Jason Stern: For people who aren’t familiar with you or your work—your partnership with Dan Barber and Blue Hill and Stone Barns—can you say a little bit about the background of that work?
Jack Algiere: Sure. My wife, Shannon, and I were referred to Stone Barns during its infancy, while the place was still being designed and established in 2003, before we opened to the public. David Rockefeller and his family had committed to restoring these amazing stone barns here. And Dan and his brother David, as restaurant owners, had committed to taking on the restaurant. The idea of placing the restaurant here—celebrating this old family farm and what it could do for the public, as part of a nonprofit that would teach, research, feed people, and do all the things we do now—brought a new lens. That vision was pioneering: a farm hub built around an innovative, organic, regenerative food system encompassing the restaurant, culinary work, fermentation, farming, conservation, and more. It was really compelling to us.
A mentor of ours, Amigo Bob, called me and said, ‘I’ve just learned about this project. Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch have been working on the design. You guys really should do this. You’re the right people for it. It’s the right time.’ I’ve always felt fortunate about that. We weren’t looking for something different. But from a social perspective, we’ve always wanted to have more impact in our communities than just farming in the bush. You know, I believe farming as a way of life is very valuable. The problem is that agriculture is so far outside our common, everyday social culture that we’re forgetting really important things we need in our lives, and why productive land stewardship in communities is so important.
I tried to leverage this book not as a how-to. Shannon and I are writing a second book about how to start a direct-market farm and pursue land-stewardship work. That will be more of a field guide. This one is philosophical. It’s really about the lessons I’ve learned working in nature and how those same processes and examples, and their parallels, have revealed themselves in the work we’ve been able to do. And I like to think that’s not just luck or chance, but a thing we could all really create more of in our lives and in our work.
In the book, you describe Stone Barns as a way of living in which life and work are not separate. And yet that can sound like a luxury—you live on a Rockefeller estate. Is there a pathway for all of us to participate more fully in nature and, through that, discover our own nature?
That’s exactly right. There are many ways to approach this, but most importantly, when we are first finding our way, we’re building our path. We don’t have rites of passage that allow us to integrate with the natural world. We do that with business and career and all the things that come with society. And that’s okay. I’m not saying we should go back to nature, become Luddites, or let go of technology. The idea is that we’re embracing all this stuff in the most modern context and finding how we fit in this whole thing. Very simply, we are this body of nature. We are absolutely part of it. Yet culturally, we consider ourselves observers to this whole thing that’s around us, even though our participation in it is palpable.
Growing up on a farm, I loved plants and learned from my parents about mechanics, plants, and the many things that compelled me to love this kind of work, along with music and stuff. Then, when I realized the social significance—the cultural significance—of growing food for people, something pivoted in me. Oh, yes, I want that for myself. I want that physical health. I want the nutritional health. I want the mental health of being in nature. I don’t want to be at a desk—although now I do spend a lot of time at desks. The common approach is, ‘I’ll work here, and I’ll recreate in nature when I have a chance.’ We put production over here, conservation over here, and recreation in another place. I learned very early that this compartmentalization was something I didn’t want in my life.
And, just to speak to the privilege piece, that certainly comes with this place. But one model this place shows is that when you have a community that understands the values that allow farmers to follow their greater ethic—land stewardship, healthy plants, healthy people, protecting watersheds, building soil, capturing carbon, promoting biodiversity—then farmers shine. When that community is not there, farmers are forced to shave away one ethic after another, reducing their work to a very utilitarian production system. We had that support.
You’re describing a very different sensibility from the idea that nature is a state of war and that humans, as the most powerful, are entitled to exploit it. What follows from seeing ourselves as part of nature instead?
The general ethos here is that healthy systems make healthy people. I don’t know our precise role as stewards of this planet, but I’m beginning to understand it through what I’ve been able to see in the other. Through an ecocentric lens, you respect the other in order to give everything the dignity it has and allow it to tell you something about who you are. We can’t learn that just from each other. You and I can’t teach each other this. We learn it together, within the rest of the system. That is a critical difference between an industrial worldview and an agroecological worldview, which reflects a more Indigenous way of knowing.
