Thoughts From Your Farmer

Building community comes in many ways. Several years ago, a nonprofit named The Land at Home Project asked if I had ever considered having veterans work on my property.

I had hosted a couple of groups before. They came through, helped for a week or so, and moved on. It was a labor force, and I enjoyed it. This was different. This was training through work.

I loved the concept. I have been farming for eighteen years here in the desert, and the best way to help anyone learn is to work the farm. This is nothing you will learn at a university or on YouTube.

The lesson that starts with everyone, in their minds and their hearts, is the manual labor. Then add the weather. Farm work is not for the faint. It is a discipline.

Who better to grasp that concept than military veterans? These people have been serving our country for years. That is a way of life. When they leave that life, the question hanging in the air is simple: What’s next?

I work with The Land at Home Project as a host in their Veterans in Agriculture program. Through this program, I have hosted veterans from many different backgrounds who want to begin their own farms.

They learn the essentials of agricultural production, and they get their hands in the soil at host farms like mine. That is how you understand the principles. That is how you start to see how you will manage your own place.

I am successful as a farm-to-market farmer, a farm-to-plate farmer, and a vendor to large, multi-site supermarkets. That is not a résumé line. That is what I can show a veteran standing in the row with me.

This program gives beginning farmers and ranchers a head start. They leave with mentors, community, and a much clearer vision of how to start than I had eighteen years ago.

Together, we have already created many incredible success stories of beginning veteran farmers.

Together, we can all make a difference. Let’s do this from the ground up.

To heal our bodies, we must first heal the soil.

Small-scale farming is a really big deal.

— Farmer Mark

Farmers live in the future. We are always planning. The job of predicting when our food becomes ripe enough for consumption is a test of nerves. Many failures come from planting too soon or too late.

The Summer/Fall/Winter transition is one of the trickiest for us desert-floor farmers. Our land is sunburned from the relentless heat of the past 90 days. Our crops have been on a critical “stress” cycle. Our people are exhausted, as are our animals.

This is the cycle of life and the cycle of our planet.

Here at Rogue Rhino, we operate through the summer. We have members who need to be fed real, nutrient-dense food. Just because the weather is against us doesn’t stop us from doing what we do. We are true stewards of the land.

As regenerative farmers, we put our sheep to work in the fields that are ready for transition. We must be very watchful that the summer heat does not weaken our animals, providing them with windproof shade and clean water.

Once the sheep have finished, we move them. We pull and repair the irrigation, apply minerals and compost, rake, and prepare the garden for new plantings.

We will be purchasing around 10,000 new organic plugs for hand planting this season.

These plugs are grown in a nursery and are around a month old. The plugs are very delicate, and they take a trained hand and heart to be planted correctly.

“We plant with intention.”

Once planted, the plants will stress, and we watch them closely. If we plant too early and another big heat wave hits, it could kill the new plants. If we plant too late, the ground won’t be warm enough and the daylight will not be long enough for the baby plants to take root.

When you work outside for a living, you learn the seasonal cycles. It’s never the same, but you get a feeling when the evenings get a little chillier and the storms become more violent.

Change is close.

We follow the moon. The desert is communicating with you. The big winds in the afternoon are all part of the transition process of the desert floor.

To be a successful grower on the desert floor, turn off your cell phones and spend time outside.

Planning is key. Execution is critical for success.

— Farmer Mark

The desert heat is slowly fading. The seasons are changing and, more importantly, so are our daylight hours. Most people don’t notice that gradual change, but your trees and plants do.

Stay connected to what is happening outside—not on your phone or computer. It’s a wonderful way to live, and we live in a magical place: the Desert Southwest.

We’ve had some good rain lately, and our farm crew is busy crossing over the gardens and preparing for the Fall/Winter planting. Thousands of seeds will go into the ground, planted with intention and by hand, with thousands of plugs on the way.

When planting, remember that the seeds you’re holding are nothing short of a miracle. They need to feel your vibration before they hit the soil.

Small farmers are always planning and searching for that next revenue stream. We look back at our notes from this time last year, remembering what worked and what didn’t, and use those lessons to decide what comes next.

For us, Soil is Life.

Right now, we’re trimming back plants burned by the summer heat, cutting branches and building compost for our spring transition. It’s all forward thinking. This relationship with nature is a lifestyle.

