Plain Talk with John Mesko - Free Archive Audio

The final stop on my November 2005 grand circuit of the midwest was at Lighthouse Farm (formerly Pilgrims' Wayside Farm) just outside Indianapolis. As I pulled into the driveway I saw that John Mesko was about to load a venerable John Deere tractor onto a utility trailer, so I did the neighborly thing—watched him drive it aboard, then told him it looked good to me. The tractor was part of the load of equipment he would be taking to Minnesota the next day, in preparation to move his family north to live and work on the farmstead where John had grown up.

When I began reading John's weblog Antithesis in Agriculture, what impressed me most was the imagination with which he approached the job of making his very small scale farm a viable operation. Much of his effort was centered around reaching out to the local community and infecting them with his enthusiasm for the work—workshops on chicken and lamb butchering, direct sales, the weblog, the website. Like Joel Salatin, John has a clear understanding that a viable farm must be a multi-faceted operation; to this he adds willingness to think up and try out new ways of adding depth and richness to the work of Lighthouse farm.

This is an important message for those of us who are stumbling our way out of a modern industrial lifestyle towards what we think will be a better life. The ever-present temptation is to overreach, to skip the painful and tedious learning process and jump directly into the life we envision—only to find that it is a life we are not equipped to live successfully. Instead we need to humble ourselves, to acknowledge our weaknesses and lack of skills, to chart a path that will allow us to learn and grow as we make progress towards the goal while still living a life that is full and enjoyable.

John Mesko embodies just such an understanding as he leads his family towards the good life, deliberately blazing a trail in the process that others can follow. Join us for a conversation that touches on the need for clean food, the possibilities for making a living from a small scale farm, and the goodness of the Christian agrarian life.