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Some stories of stewardship begin with the land. This one begins with a dinner, a chuck roast, and a mother who believed she had found the right woman for her son.

The menacing table grapes depicted on the front of The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan haunted me, yet within the week, I’d read the entire thing. Pouring over its pages, I wondered why I had never thought about where my food comes from. I thought all cows happily ate grass out on a pasture their whole life. It never occurred to me that they were being shipped all over the country, shoved in confined feed lots, and being treated with disgrace so that we could consume endless amounts of hamburgers. 

In 1930, a mosaic of agriculture surrounded the dairy at Foxhollow Farm. Tended by a tenant farming family of the 20th century, their land-management approach was a synergistic one.

As I make my way across the dewy pasture, I am thinking of my Great Aunt Margaret. Did she lace up her tanned leather boots to venture through these same fields? What did she bring along as she wandered? Did she carry upon her shoulders a divine responsibility to the farmland she’d chosen to steward back in 1930? In my mind, I find her lingering near the herd of Jersey dairy cattle where there is peace in the low murmur of their chomping and the rich scent of spring’s orchard grasses upon their breath.  Still lost in my imagination, my...