There’s something special about sitting in the stillness of your garden and simply observing the beauty of a diverse ecosystem—all of it living together in a symbiotic relationship.

During these transition periods, we also add minerals to our soils to help increase the nutrient density of our plants and trees. Those nutrients ultimately end up in the food they produce.

And that, my friends, is one of the things that makes our farm different from most:

We care about what we feed you.

When you eat nutrient-dense food, you’re giving your body the building blocks it needs to operate and stay healthy.

Remember High School Chemistry?

Do you remember the Periodic Table of Elements?

I hated having to memorize that table in high school. It made no sense to me. I could never make the connection between all those elements and the real world.

That changed when I started farming 18 years ago.

As I began reading about “old school” methods of farming, I kept seeing references to those same elements. Suddenly, the table I hated memorizing started to make sense.

The connection was right there in the soil.

I’ve since created a mini periodic table specifically for plants and trees. It’s very basic, but it helps explain the elements involved in growing healthy plants and producing nutrient-dense food.

More importantly, it’s the kind of tool I want to use to teach young people who have an interest in growing—helping them make the connection I couldn’t make when I was sitting in a chemistry classroom.

Because once you understand what’s happening beneath your feet, you start looking at everything growing above it a little differently.

— Farmer Mark

I have been working on this idea for some time now. How can I bring children closer to what farm life is all about? Can I plant a seed in someone’s mind that will grow into a future farmer or rancher? I have seen a few other farms jumping on this idea also; maybe together we can make a difference. Today’s public education system has failed in so many ways that I think the parents who can afford to homeschool have a huge advantage.

The creation of Rogue Rhino Academy is official. I am now working on creating our curriculum.

Tentative Start Date: Tuesday, October 6, 2026
Class starts at 9 a.m. and runs until 11 a.m.
Fall classes will run on seven consecutive Tuesdays.

Topics covered:

From Egg to Chick: Children will pull and incubate fertilized chicken eggs and follow the hatching process.

Aquaponics: Children will learn, plant, and maintain a symbiotic ecosystem where the fish fertilize the water for the plants and the plants filter the water for the fish. This is a recirculating system.

Adventure in Growing Mushrooms: Children will learn how to grow their own mushrooms from Petri dish to fruit.

Composting Adventures: Children will learn about turning kitchen scraps into soil and brewing Plant Power Tea.

Intro to Beekeeping: A basic hands-on course on a living beehive. Maintenance and spinning honey from a comb.

Raised Garden Beds: Students will build, plumb, and plant a raised garden bed and grow vegetables.

We plan to intermingle all these topics during the seven-week course, much like a real farm would operate. We will have work parties (cleaning chicken coops, weeding gardens, trimming trees) and snacks during each class.

This will be our first attempt at teaching on the farm, so this will be a learning process for all of us. We hope to build a successful academy both at the farm and online. The Academy is a nonprofit organization; the monies earned will be turned into garden boxes for the unfortunate in Mesa, Arizona, and local food banks.

— Farmer Mark

In the news today is a prime example of why you should be shopping for your food from a local farmer or rancher. And I am not talking about the resellers who claim they are buying their food from local farmers so they can resell it back to you as a prepared meal.

Educate yourself. Source for yourself. Know where every item comes from.

This week, approximately 1.5 million dozen eggs — more than 19 million individual eggs — have been recalled because of potential Salmonella contamination. So far, 98 people have reportedly become sick, with some requiring hospitalization.

One aspect that COVID brought into the public conversation was the concept of comorbidity — the reality that other health conditions can sometimes affect how severely an illness impacts an individual. Statistically, when you divide the number of reported illnesses by more than 19 million eggs, the chances of becoming sick may appear very small.

But that isn't really the issue here, in my opinion.

How did we allow one or two giant corporations to control this much of our chicken-egg production and distribution?

How did we let that happen?

A second observation that caught my attention this week concerns cattle and large feedlot operations. One report described an audit involving 20,481 cattle finished for slaughter, with 6,078 reportedly observed lactating.

That raises some serious questions.

Growth-promoting hormone implants are commonly used in conventional feedlot cattle. These implants are typically placed beneath the skin behind the animal's ear and can contain naturally occurring hormones such as progesterone, testosterone, and estradiol, as well as synthetic compounds such as trenbolone acetate, zeranol, and melengestrol acetate. They are used to promote growth and improve feed efficiency.

But I can't help asking: What are these practices doing beyond simply making an animal grow faster?

