Issue 7 . Letter from the Director

You might notice that the journal looks and feels different. Mad Agriculture is undergoing a bit of an internal revolution. Over the past few years, we’ve been discovering ourselves and how we serve both land and farmers. What has become clear is our purpose, vision and mission, theory of change and our core value offerings of equitable financing, land and business technical assistance, and access to values-aligned markets. Our work has evolved a lot over the past four years, and with that we have noticed that our brand and story don’t fully reflect the energy, tone, ambition and radicalism of the movement we are trying to build. In short, we want to be louder, push the margins, fracture the conventional system, overturn more tables, love more deeply, collaborate wildly, and be boisterous and playful. 

Change comes from the margins. Margins are messy, mutable, and alive. Margins are ecotones, rich ecological wonder zones where collisions happen. Ecotones are where ideas and cultures meet, conflict, merge, and reconcile. We are working through a rebrand that leans into this wildness, and transmits such madness in our voice, aesthetic, and story. The madness comes in part from the anger and rage for the social and ecological devastations that we long to heal. In part, it’s a madness of insanity. In Wendell’s words, ‘I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.’ The world that we are striving to create is so vastly different from the world that is, that nearly everything that we do bears certain madness. Our madness is countercultural. We will not sacrifice compassion, kindness and our approach of non-judgement in our approach to being louder and leaning into the uncomfortable areas of the work. 

Regeneration is action, work in motion. Regeneration is real; the good, the bad and the ugly. Regeneration is a rebellion against convention. Regeneration embraces the different, the outcast, the wild and the weird. Regeneration stretches the imagination. Regeneration is experimentation, trying new things, combining the new and old, testing, living, learning, repeating, or not repeating. Regeneration brings new-found calm, fills your lungs with grain dust, bombards your senses with earth smell, tastes like sweat and tears, and feels like the quickening of your heart. You know regeneration by the feeling of resonance with things within you and beyond you, conscious and often unconscious. You know regeneration when discomfort and fulfillment are the paradox of living. This is the energy of the movement, and where we’re taking our voice and brand. If the regenerative revolution is alive, messy, and mutable, then so are we. 


Onward, 
Phil