports for their nitrogen supply—across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia—face the prospect of reduced harvests, crop losses, and food price inflation that will hit their poorest citizens hardest. Holistic regenerative agriculture works from a fundamentally different premise. Instead of importing fertility from distant supply chains, it rebuilds the biological capacity of the land itself. Healthy soil ecosystems cycle nutrients through living root systems, mycorrhizal networks, and the movement of animals across the landscape. A regenerating regional food system does not need a clear shipping lane through the Strait of Hormuz to grow food next year. It needs functioning ecology underfoot. This is not a theoretical distinction. It is the difference between a food system that breaks when geopolitics shift and one that continues to feed people regardless. It is the difference between sovereignty and slavery. Every crisis like this one is an argument for food systems founded in ecological regeneration—for abundance, for resilience, for peace. Our challenge is to fund that work at scale before the next chokepoint closes. Disruption like this is painful. But it does one useful thing—it makes the fragility impossible to ignore. People do not rethink their food system when everything is cheap and easy. They rethink it when the shelves get thin and the prices stop making sense. If this moment wakes even a few more people up to the fact that their food supply depends on forces entirely outside their control, then the disruption will have done more for food sovereignty than a decade of policy papers. #foodfreedom @`Jeff Booth` #farming #sovereignty #notedeck

“'Kindly let me help you or you’ll drown,' said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree." -Alan Watts There is a quiet arrogance embedded in the phrase "regenerative agriculture." It implies that regeneration is something we do—a practice we perform, an outcome we engineer. But regeneration is not a human achievement. Regeneration is what living systems do when we stop preventing it. A grassland is not waiting for a management plan. A forest is not waiting for a grant cycle. These systems have been regenerating themselves for millions of years—building soil, cycling water, sequestering carbon—all without a single human input. The complexity that makes them resilient is not designed. It emerges. What humans have done—with remarkable consistency across centuries and continents—is impose control structures on top of that bothersome and confusing complexity. We reduced ecosystems to monocultures. We replaced biological fertility with synthetic inputs. We removed the animals whose behaviors and biology evolved in symbiotic relationship with the grasses...and then watched the land degrade to desert while calling it "natural." The work of our generation is not to "create" regeneration. The work is to remove the obstacles we placed in its path. Sometimes that means stopping the reductionist control— stopping the tilling, the spraying, the confinement—and sometimes it means repairing the damage we have done—returning livestock to a grassland dying from misguided "preservation." The animals are not an imposition on the system. Their absence is. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek understood this. He spent his career arguing that the most productive orders in society—functioning markets, stable money, resilient communities—are not designed from the top down. They emerge from the bottom up, through the distributed decisions of individual actors operating in their own self-interest within a shared system. No central planner possesses enough knowledge to replicate what that process creates spontaneously. Hayek called the belief that they could "the fatal conceit." An ecological system works in the same way as Hayek's economic free market. Every organism in the system—the grasses, the grazing animals, the dung beetles, the mycorrhizal fungi—is acting on its own imperatives. No individual member comprehends or controls the whole. But together, operating within the relationships that evolutionary iteration shaped over millennia, they produce something no planner could design and no individual participant could produce alone: deep soil, clean water, a stable climate, abundant life, resilience. The wisdom is embedded in the system, not in any one part of it. Unfortunately, Hayek's "fatal conceit" is the foundation of modern agricultural policy. This is a hard pill to swallow for a culture that treats human ingenuity as the solution to every problem. We want to fix things. We want to optimize and control. But complex systems do not flourish under control — they flourish when free. The most powerful thing a land steward or economist or anyone working within a complex system can do is learn to see what the system is trying to become, aid it if necessary, but mostly get out of its way. @Saifedean Ammous #foodfreedom #regenerativeagriculture #farming #sovereignty

@Leathermint Do you ever work with lambskin? Would you ever do wallets? I have sheepskins that are too small or torn that won't sell as rugs/throws. I'm looking to do something cool with them. Maybe for bitcoiners.