When I read reports suggesting unusual physiological changes in feedlot cattle, including lactation, it makes me question what we are doing to these animals in the pursuit of greater production and efficiency.

And then comes the question that inevitably follows:

What, if anything, does that mean for us when we consume the meat?

Can we definitively correlate agricultural hormone use with hormonal changes in people? I am not claiming here that we can. But I do believe consumers have every right to ask questions about how their food is produced and what is being used to produce it.

Look around at today's society and the conversations surrounding hormonal health. Is it unreasonable to wonder whether our increasingly manipulated food supply could play some role? Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. But I think asking the question is entirely reasonable.

And if problems with conventionally produced meat eventually become a larger part of the public conversation, will we someday be told that laboratory-grown meat is the healthier alternative?

I know. I'll take off my tin-foil hat.

Perhaps the motivation behind chemically altering our meat supply really is much simpler: efficiency, greed, and profit.

But that brings me right back to where I started.

Please find your local farmer and rancher.

Find someone who can tell you where your eggs came from. Find someone who can tell you how their chickens were raised. Find a rancher who can tell you whether growth-promoting hormones were used and how the animals were fed and finished.

Buying locally does not magically eliminate every possibility of foodborne illness or guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong. But it gives you something our increasingly consolidated food system often does not:

A direct connection to the person who produced your food.

Yes, locally produced food will often cost you more.

But please consider the alternative.

— Farmer Mark

To tie into one of my previous editorials, “Cheap Food,” I have just read that a USDA study on consumer dollars spent on food shows that only about 5 cents out of every $1.00 makes it down to the farmer.

If you’re a small farmer, you must make the connection “direct to consumer” to capture as much revenue as possible. Since COVID, selling to restaurants has become even less profitable. Chef-run restaurants operate on such thin profit margins—with state minimum-wage requirements, long hours, medical insurance costs, and a dwindling workforce—that it’s easy to see why they can’t afford local farmers’ produce.

Don’t forget the absurd food-safety regulations that apply when purchasing from a local farmer. The system is truly broken.

Your relationship with your local farmer is critical.

However you can make it work, every dollar you spend directly with your local farmer or rancher helps keep them in business—whether by purchasing online at their individual farm stands or elsewhere.

Be watchful at the farmers markets, as I have mentioned before: make sure you know the source of what you are buying. Make an informed decision and do not take for granted that just because something is sold at a farmers market, the seller grew that food.

— Farmer Mark

Every year the temptation returns: push the timing just a little further, squeeze one more meat-bird harvest before the Arizona summer closes the window. This year I gave in. We ordered late. The heat exacted its price.

Yesterday we processed 45 birds for direct sales. Six of us worked four hours through prep, harvest, and cleanup. The chamber vacuum machine failed us—our birds had simply grown too large for it—so we fell back on the reliable shrink-bag method, the approach I still recommend to any new farmer or homesteader. Equipment failures piled up around us: a broken ice machine waiting on a circuit board, refrigeration trucks down, dead batteries. Another Arizona summer.

Yet the birds themselves were beautiful and heavy. They will sell quickly. We need the revenue.

What matters more than the logistics is the choice that produced those birds. We raise Red Rangers, a heritage broiler. They are active, aggressive, and slow to mature. Roosters behave like roosters. Feed conversion is less efficient, time to harvest is longer, and costs are higher. We accept that. We feed them one of the most expensive organic rations available—Scratch and Peck 18 percent protein—supplemented with vegetable scraps from our microgreen and vegetable production. Quality over quantity is not a slogan here; it is the operating rule.

Contrast that with the industry default, the Cornish Cross. Bred for extreme growth and feed efficiency, these birds become almost motionless at an early age. They sit and eat. Many sit in their own waste unless moved daily. That is not animal husbandry. It is the genetic manipulation of a species for maximum return. I will not raise them. The preference is personal, but the principle is not.

If you eat meat for nutrition, you should know who raised the animal, what it ate, how it lived, and the state of its health.

Anything less is guesswork. Visit the farms that supply you. Look for actual coops and living birds. If a seller offers eggs but has no chickens, you are buying someone else’s product under a different name. The same test applies to meat. Reselling under a farm label is common in Arizona and, remarkably, legal. Labels on cartons and packages tell only part of the story; the rest must be verified in person.