We can act as if we are not agrarian because we have a lot of things that prop us up and push us out in front, away from the power of nature. We’ve made a lot of mechanisms to overcome that. There’s a section in the book about the Haber–Bosch process, which enabled synthetic nitrogen production. Fertilizer factories could become munitions factories when they were needed. That helped create both the military complex and the industrial complex in agriculture, and our reliance on petroleum to make the nitrogen needed to feed our crops, because we have not set up ecological, regenerative systems that regenerate the soils we’re growing from. We are in debt to this planet because of how much we’ve pulled out. Petroleum is like a credit card: we used it knowing the account would eventually run out.
In the book you describe three grand acts of metamorphosis—the vegetative, flowering, and fruiting phases. The plant transcends its life from seed to seed. Can you outline that pattern?
This is a beautiful pattern. The point of ‘observe the one in the many’ is that the plant itself is an expression of the leaf in expanded and contracted forms, the leaf being the central archetype of a plant. The leaf, the bud, and the stem—this small triad—repeats itself. That is especially evident in the vegetative state. I connect this to people because we’re talking about the vegetative body as a period of attention, when we gather and collect information, personally or as a group. If we have a complex problem we’re trying to solve, we have this iterative, incremental growth: one leaf gathers information and feeds the next, and the next.
Once the plant has gathered enough, it begins to consolidate its thought. The plant draws back; its literal shape changes. It goes into the inflorescence and changes from within, down into its cells. It makes a choice that emerges not as incremental, but as one version: the flower—a spontaneous, simultaneous gesture of what that plant had been doing incrementally as a leaf. The petals, sepals, stamens, and pistils are contracted and expanded versions of that leaf. This is something Goethe was talking about in the 1790s, and modern science now confirms that the cells differentiate like that. I love that.
Then comes the fruit. Once pollen touches the stigma and there is fertilization, the plant goes into its next big expansion and contraction, which is the spontaneous development of the fruit and the maturation of the seed. It’s a pretty extraordinary thing. Understanding that begins to make sense in terms of the metaphors and the ways we go about struggling with problem-solving every day.
Can you give an example of how that applies to life—how someone might think about it?
The first thing is that we have to pay attention. If we’re going to start a new project, we really want to do our homework. That’s what the vegetative body is. We’re learning, gathering, listening. But today there’s more data and information than anyone could ever need, and yet there’s still the same heel-dragging and indecision. Clearly, the amount of information is not the issue. We gather to a certain point. Farmers have to be a little heuristic because if we’re not, we don’t make a decision on time. We have to make the call, knowing it’s not perfect, and consider improvement the goal. Then we learn from that.
Then we get to a place of presence that says, this is the moment I need to make a choice. There can be nothing more present than a flower. All these green plants around us are the background. When a flower comes out, it calls to us. The plant is telling us, ‘I’m here.’ Now, to decide what you’re going to do requires a great deal of letting go. Not everything you’ve gathered can come with you. You cross that threshold lightly. The emerging future doesn’t have much room for luggage. You step into that fog and all of a sudden new things appear. We come into this space of unknowing a little bit. Even though we’ve gathered so much, we still have to trust that step, whatever that means.
I started thinking about tending—tending to ourselves, tending to this planet. The word fascinates me. Attention is this vegetative state of gathering. Then the presence of the flower is intention, because we do need to make the choice; the choice expresses what we’re going to step toward. And then I was thinking about what comes after intention. I’m always thinking about imagination. What’s so great about fruit is that it’s thoughtful, creative, tempting, sensual. It’s all about juice and wings and all kinds of really cool ideas. So I thought, oh, that’s really like pretending. The sequence is attention, intention, pretending.
You seem to distinguish intelligence—the collection of data—from consciousness as something more connected to the present moment. Is that accurate?
Yeah, that’s accurate. I don’t think AI is a conscious thing. I think it’s a massive database of information. Intelligence is a gathering. But consciousness is a different thing. I think it’s a living thing. I think it’s not in our head. It’s not a thing we make. It’s a thing we connect to when we practice what we do over and over again.
From the perspective of plants, I don’t believe they have a singular identity consciousness. I think they’re too interconnected for that; their consciousness is in the wholeness of the soil fertility and the biome that surrounds them. They are an intermediary between space and rocks. They make that relationship possible.
You talk about hope in an unfamiliar way. It isn’t conventional or separate from effort; it seems active, almost a byproduct of honest work. Can you say something about that?
Hope is not necessarily about knowing. Real, grounded hope means understanding that the result does not determine whether we should continue. It’s the drive to continue. It’s the practice to continue, right? Not the end goal. Instead of saying, ‘I didn’t get that job; I’m a failure,’ we can say, ‘I learned so much through the process. I simply didn’t get that job.’ Now a new door has opened because I worked so hard to get there. I worked, thought, exercised; I developed a kind of fitness in my life around interacting with something more than me.
