Things got complicated really quickly. Sometimes, when you plan for the long haul, you end up in a house that doesn’t have a functional kitchen sink, with a smoke-filled outdoors, cupboards covered in grime, no internet, no phone service, no car, four kids who are bored, a heat wave, all in the middle of a pandemic in a location where people don’t think the pandemic is real. To review, our goal was to build a regenerative agriculture farm that would be carbon negative, debt-free, off-grid, with diverse solar-based income, managed together by our family of six. We’d been inspired, done research, taken courses and felt we’d reached the limit of what we could do in suburbia. The next step seemed simple: find the land and sell our house…within the next few years.

We grew up in California and Wisconsin, two thousand miles apart, but still suburbia. Our families were friends, and visited every couple of years. Over one glorious winter break, just before college, we fell in love, and over the subsequent months we talked to each other about everything: hopes and dreams, family expectations, values and morals, philosophy, all the problems with the world around us, and how we wanted to fix them. After we’d both graduated from the same college, after Daniel finished a masters degree and Miranda apprenticed at a dance company, after we were married, after we’d moved into a house and had our first child, we went back to looking at the big questions: what can and should we do with the time that we have? What can we leave for our children? 

We knew our suburban lifestyle was directly threatening the livability of the planet. Like many people, we wanted to find ways to mitigate and reverse that threat. We had the desire and means to have more than two children, but the suburbs are built around the assumption of families of four. We feared the massive societal upheavals that climate change coupled with growing inequality seemed to make inevitable. We wanted the means to survive and thrive in an increasingly unstable world. We wanted to give our children something tangible in addition to knowledge, family, and culture. How could we accomplish all that?