Calling All the Cattle Zaddies...
Becoming a "crowd farmer" has never been easier
Welcome back to The Link, a bi-weekly circularity newsletter making the connection between regenerative farming and you, every other Tuesday.
I’m following Anne Lamott’s advice and writing about what I’ve been told not to write: 1991 era Billy Crystal is a H.O.T. cattle zaddy who can get it.
Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. Remember his role in the cringey movie City Slickers, a film about three neurotic, workaholic thirty something bros from New York City sorting through their mid life crises that reveals far more about the ageism that Hollywood screenwriters in the ‘90s focused on instead of character development?
OK if it’s not ringing a bell, there’s Mitch (played by Billy Crystal), Phil (played by Daniel Stern, the robber from Home Alone) and Ed (played by Bruno Kirby) who are all feeling dead inside because of their capitalist driven lives and societal pressures: bad marriages, unfulfilling jobs, too much cocaine, not enough smoothies. Luckily, things are about to take a turn towards hope: for Mitch’s birthday, Phil and Ed gift him a two week bromance filled trip to experience a cattle drive from New Mexico to Colorado with them.
SPOILER ALERT: there’s some very dated toxic masculinity scenes peppered with awful jokes; there's a stampede mishap involving a coffee grinder (tinseltown thinks cattle detest artisanal coffee grounds, and they’re probably not wrong). Despite all the snuff, their experience of reconnecting with the land and learning about cattle ranching and resiliency changes their lives for the better… or something. I don’t want to spoil the plot but I don’t think I’m selling this film to you, and I’m OK with that.
Even though the movie hasn’t aged well, Billy Crystal’s character is still attractive to me (just look at the evidence below) mainly because by the end of the film, he sheds his lame mentality of “farming and ranching are so foreign to me and don’t impact my world” to directly respecting and integrating it into his urban life back home.
But Billy C’s character wasn’t the only one with a strong desire to return back to the land and deepen his connection to farming. It makes me think of this excellent piece from the most recent Ambrook Research newsletter (run by the brilliant Jesse Hirsch) that reports on the Back to the Land movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, which touches on the millions of Americans who left cities to become homesteaders that found a recent resurgence in our ongoing covid pandemic.
And since I write this newsletter to you, dear bestie, I know I don’t have to tell you that our current food system is broken. My part of the deal here is providing you with tactile solutions, different perspectives, and eye opening takes on our collective equity in visioning a new food system in the path ahead.
So without sounding too much like Owen Wilson’s character in The Royal Tenenbaums, I’m very excited about Steward, an investment startup that’s redesigning how to support regenerative farmers around the country. It’s really freaking hard to be a farmer in the United States. And for the average citizen, how many farmers do you know? In all of the conversations that I keep having with small to mid-size farmers, the two biggest challenges that many face are capital and labor (followed by a complex labyrinth of issues). And when it comes to industrial agriculture (Big Ag), almost all of agricultural lending is driven by government policy, whether it’s direct government lending or through banks that have government programs and policies that incentivize large industrial production.
Steward’s mission is to promote environmental and economic stewardship in the regenerative agriculture space by providing flexible loans to help scale farms, fisheries, food producers, and ranchers looking to push their operations forward. Farms can apply for funding directly on their website, and anyone (hey bestie!) can buy into the Steward Farm Trust—a fund that provides loans across the portfolio of farms—with a minimum of $100, which is about the cost of 2 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at Erewhon.
According to Steward’s founder, Dan Miller, a tech and real estate entrepreneur, part of the driving vision for Steward is to connect these key players, farmers and citizens (lenders), who are usually isolated from one another together on a local, national, and international level. Why try to fix big agriculture when you can create an entirely new system?
I’d like to think that if a City Slickers remake were on the horizon (every film that’s ever been made is being remade right now), Billy C’s character, along with the other two city bois, would be volunteering on a local regenerative ranch somewhere, only to realize there was no looking back at their former lives of $10 lattes and Amazon prime beard trimmer deliveries. As they’d charge their iPhones in the cabin after a long day of rotational grazing (probably while micro-dosing), they’d get on Steward and invest in the Steward Farm Trust, because they’d understand that biodiversity is sexy and essential, soil health and our well being are directly connected, and we are only as resilient as our efforts in supporting our local farmers. In the words of Paris Hilton, now “that’s hot.”
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