A Million Sets of Eyeballs

On February 15, 2009, I wrote my first Foothill Agrarian blog post. At that point, I’d been raising sheep and selling meat at Farmer’s Markets for about four years. I had also tried (or would try in the coming years) producing summer and fall vegetables, selling firewood, and getting paid for targeted grazing. Today, more than 17 years (and many hundreds of posts) later, my blog has been viewed more than one million times! Even if some of these page views are from bots, this is a staggering number of eyes that have read my words!

Originally, my blog focused almost entirely on my own farming experience and on the local food movement in the Sierra foothills. I wrote about the day-to-day, season-to-season, year-to-year work of raising sheep. I talked about the joys and frustrations of trying to make a living from ranching without actually owning a ranch. Occasionally, I wrote more philosophical essays about production systems or my community’s relationship with the land. Since Sami’s diagnosis with glioblastoma in 2023, most of my posts have dealt with her illness and death, and with my own grieving process.

Obviously, I enjoy writing. I find that exercising my writing muscle regularly helps me improve (or at least I hope I’ve improved). I also find, when I go back and look at some of my earliest posts, that my perspective on farming and ranching has evolved over the last 17 years. The optimism of my early years as a shepherd eventually bumped up against the realities of trying to make a living with livestock. Similarly, the grief I’ve felt over these last three years has also evolved. Through the years, though, putting my thoughts into words and putting my words into the world have been hugely valuable for me. I hope they’ve been valuable to some of the folks who’ve read them.