The Promise That Outlasts Me

The conservation contract underneath everything I write here, and why I signed it as a single, broke, solo mother in the middle of nowhere

In 2020 I was 39 years old, single and broke, raising two boys on my own.

I’d bought 53 acres in western Maine two years earlier through the USDA’s program for disadvantaged farmers, with the rest crowdfunded from people who believed me when I said I would steward this place. There was no inheritance, and no second income. There was a deep hunger to do one true thing with my life, and a piece of land that turned out to be more important than I knew when I bought it.

When state biologists walked the acreage that year, they found two at-risk habitats:

• A stream feeding Gilman Pond holds brook trout fry and subsequently impacts an endangered freshwater mussel further downstream.

• A juvenile grove of Northern Larch sheltering Canadian Lynx and the at-risk Nighthawk.

So I signed a 50-year conservation contract on 40 of my 53 acres. The contract protects all of it until 2070—long after I’ll be in any position to defend it myself.

40 acres of this farm will not be optimized, developed, or sold. They are committed to the species who were here before me and will be here after.

People ask me: Why?

The honest answer is that I drive a borrowed compact car, am perpetually behind on my bills, and rely on food stamps. But I’m also still farming. This is not a contradiction—it’s the cost of keeping a 50-year promise to a piece of land while the systems that surround it would rather I didn’t.

The other answer is that I don’t believe anyone is coming to save the wildlife on this land. Not the government. Not the next administration, whichever one. Not the developer who would have offered me a price I couldn’t refuse if I hadn’t taken the option off the table. The trout fry don’t have time to wait for a political climate to be right. Neither does the lynx . Nor the freshwater mussel that’s been here longer than the United States has been a country.

If I waited, those acres would eventually be cut, drained, subdivided, sold. Maybe not by me. But eventually. The market is patient and it always wins, unless you take something off the market.

I want to BE the change I want to see in this world, and since I can’t control what happens in Washington—I did the only thing I could: I took 40 acres off the market for the next 50 years.

That contract is the spine of everything you’ll read here.

The garden, the sheep, the bread, the pantry, the writing about real food and capable women and resistance to corporate systems—all of it lives downstream of one decision: that 40 acres of this farm will not be optimized, developed, or sold.

Because I'm effectively functioning as a non-profit ecological reserve, my farm is smaller than it could have been, my income is narrower, and the math of the operation is harder than it has any right to be. I have made my own life harder, on purpose, for the sake of a stream, a grove, a mussel, a cat, and a bird.

And I would do it again tomorrow.

If you’re new here, this is what you’re subscribing to. The how-to writing—how to harden off seedlings in Zone 4, how to make your own homemade bread, how to keep a small flock of sheep through a Maine winter—all of it sits on top of this. The throne underneath the work is a contract that outlasts me, and the larger conviction that we owe the future better than what we are currently giving it.

I’d be glad to have you here.

—Sam

P.S. If this is the kind of writing you want in your inbox, the subscribe button is below. Free subscribers get every weekly post. Paid subscribers support the farm directly and get the deeper archive—about a fancy coffee or two per month. Either way, your reading keeps the writing free of corporate sponsorship I’d have to pretend to believe in.

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🫶Ways to Support Runamuk

1. Instead of buying me a coffee, you can “buy a sheep a cookie” or donate for a “bag of sheep-feed” by making a one-time donation through PayPal or Venmo.

2. Purchase a farm-share for yourself, or donate the funds to a family in need.

3. Check out our Donate page on the Runamuk website to see how you can volunteer or donate things you’re no longer using. We love hand-me-downs!