Farming is not a game of volume alone. It is a series of deliberate choices about genetics, feed, housing, and labor. We house birds outdoors under shade cloth and wire, protected at night by guardian dogs. We accept slower growth and higher costs because the alternative produces an animal we would not want to eat. That standard should not be rare.

The birds we harvested yesterday met it. That is the only measure that ultimately matters.

— Your Farmer, Mark

I’ve been receiving many requests from the public for volunteers. Many of you have watched our YouTube videos on Rogue Rhino Gardens and want to come learn what we’re doing here. First, please let me say thank you.

Unfortunately, we have had some difficult experiences with volunteers in the past. The old saying is true: “One bad apple…”

Several seasons ago a young male volunteer climbed a ladder he was never asked or allowed to use, fell, and injured his leg. He went to the hospital and was found to have a broken bone.

Weeks later I received the hospital bill from his parents. When I asked why they were sending it to me, I said, “Your son was a volunteer, and he did not have permission to climb or work on a ladder.” They told me to just make a claim with my insurance company.

I told them no. Insurance companies already charge farmers extremely high rates no matter how carefully we operate. Yes, some of the larger “show farms” do allow volunteers and simply pay those higher premiums. We choose not to.

Anyone who thinks they can learn how to grow food in the desert in a short period of time by volunteering is far more optimistic than I am. I’ve been doing this for eighteen years and I’m still learning every single day.

Cyclospora is in the news again. This parasite is not new, not lab-created, not genetically engineered, and not deliberately released. It is a naturally occurring, water-borne organism that has been with us for a very long time.

Most outbreaks are tied to raw produce—lettuce leads the list, followed by berries, peas, Thai basil, herbs, and cilantro. When U.S. production is out of season, we import these foods to meet year-round demand. The contamination almost always happens the same way: the produce is washed in water that carries the parasite. Standard food-safety rules require a chlorine rinse, yet Cyclospora shrugs it off.

These outbreaks are neither rare nor surprising. In my view they are the predictable result of a food system built on cheapness. As a society we no longer eat with the seasons; we eat what advertising tells us to eat, whenever we want it. For decades government policy has subsidized farmers to grow certain crops at a loss and paid them not to grow others. Farmers have almost no control over next year’s price for a bushel or a pound. The only time a farmer truly sets the price is when he or she sells direct to the consumer. Corporations set the rest of the prices—and that is why thousands of farms disappear every year.

Cheap food carries enormous hidden costs: declining public health, heavier reliance on pharmaceuticals, soaring Medicaid and Medicare bills, and long-term care expenses—all ultimately paid by the same consumers. SNAP and food-stamp dollars should be restricted to nutrient-dense real food, not soda and snack foods. Imagine shifting the money we already spend on the true cost of cheap food into nutrient-dense production instead. Our collective health and immune resilience would improve dramatically. The human body is an extraordinary machine; “garbage in, garbage out” is simply the full price tag of the current system.

A strong, healthy population would barely notice pathogens like Cyclospora. If you want to lower your personal risk and raise your own vitality, the path is straightforward: buy from local farmers, learn to eat with the seasons, stop relying on imported produce, and walk away from fast-food restaurants.

For those who have followed my farming journey these past eighteen years in the Phoenix area, you already know my obsession with nutrient density. It begins in the soil. We feed the soil; the plants take care of themselves. When I became a full-time farmer my social life largely vanished—two simple reasons: the work and the hours. I still love to read. Reading fuels imagination and wonder in a way nothing else can. I still remember the jolt of watching the first movie made from a book I had already lived inside my own head; the filmmaker’s vision and mine were worlds apart.

The old-school agricultural writers remain some of the most valuable teachers I know. In today’s world every time-tested method seems to get a shiny new name. “Organic,” once a plain description of how my grandparents grew food without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides, is now a patented, multi-billion-dollar brand complete with its own list of approved sprays. When that kind of money enters the picture, common sense often exits.

I once found a home in the idea of regenerative farming, but it too is rapidly becoming another regulated certification. Allan Savory, the true originator of the thinking many now call regenerative, used a better term: Holistic Management. That is the word I stand behind. It means seeing the farm as a complete living ecosystem—diversity, soil health, and the intricate, symbiotic relationships between plants, animals, microbes, water, and even the wider cosmos. Falling in love with your land, whether it is a backyard or a thousand acres, and learning to work with those relationships rather than against them, is one of the deepest satisfactions I know.