Over Labor Day weekend, I drove my niece to Phillips Exeter Academy.

Six hours there. Six hours back.

Jersey to Harlem, then through the states until we finally arrived in Exeter, New Hampshire.

I expected to drop my niece off at school. I did not expect Exeter to change the way I thought about Sovereign Soil.

There is something different about the place. The academy does not simply sit inside the town. Its presence feels woven into it. Students, buildings, businesses, traditions, streets, history. It feels like the school and the community grew together.

Standing there, something clicked.

For a while now, I have imagined Sovereign Soil as more than agriculture. I have wanted to combine farming with education, to create a place where people do not just grow food, but knowledge, skills, businesses, and opportunity.

But Exeter made me ask a bigger question.

What if we added a third piece?

Agriculture.

Education.

And community.

Not just a farm with a school attached to it. A place. A town. A community substantial enough that one day you could type a different ZIP code after its name.

And almost on cue, J. Cole came through the speakers with a line I could not ignore:

“I got bigger dreams.”

Funny how life does that sometimes.

I have always been a dreamer

I have always dreamed big.

And when I look backward through the strange benefit of time, I have realized something about myself: a lot of the things I dreamed about eventually happened.

The dreams that have not happened are not necessarily failures. Sometimes I simply have not reached that part of the story yet.

That thought made me think about Hercules.

Most people know Hercules for his Twelve Labors, but the familiar story begins with ten. After tragedy, he was ordered to serve King Eurystheus and complete ten seemingly impossible tasks. Two were later refused credit, the Hydra because he had help and the Augean Stables because payment was involved, so ten became twelve.

Imagine that.

You complete what you believe is your assignment only to discover that you are not finished.

There are two more labors waiting.

And Hercules went back to work.

That is the part that stayed with me.

He did not finish his Twelve Labors in a day. Neither will I.

The next labor

On the way home from Exeter, I could not drive through all that farmland without stopping.

When I finally hit land, pun absolutely intended, I wanted to see what other people had built with theirs.

Our first stop was Kimball Farm in Westford, Massachusetts.

And Kimball messed me up.

Because it challenged another assumption I had about what a “farm” has to be.

The Westford property began as a dairy barn in 1908, when the Kimball family sold milk wholesale. In 1939, the family converted a woodshed into an ice cream parlor. Today, Kimball describes its Westford location as “50 acres of fun,” with mini golf, a driving range, pitch-and-putt, batting cages, bumper boats, bumper cars, a zipline, arcade, animal experiences, pony rides, caricatures, a summer music series, homemade ice cream, a Country Store and Cafe, the Outback Tap Shack, and a Grill and Seafood Shack.

And about that seafood shack.

I ordered the Captain’s seafood platter.

Listen.

That may have been the best seafood platter I have ever had in my life. So damn fresh.

But while I was eating, my brain would not stop working.

Because Kimball taught me something.

They were not just selling a product. They were selling a reason to come.

That is different.

A family might arrive because the kids want bumper boats. Someone else comes for golf. Another person wants a beer. Another wants seafood. Somebody wants ice cream. A company may book an outing. Parents create memories with their children.

And all of those paths lead back to the same property.

That matters for Sovereign Soil.

Because I have spent a lot of time thinking about what we would grow. Maybe I need to spend just as much time thinking about why people would come.

From a farm to a destination

That is when another piece of Sovereign Soil started taking shape in my head.

Maybe farming is the foundation without being the limitation.

People could come for food. But they could also come for education. For festivals. Farm-to-table dinners. Children’s programs. Culinary experiences. Agritourism. Recreation. Music. Entrepreneurship. Markets. Weddings. Retreats. Community.

For the simple pleasure of sitting somewhere beautiful and feeling like you belong there.

Kimball demonstrated something incredibly valuable:

Land can produce more than crops.

Land can produce experiences. Land can produce memories. Land can produce employment. Land can produce culture. Land can produce an economy.

And eventually, perhaps, land can produce a community.

Suddenly my dream had not gotten smaller. It had gotten considerably bigger. Again.

Then came Tranquillity

We got back in the car and drove another 130 miles.

Next stop: Tranquillity Vineyard and Winery in Middlebury, Connecticut.

Even the name felt appropriate.

The vineyard sits on the remaining roughly 45 acres of the original 300 acre historic Tranquillity Farm estate along Lake Quassapaug. The current owners describe their role as stewardship, preserving and repurposing the property for future generations while operating the vineyard and winery.

There we were.

Wine tasting. A couple of bottles. Looking out across the vineyard.

And somewhere between the road, the wine, and the view, the business questions stopped.

A different question showed up.

Why?

Why do I want this so badly?

That is a harder question than what to grow per acre.

It is harder than revenue projections. Harder than land acquisition. Harder than grants, infrastructure, staffing, or business plans.

Why am I choosing something this difficult?

Because, truthfully, there are easier ways for me to make money. There are ways to build wealth that do not involve dirt underneath my fingernails. They do not involve weather. Animals. Equipment breaking. Crop failures. Payroll. Backs hurting. Early mornings. Late nights. And land that does not particularly care what your five year strategic plan says.

Yet somehow I am deliberately dreaming about what amounts to back-breaking, self-inflicted labor on behalf of people who may never know me.

But I know them.

Because I come from the same desert.

My own labors

That is when Hercules came back into my thoughts.

His Labors were about more than monsters.

His story begins in tragedy. He cannot undo what happened. The path that follows is one of burden, service, struggle, and transformation.

That is important to me because redemption does not mean pretending the past did not happen. It means deciding what happens because you survived it.

I am a product of my environment.

