Fed from the Farm

Hello, We are David and Mariah Boatright and our four sons are Judah, Ephraim, Asher, and Levi. This is our regenerative agriculture story. Today our mission is to restore the health and vitality of the land and to nourish the families who eat of its bounty. We both grew up on farms and wanted to one day raise a family in the country. We knew all about conventional agriculture but were disenchanted with the industrialization and coldness of the system that had become the new norm. I (David) watched as small farms disappeared and the message at farm meeting after farm meeting was to get bigger, farm more acres and buy more equipment. For me, the math never added up. What was the end goal? Where would it lead? Why was a bigger tractor the solution to a farming system that couldn’t support a decent salary any way? The common lament was that there were so few young farmers, but I was simultaneously being told it was impossible to make a living full-time farming. Mariah grew up on a factory chicken farm where she quickly lost interest in the packed houses, dusty conditions, and unrelenting pace of the factory farming system. We both wanted to raise our future family in the country but we were equally sure we did not want to conform to the conventional farming model. Then there was a spark. I learned how to graze on my family’s beef cattle farm. After being hit with a crushing drought in 2012, I began to search for a better way. Slowly, I learned about restoration grazing- a system that improves the health of the land by using livestock to trample forage to the soil surface increasing organic matter and improving the water filtration ability of the land. I was excited. It seemed almost too good to be true. The system could in fact build on itself. Each year the land could heal more, grow more grass, and produce more food (harvested by beef cattle or sheep). I began experimenting with such a system on my parent’s farm and the results were remarkable, I was hooked. After we married, we began managing a farm with a focus on regenerative grazing management and soil health. By using planned multispecies grazing and eliminating the use of harsh pesticides and herbicides we watched the land heal before our eyes. We were so excited! We had added sheep and goats to the system and were confident there was indeed a way forward for us to succeed in a non-traditional regenerative agriculture system. We now knew the incredible difference that a healthy soil and nutrient rich grass made for the animals but we had never considered the nutrient density (read that deficiency) of our own food. There was a disconnect between how we farmed and how we nourished ourselves. When shopping for food we just focused on price; what was the cheapest or “on sale”. We never stopped to consider how the food was raised, or the cost of the production system on the environment or on ourselves. What was really in our food? Why was it bland and tasteless? We never gave it a second thought. We were still supporting an agricultural system, through our food purchases, that we felt was unsustainable, and we were completely blind to it. Then the course of our lives took a dramatic turn. We were told we might never have children. For a newly married couple who had been dreaming of a large family in the country this was crushing. The doctor informed us that with Mariah's health condition conceiving would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, without a lot of drugs hormones and a medical procedure. Their suggestion was to "just start taking a bunch of drugs to control this and come back when you are thinking about children." We are both people of faith and looking back we believe God used this to open our eyes to what we had been missing. Several months into the new "treatment" we decided we had to make a change after Mariah began suffering from some severe and bizarre side effects of the medication. At that time we began learning about the benefits of n