This summer, Jeff took his summer school students out on a wagon ride around the farm and asked them to spot every ecological service they could find — not just the ones we humans are responsible for, but the whole system working together. Animals are spreading seeds. Plants provide habitat. Soil takes in nutrients. After the tour, a student told us it was the highlight of the course — that he "finally understood what regenerative farming actually means."
That's really the heart of what we've been building toward for years. As we tell farm campers, we strive to live alongside everything — birds and insects, toads and turtles, deer and coyotes, weeds and fruit trees. That balance isn't just good for us. It's good for our neighbors here in Prairie Crossing, within the Liberty Prairie Reserve, in Lake County, and beyond given our position at the top of the Des Plaines River watershed. Being at the headwaters means the decisions we make about soil and water don't stay on our farm — they move downstream to everyone below us. We take that seriously, especially now, with heavier rain and more frequent storm events than we used to see. We all share this ecosystem, and we all call it home.
None of this happens by accident, and none of it happens overnight. It's the result of a specific, sometimes unglamorous pathway we set out on years ago: moving beyond USDA certified organic and toward regenerative agriculture.
Farming certified organically is still the foundation on which everything else is built. It's an important commitment we make to our customers — it builds accountability and trust into our work through external certifiers, auditors, and meticulous record keeping. We've been doing this long enough now that while it's not "easy" by any stretch, it's become a familiar process — one we keep improving every year. Clearer records. A firm commitment to organic seed and nutrient sourcing, even when it takes more effort and costs more. And a cover cropping system that's grown more complex over time, because we've come to think of it less as a purchase and more as a strategy. Buying finished compost and spreading it where it's needed is simple. Growing your own soil isn't. Instead, we split fields into sections — some growing food, others growing soil — and rotate specific cover crop mixes through the resting sections to rebuild whatever nutrients the ground gave up growing food for you the year before. It's a multi-month, sometimes multi-year process, but the complexity is worth it if it means healthier soil and healthier food into the future.
Sudan grass somewhat damaged by recent rainstorm, but soil stayed in place!
Regenerative farming isn't a different universe from that work — it's an extension of it. Where organic certification governs how we farm the acres we actively cultivate, regenerative practice turned our attention to the land types beyond our row crops — wooded areas, marshlands and wetlands, hedgerows and windbreaks, perennial plantings, and silvopasture for our animals. It asked us to steward all of the land we have, not just the acres in production.
We dipped our toes into this in 2019, when we planted the farm's first food forest — six acres with nearly 800 perennial plants going into the ground that year. Over the years, we've refined not just how we manage the growth of those trees and shrubs, but also the understory beneath them: the grasses and forbs filling in at ground level, which turned out to matter just as much as what we planted on purpose.
Photo: Audubon.org
That attention paid off in a way we didn't fully anticipate. Birders started noticing more grassland and prairie birds in our fields — species that need undisturbed grass through the nesting season to survive. So we started working more closely with Mike Kelly, our longtime hay farming partner, to hold off haying the far fields until after July 15th, giving meadowlarks and bobolinks time to finish nesting and get their hatchlings off the ground before the mowers come through.
We'd always let our asparagus go to seed as a food source for birds. Now we've gone a step further, letting common milkweed grow up alongside it — not as a weed we're tolerating, but as a food source we're cultivating. Milkweed is the only plant monarch caterpillars can eat (and pollinators love, too!), and it gives adult monarchs a place to nectar and rest as they move through on their long migration. It's a small decision with an outsized effect.
Years of just paying attention — watching where the deer move, where the birds nest, where the pollinators travel — have given us a pretty clear picture of the wildlife corridors that run through our farm. We're now using that knowledge to guide where we plant fruiting and edible hedgerows: plantings that feed and shelter wildlife while also connecting those corridors into something more continuous.
Watching this all work — the birds timing their nesting to the hay cutting, the monarchs finding the milkweed we planted for them, the food forest understory settling into its own rhythm year after year — is soothing and awe-inspiring in equal measure. It's also, honestly, transformative. It's changed how we think about every acre we manage, not just the ones we harvest from.
And it's why sharing knowledge matters so much to us. When a student can look out over the vegetable fields, the edible hedgerows, the silvopasture animals, and the six-acre food forest and finally understand what regenerative farming means, it tells us the whole system is working. That transfer of understanding is its own kind of ecological service: knowledge moving outward, the way nutrients, seeds, or water do, making the whole system and community a little richer for having passed through.
