I’m a writer, historian, craftsman, duck-rancher, woods-wanderer, and believer in small-scale, broad-based, participatory, part-time, and amateur farming. I live with my wife and daughter on an acre and a quarter of the Eno River watershed in the Southern Piedmont of North America, in the shade of a blackgum tree.

In my twenties I got it into my head that I wanted to farm part time and write part time. The times turned out to be far smaller parts of the whole than I had intended. When I began this site in 2002 I had just gotten a small flock of ducks, we were expanding our gardens, and it seemed as though we’d be able to buy more land soon. I wrote a book about what it means to be rural and I worked for a few years with the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, which does some very good work in this part of the country promoting local and organic agriculture. Then we had a baby, and my “real job” grew more complicated and absorbing, and I ran out of time and energy.

Now, nine years later, the “real job” is gone, and the baby is eight years old and told me recently she wants to be a farmer. She’d make a good one: she sees things in plants and animals I don’t, and she’s even more stubborn than I am. So that is progress towards the old “new agrarian” dream, just not the sort I’d intended.

It’s time, though, to restart the engine. We are working on getting that little farm, sooner rather than later. In the meantime,this site is about our progress, on what I used to call our “halfway homestead” — in print, anyway; privately I called it our half-assed homestead. You’ll read here about gardening, backyard poultry, and any other agricultural ventures I manage to get into; about our woods and the natural community of which we try to be a part; and my thoughts about food, home craft, place, sustainability, nature, and activism… and whatever else comes to mind.

I’m also working on a history of American baking, tentatively titled The Decline and Fall of Gingerbread, in which I explore craft, technology, culture, and the ways in which we have become abstracted from our food. You can read more of my historical work, including a lot of food history, at my self-titled site, Walbert’s Compendium.

And you really should read my wife’s blog, Needle and Spade, which has considerably more about gardening than I can write (and far better pictures, too).

If, finally, you want to know what a “new agrarian” is, I have to ask your patience. I think I thought I knew, once, but now I find I’m still working on it. “New agrarianism” is going to have to be an inclusive vision, and a complex one. What I do know is that if we are going to survive as a species and as a civilization we are going to have to live lives more integrated with their source — in the land, in nature, and in one another.

— David Walbert