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. 

Business is a part of life, part of the American way. But it doesn’t have to be rapacious, leaving a few rich people and many poor people. It doesn’t have to plunder the earth. Mt. Folly Enterprises, which I’ve funded, is owned by 9 people, all of whom are from east and east-central Kentucky. As the company grows and prospers, more people will become owners, and I will become a minority shareholder. Shared ownership, including decision-making and profit sharing, requires time spent listening, learning, planning and doing. We can depend on each other to create a culture of continuous improvement.

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.

Our plants and crops are grown in organic soils, not fed chemical fertilizers as if on an IV. This makes them tougher, and better for you!