Dear Friends,

At Laura’s Lean Beef we built a company selling beef throughout the United States and Canada. This  changed the food system on a large scale, as we were the first company to sell beef raised without antibiotics or growth hormones nationally.

I’m proud of the change we made, starting in 1985. Today, meats raised without antibiotics or growth hormones are available in grocery stores everywhere. But that time has passed. The new challenge is to adapt locally to the hard issues of climate change, rural poverty, social and environmental justice. 

To this end, I’ve written our new mission statement, shared below.  My blog posts to “our farm years” will be a report on how we are doing, and the newsletters will reflect this. Our Facebook and Instagram posts will be reflective of this mission, too. 

At Mt. Folly Enterprises, we’ve set our intention to create a living system which works for people, the environment,  and the commonwealth, one community at a time. 

Work is a part of life. Work can be hard, but it should never be meaningless. We pride ourselves on developing our goals together, sharing ownership of the companies,  including decision-making and profit-sharing. This requires time spent listening to each other, so we can depend on each other, and create a culture of continuous improvement.  We can’t rely on outside forces to make life just, so we’ve taken it upon ourselves to do so.

The natural environment is in crisis. At the same time, nature can heal herself.  Industrial farming is at war with nature; we are not. To pilot nature’s healing, we are creating a new model of people, work and the environment, with a regenerative farm at the center and energetic local businesses radiating outward.  Over time, the specifics of this template may change – the businesses may shift, an iterative process of learning may lead to new ways to be regenerative  — but the process of discovering and improving the system will remain.

Genuine change comes from the street and fields — from the bottom, not from the top. Therefore, we remain focused on our community, its local faces, its strengths and its flaws.  Since we are committed to real change, our goal is not to scale up, but to scale outward, not to centralize power and resources, but to distribute them.