Carl James Sutterfield

Interview With Ragan Sutterfield

ST: Hi Ragan. Give us a little background. How long have you been farming and writing? What is a typical day like for you?

RAGAN: I’ve been writing seriously since high school, but my writing didn’t really begin to take shape until 2004 when I published my first article.  Around the same time I began an apprenticeship in farming with a sheep farmer near where I grew up in Arkansas.  Over time that apprenticeship grew into a full blown livestock operation including sheep, pigs, chickens, and cattle that I ran by myself.  That venture was a humiliating experience–it brought me to the limits of my abilities and truthfully I got in over my head because my ambitions overreached my competence.  I learned through my failure that farming must be done with an extreme respect for limits and surprises, and even more so that farming must be done in community.  Over time I sold off most of my livestock and found my way to a partnership with a couple of other farmers and social entrepreneurs in a project to establish a school farm at Felder Academy.  Our goal there is to create a sustainable school farm model that is self supporting and could easily be repeated at any school.  All three of us help manage the farm and we coordinate our activities with a weekly meeting on Tuesdays.  We are all responsible for making sure the chickens get fed, plants get watered, and progress is made in the garden.  Though we all chip in time when we can, I am responsible to see that everything is taken care of on the weekends.  During the week I also try to work on high level work like the development of a planting calendar, coordinating the pick up brewers grain from a local microbrewery for compost, etc.  I support my farming and writing through an off farm job working for a consulting firm, so much of my time is taken up with that.  It is not ideal, but this arrangement has allowed me to have more freedom in my farming and writing and less financial pressure.