Before I had a farm, I had a drawer full of farmers.
Business cards. Dog-eared books. Names written in the margins of vision documents I wrote at two in the morning during years I now understand better than I did then. Between 2022 and 2025 I was building a flower farm with my wife on nine acres near the Chief Ladiga Trail, and I was also collecting people who had already done the thing I was reaching for. I read them the way you read someone who has crossed the water you are still standing in.
Then I lost the farm.
This book is about both of those things at once, because they were never really separate. It's a book about the men and women who taught me to love the land, and it's a book about a man who dreamed the ground, worked it, and did not keep it. Half portrait. Half confession.
Each chapter is a farmer. Each farmer is also a mirror.
- Wendell Berry gave me the century — place as fidelity, the idea that you belong to a piece of ground the way you belong to a marriage.
- Joel Salatin gave me the megaphone, and taught me the difference between conviction and performance, mostly by making me watch myself blur the line.
- Justin Rhodes gave me the homecoming — going back to the grandfather's land, broke and sick, and filming it anyway.
- Noah Sanders gave me the doctrine. I drove down from Weaver to his Redeeming the Dirt conference — a camp in Coosa County, October 2018 — still a pastor, still years from my own dirt, and heard a man from Goodwater say out loud that the ground is God's and farming is worship.
- Cale and Kelly Crosby at Indigo Ridge gave me the proof — the whole theology being lived one county over, with kids underfoot, close enough that they drove to my morning prayer.
I am not writing a how-to. I am the last person who should tell you how to keep a farm; I didn't. This is a book about why the land pulls at a certain kind of person — and what it costs to answer the pull, or to answer it and still come up short. The credential here is the wreckage, not the podium. I think that's the honest version. I know it's the only one I'm able to write.
The early chapters are already here, as Southern Legends profiles. The rest are coming, one farmer at a time.
If you want to know when it's finished — and read the chapters as they land — put your email in below. No pledge, no "support my writing." Just the next farmer when the next farmer is ready.
Matt Headley is a former pastor, flower farmer, and classically trained singer from Northeast Alabama. His memoir Broken Ground is about the losing; this book is about the company he kept along the way.
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