Made two infographics today about the squeeze of American farmers. Fun fact: 96% of American farm families have off-the-farm jobs to make up for farm loses. (per USDA) #farmstr #farming #fiat #agriculture #foodfreedom

I drive trucks two days a week as my off-the-farm job to keep things stable. While I drive the trucks, I listen to @jack mallers Mailbag Monday. I appreciate his macro takes and his ability to see the truth of so many different situations. But one thing he keeps saying rubs me the wrong way: it's a moral imperative for a company to be profitable—that profit means you're producing more value than you extract from the market. In a free market, he's right. But we don't have a free market in food. Four meatpackers control 85% of U.S. beef processing. Ranchers now take home less than 30 cents of every retail beef dollar. Since 2015, cattle prices have dropped while grocery prices have climbed. The processors in the middle are recording record profits. That's not value creation rewarded by a free market—that's extraction protected by a captured one. The rancher raising the best grassfed beef in the county often can't legally sell it. Federal law requires USDA inspection for retail meat sales, and there are only about 90 USDA slaughter facilities in the entire country. Some states have none. Custom-processed meat must be stamped "NOT FOR SALE." So the highest-value local beef either can't reach the consumer at all or gets funneled into commodity channels at undifferentiated commodity prices—prices set by the same four companies that control the market. In this system, profitability doesn't measure value. It measures compliance with the captured and extractive system. The ones most able to externalize their costs (on the land, on the animals, on the workers, on their families, etc.) are the most "profitable." The median American farm household earned negative $1,830 from farming in 2024. Negative. Ninety-six percent of farm households earn off-farm income to survive. Statistically, ALL OF THEM. The median farm family brings in $87,000 from off-farm jobs—not government handouts, but second and third jobs—to keep farming and feeding people. That's not a moral failing. That might be the most noble act in the American economy: someone who knows the math doesn't work, keeps feeding people anyway, and drives to town to work a second job to make it possible. They're not extracting from the market. They're subsidizing it—with their own labor, their own time, their own bodies. If profitability is a moral imperative, then we need a market worthy of the morality. #foodfreedom #farming #ranching #foodstr #farmstr

@The Bitcoin Way Hey Tony, et al. I've started consulting with farmers on Bitcoin self-custody and financial sovereignty and I think there's a partnership opportunity. We can never be sovereign if we lose our means of food production—which is happening at a staggering rate due, in part, to the financial collapse of farms. I'd like Bitcoin to be part of the food sovereignty discussion. I'm tied to farms and food education centers all over the globe through my role as an accredited Savory Institute hub leader.

Savory Institute

Savory Network Hubs ⋆ Savory Institute

Savory Network Hubs are learning centers that support their local farming, ranching, or pastoralist communities, tailored to their needs.

I'd love to discuss developing a course with you explicitly for farmers and ranchers who already understand the need for sovereignty, but haven't yet discovered Bitcoin. We could potentially deploy it throughout the Savory global network.

Hey @jack. Congrats and thank you. https://squareup.com/bitcoin

My boy is playing hookey and Chuck Berry. I'm his first and biggest fan. #music #guitar 🎸🤟

My boy is participating in a charity fundraiser this weekend to feed at-risk kids in our region. He thought the #nostriches might enjoy seeing some of the newest riffs he's been working on in exchange for some zaps. Any zaps that come in from this post will be saved to his cold storage and I'll give him an equal amount of fiat in current USD rate for the fundraiser. So your zaps do double-duty! #neversell Would you be willing to help feed kids, support my boy's efforts, and help him learn #v4v? #fundraiser #electricguitar #music

GFM.

We're watching global military strategy shift from Terran to Zerg in real time. I expect Protoss is only 40 years away.

@jack mallers Congrats on making it to all 50 states. I'd love to provide our grass-fed lamb for your @PUBKEY party. We're a 5th-gen family farm running on the Bitcoin standard using Strike.