A Game of Mind Versus Heart

At Mad Agriculture, we often talk about the meeting place between art and agriculture, where the work of growing food becomes something spiritual, creative, and deeply human. This essay, written by avocado farmer, Sean Bettles, and Mad Agriculture’s Chief Finance Officer, Tanner Starbard, captures that beautifully.

The two grew up together in Ojai, California, where salt air drifts in from the Pacific and coastal mountains form the iconic valley. Their friendship, rooted in that landscape, has carried through the seasons of their lives. Now, both men find themselves in a time of profound fertility, each welcoming a new child while tending to land, business, and the balance between heart and mind.

What unfolds here is a meditation on fecundity in all its forms: the fruiting of trees and the birth of new life, the slow cultivation of beauty, and the quiet faith it takes to keep creating in a world that often measures value only by yield.

Together, Sean and Tanner remind us that regeneration is not only a practice of the soil, but of the soul.

Jonnah Perkins, Director of Media

SEAN

Sometimes I feel like, when it’s the middle of the day, and I’m hustling and bustling around, the word “sustainability” means keeping the farm alive. It’s only when evening strikes and the day tends to hold more weight that I think about how much more that word means. It’s when the evening beams of light hit the Los Padres National Forest, that the importance of keeping our natural ecosystem alive and thriving feels emotional and urgent.  

In the day, selling a box of avocados at the right price to keep the family packinghouse running occupies most of my time. Competition from foreign imports is putting a strain on California farmers and small packinghouses. Paying off operating loans and the mortgage is becoming harder and harder, as climate change takes its toll on the land, and global trade hits the pockets.

In the evening however, creating a diverse planting of fruit trees and natives, with a robust ground cover of wildflowers, squashes, and culinary herbs is what my heart seeks. Walking along, checking on the figs, persimmons, plums, apples, citrus, purple sage, toyon, mugwort, hummingbird sage— is everything to me, as I watch those little trees and plants grow slowly but surely amongst the rows of avocado trees. The owls and hawks fly above, and the trillions of critters walk below, all somehow connected and interdependent. 

It’s a game of mind versus heart. We love our land, and we see it as an oil painting, and other times it’s a grind to make it profitable.  

Being regenerative is radical. It takes grants, money, sheer will power and a drive to be antithetical to the mainstream.  It sometimes doesn’t make sense—how are you supposed to make any money if your rows aren’t straight and you don’t have economies of scale?  But does the badger care about that? Or does he need an ecosystem that supports a host of characters keeping the food web alive?  

I’m constantly doubting my work. Wouldn’t it be easier to spray Round-up?  Sure.  But when the evening comes, and the birds and coyotes reclaim their land as the trucks come to a halt and the bi-pedals return to their abodes, I don’t know if it would feel easier. I would doubt myself more. After all, I have a kid coming into the world soon. What would he want?

I’m young. And I live in a different time. I was in high school when Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was aired in my living room. I was in college when scientists started to ring the alarm bells of “loss of top soil, biodiversity loss, Bee Colony Collapse etc”; which I later learned they’ve been doing since the 60’s. After school, I worked on organic, regenerative, and conventional farms. All of them are doing their best, with the tools and resources at their disposal, to grow healthy abundant food.  

As you get older, you wonder what you can do to help.  How can I do something good today–  for my neighbors, for my land, for myself– to thrive and enjoy a healthy life?  Fortunately for me, I have (thanks to the hard work and savvy of my parents) a little slice of land along the coast of California where I can start by throwing wildflower seeds out.  I can start, with the help of grants and support from companies like Mad Agriculture, to make a real difference, albeit small.  It might not seem like much when the orioles come and make hanging nests in our palm trees outside our office, but I look forward to them every year.  My heart needs them.  My mind is doing math on the markup of avos, but my heart knows they are there—furiously building their tiny homes, dangling from the trees, defying gravity, yet standing through the gustiest of winds. 

I’m grateful for the possibility to help.  I’m in year five of working with my folks. Year four of planting different trees. Year three of transitioning organic. First year of a small crop of fruit.  Some vibrant purple, amazingly sweet figs with an ant infestation on half of them. Some peaches that didn’t sweeten up from the cool summer, some that did and tasted amazing before the snails and birds found them. Passionfruit that is late to bear fruit yet packed with a sweet and sour crunchy juice.  Apples that surprise and disappoint, depending how long I can possibly wait for them to redden up. Pears that made me believe they can be the solution to all my problems. And winter squash and culinary herbs that will help define my fall. 

As I come back to edit, Its Nov. 30th and my boy has been born.  What a fabulous and magical thing birth is- so grateful for the mommas bringing new life into the world.  And for the dads supporting those mommas and caring for and holding their little ones.   I found time this week to tour the farm and boy am I grateful for already putting in the time of diversifying the land. 

The feeling of seeing a young yet sturdy tree, rooted and rising to the sky with vigor, fills my cup to the brim– knowing that most likely, that tree will feed my kid for decades.  And our community too, as even one tree can give so much.  To bring home all these different fruits to my wife and kid, rejoicing in the culinary expansiveness, makes me feel like a rich man.  My mind hopes that one day, I grow and sell enough fruit to justify my time and energy- that it’s at least a little profitable.  But I have a feeling my heart will be overjoyed that I did it, and continue to do it.  Because, at the end of the day, seeing and feeling diversity on the landscape is everything to me. 

TANNER
Finding joy in the triumphs of others has become one of my secrets to happiness. 

When my brother summited his 100th Sierra Nevada peak, I could breathe the same thin air into my lungs. When my son lifts his feet on the big slide at the playground, the same butterflies tickle my belly. 

When Sean grows meadows amongst his avos, I can smell the central coast soil grow richer, even from the Eastern flank of the Rockies.

Is it by trick of the mind or an opening of the heart that the feats of my community can feed me so well?

As my time and energy become ever directed toward my young children, my own pursuits move to the back seat of our minivan. 

As I have evolved in my role at Mad Agriculture, my time on and with the land and its stewards occupy fewer and smaller boxes on my Google calendar. 

Life constrained only to the self is dull, 

joy found in the ways of others makes life full. 

Each of us can only do so much as individuals. We cannot bear it all ourselves. To honor this earth through our actions, it takes many hands and many hearts for many many seasons. 

Sean, like many Mad Farmers, proves to me with flowers and fruit that humans can bring goodness to the land. These are the stories to tell our children, so they too can love the wild and give life to the world. It will bring me great joy to witness their contributions to the Great Creation.