Accidental Gods A Wild Farming Life: Building a regenerative croft from scratch with Lynn Cassells
Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer met while working as rangers for the National Trust and soon realised that they shared a dream to live closer to the land. They bought Lynbreck Croft at the edge of the Cairngorms National Park in the Highlands of Scotland in March 2016 - 150 acres of pure Scottishness - with no experience farming but a huge passion for nature and the outdoors.
Now, they raise their own animals and sell the produce, grow their own fruit and vegetables, and are as self-sufficient as they can be, alongside producing food for their local community and hosting educational tours and running courses.
Hailed as Best Crofting Newcomers in 2018, they were given the Food and Farming Award by the RSPB in Nature of Scotland Awards in 2019 and were nominated for Nature Champions of the Decade as part of teh Nature of Scotland 10th anniversary.
They have appeared in the series This Farming Life on BBC2 and have written the book, 'Our Wild Farming Life', linked below.
Lynn and Sandra were newcomers to farming and to regenerative concepts, but in the past 6 years, as they have faced success and (some) failures and learned from both, they have seen regenerative farming becoming a far more widely held concept.
In this heart-felt episode, we begin by exploring the writing process, and how Lynn, a new writer, came to write such a fluent book.
From there, we delve deeply into the practicalities of farming in a relatively inhospitable landscape, but also explore the spiritual nature of land-connection, the ways we can give the animals with which we share our lives the fullest capacity to be all that they can be, so that we can become all that we can be: so that we can feel safe, and held in connection to the land and the tribes of the more than human world that surround us.
Lynbreck Croft: https://www.lynbreckcroft.co.uk
Lynbreck on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lynbreckcroft/
Our Wild Farming Life: book: https://chelseagreen.co.uk/book/our-wild-farming-life/