Christine Martin ranches 100 acres in East Texas, teaches holistic management, and runs The Messy Middle of Regenerative Agriculture on Substack—and the conversation we had yesterday was one of the most grounding I’ve had on this show.
Christine came to farming sideways: born in Argentina, raised in Brazil, ag commodity trader in Switzerland. She landed in Texas 25 years ago, bought five acres to survive a corporate job that was eating her alive, and started down the path most of us know well—chickens, gardens, draft horses, dairy cows, all of it. A migraine that put her on the floor of the trading floor finally forced the connection between what she was eating and how she felt. Soy was in everything. Clean food was hard to find. And she had five acres. You see where this goes.
What she found in holistic management changed the framework entirely—not just for her land, but for every decision she makes on it. The core idea: most of us are addressing symptoms, not root causes. We’re not making money, so we add bees. The pasture’s struggling, so we buy a no-till drill and seed a 12-species cover crop mix. We keep doing things to the land without asking what the land is already doing, or whether we’ve got the time and capacity to run what we’ve already got.
Christine tripled her carrying capacity within two years. By year four she wasn’t buying hay. The seed bank in her soil produced species she’d never planted.
As a regenerative farmer myself, I think that’s astounding.
We also talked honestly about what this work costs us—energy, time, the stories we tell ourselves when things go sideways financially. Christine shared her own habit of reaching for Netflix when the bills pile up. That’s not weakness. That’s what financial stress does to a body. And you cannot regenerate land from a depleted state.
Watch the replay here. You won’t regret it.
Thank you to all those who tuned in for my live video with Christine Martin! Join me for my next live video in the app.