I feel that way about farming. People give the quintessential discouraging response: ‘This is all very nice, but how are you going to feed the world?’ But that’s not my intention. My intention is to feed my community and take care of the place where I live. It’s our job to create a place for us to flourish. That comes with delicious, nutritious food, healthy ecosystems, drinkable water, and the fairness we’re all striving for. In our specialties—as a writer, farmer, musician, or accountant—we forget that we actually play really significant roles for each other.
My older son is studying native grasslands in South Dakota and the response of native grasses to grazing bison and cattle. He grew up with us on the farm and has had this very ecocentric life. The beautiful thing is that the way he finds meaning is very intentional. Anything we can do to work in nature matters. I think food is our last real vestige to nature. That is our pathway, right? We return to nature through our food. Once we recognize the relationship between food and where it comes from, we start recognizing the meaning of things. What are cows? Why do they show up? They serve a tremendously important role in maintaining grass ecosystems and recycling carbon. When we put them in a feedlot and fill them with corn, they’re not expressing their meaning. They’re simply serving as food, and we’re missing their larger meaning.
That’s what kids are thinking about for themselves too: How do I make it in this world? Where do I find hope? That hope comes from doing meaningful work. To me, meaningful work means having direct contact with growing food for people. If I could take care of this place and live in this way, I knew I would find meaning. Maybe instead of struggling all the time to solve our planetary problems, we could think about what kind of health and beauty and stability we can provide for ourselves, our families, and our communities. Honestly, if the future isn’t pleasurable, it isn’t really a future we want to live in. That’s what nature has always done: find its way creatively.
From this holistic perspective of a living, interconnected system, how do you decide what technology to use?
I was born into this. I spent a lot of time in barns, moving engines around, building structures, and working with mechanics. I appreciate mechanics and their significance in assisting us. Two worldviews stand out: ecocentric agroecology and the industrial mindset. The industrial worldview leads with technology to replace the complexity of our thought with prescribed methodologies: do this, and the technology will do that for you. It’ll turn on the water. It’ll spray the fertilizer. It’ll tell you what to do. The key to thinking about technology through a more ecocentric lens is to ask: How does it help us? How does it assist us in our work? As a land steward or farmer, we want to be as close to the system as possible.
There are degrees of separation that can happen very quickly. As soon as I’m up on a tractor, I couldn’t care less about the worms I’m driving over. But if I’m on the ground with a hand trowel or with my own hands, I would definitely move that worm. When we’re close, we care more. We almost always overengineer things, so it’s important that whenever we add a new tool, we remember what it may be taking away from us as a practice.
I have watering systems, sprinklers, heads, and other equipment, but in 30 years of farming this way, I have never used a timer. I want everyone who works with me to understand how much water they’re putting on and to pay attention. We use lines and micro-emitters, but the person who turns the knob on and off is also looking at the soil, recognizing what’s happening to the plants, and doing the math about how much water they put down. As soon as that is mechanized or prescribed—use A, B, C fertilizers and X, Y, Z herbicides—you have given up that relationship and accepted the prescription.
The point is to use technologies that bring us closer to the thing we’re working on, that take the physical strain off us so the energy in our bodies can go to our minds and our thoughts. When I’m walking through a field of lettuce with a hoe, I notice the finches and think, ‘Oh, look, the bluebird is back.’ We’re doing these rote tasks with the right degree of effort while recognizing the ecosystem around us. I love tractors, I really do. I’ve had to justify how to use them in my life. The answer is: as minimally as possible, in the best-balanced way I can. How close to the soil do you want to be?
Before we finish, is there anything else you want to say about the book?
I made the deliberate choice to write this book independently. I’ve been embedded in this organization for so long, and my partners in all this work have been incredible. But the book came from a truly personal place. I wanted to talk about concepts for which Stone Barns is not always the vessel. I wanted to go deeper and explore more complexity in some of these philosophies. Stone Barns lives these values while recognizing that visitors come with different levels of experience. A lot of what’s in this book is much deeper, and I generally don’t bring it up in our regular conversations with guests, but it is at the root of all this stuff.
My wife and I have poured our lives into this place, and publishing an independent book was important for my own expression. The work is done now, in one sense. I’m happy people can read it, but the process of writing it was profound for me.