There were things around me growing up that should not have been normal but were. There were decisions I made because certain paths were readily available. There were things I participated in that I understand differently today than I did then.

I am not going to manufacture some dramatic confession here.

I did not murder my family, y’all. This ain’t Greek mythology.

But if I am being accountable, I can acknowledge that there were probably moments when my actions contributed to things in a community that already had enough working against it.

Maybe some part of me has been trying to reconcile that for years.

Maybe that is part of my labor. Not punishment. Purpose.

Finding me again

Somewhere along the way, the dreams I had when I was younger got displaced.

Not necessarily abandoned. Just buried beneath survival. Responsibilities. Career. Family. Bills. Promotions. Credentials. Life.

You get busy becoming who the world requires you to be and one day realize you have not checked on the person you originally planned to become.

Agriculture has been doing something strange to me.

I am finding him again.

Except now he has experience. Resources. Education. Relationships. Perspective. And scars.

Maybe those years were not a detour. Maybe they were training.

Hercules did not begin his Labors knowing everything he would need. The strongest man alive eventually discovered that brute strength could not solve every problem.

Sometimes he needed patience. Sometimes restraint. Sometimes intelligence. Sometimes help. Sometimes humility.

And sometimes he completed the assignment only to be told:

You’re not done yet.

I understand that now.

Protect the dream

Sitting at Tranquillity, I finally found the beginning of an answer to my why.

I do not want another kid’s dream to disappear simply because of the ZIP code they were born into.

I do not want brilliance buried underneath survival.

I do not want entrepreneurship to die because somebody never had access to capital.

I do not want a child who could become an agricultural scientist, veterinarian, engineer, chef, farmer, attorney, physician, carpenter, or entrepreneur to never discover that ability because nobody put the opportunity in front of them.

And inspirational speeches are not enough.

“Believe in yourself” is not infrastructure.

Motivation is not ownership. Hope without opportunity eventually becomes frustration.

If we really want to protect dreams, then people need sustainable, tangible, meaningful empowerment.

Land. Education. Food. Skills. Businesses. Housing. Ownership. Community. Capital. Opportunity.

A place where all of those things reinforce one another.

That is what Sovereign Soil is becoming in my mind.

Not charity.

Not another program that disappears when the grant runs out.

An ecosystem.

Maybe the farm was never the whole dream

Exeter showed me what happens when education becomes part of the identity of a place.

Kimball showed me that agricultural heritage can evolve into an economic and recreational destination with multiple reasons for people to visit.

Tranquillity showed me what stewardship can look like when a property’s history becomes part of its future.

And all three made me ask something I had not seriously considered before:

What if Sovereign Soil eventually became a community itself?

A farm.

An educational institution.

Businesses.

Housing.

Recreation.

Food.

Culture.

Maybe one day a town.

Maybe one day its own ZIP code.

That sounds ridiculous today.

Good. Most sufficiently large dreams do.

One more stop

Eventually we got back into the car.

And I will admit it. For a minute, I got sad.

All these ideas were firing and I could not do any of them right now.

No giant property. No Sovereign Soil campus. No academy. No town.

Just me sitting in the car with a dream considerably larger than the one I had left New Jersey with.

I did not want to sit in that feeling anymore.

So I asked myself one of humanity’s most consequential philosophical questions:

What makes people happy?

Ice cream.

Obviously.

“Siri, add a stop.”

Applegate Farm. Upper Montclair.

Cherry vanilla. Grape Nut.

Applegate describes itself as serving the community since 1848. That long continuity, a place still drawing families generation after generation, felt like one more reminder that a business can become part of the identity of a community.

And there was something fitting about finishing the trip there.

I had gone hundreds of miles looking at schools, farms, and vineyards trying to understand what Sovereign Soil might become.

And I ended up almost home.

Maybe that was the lesson.

Ten labors became twelve

Hercules was given ten Labors.

Then ten became twelve.

Life added requirements.

Maybe mine will too.

Agriculture may be one labor. Education another. Building businesses another. Acquiring the land. Financing it. Developing infrastructure. Feeding people. Teaching children. Creating jobs. Building institutions. Developing housing. Building a community capable of surviving long after I am gone.

I do not know exactly how many labors Sovereign Soil will require.

I am increasingly convinced that I do not need to know.

I only need to know what the next one is.

Because Hercules did not complete twelve impossible tasks in a day.

He completed one.

Then another.

Then another.

Until eventually the impossible became his story.

So maybe I should not be saddened that Sovereign Soil does not exist yet.

Maybe I am simply somewhere between Labors.

And if history has taught me anything about my own dreams, it is this:

The ones that have not happened yet are not necessarily dead. I just have not entered that phase.

The land will come.

Then we’ll hit it.

Pun very much intended.

Follow the build. 🌱

The woman under the yellow tent cut a peach without looking at it. Knife in one hand, fruit in the other, eyes on the customer she was talking to, and she slid a slice onto a skewer and held it out before anybody asked. The customer took it. Forty seconds later she was buying a crate.

I stood there with the glasses recording and let it play out, and I thought: this is what food sovereignty looks like. Nobody pitched anybody. She grew it, she cut it, she handed it over. That was the whole transaction. The trust came first and the money followed it.

When the line thinned out I asked her the only question I really came with. How did you get into farming?

She did not have to think about it. Her father did it. His father did it. His father before him did it. Not because anybody had a vision, she said. Because out where they were there was nothing else to do, so they worked the ground, and the ground worked. That is what it turned into over the generations. A farm, a name on a sign, and a woman cutting peaches under a yellow tent who never once called it a career. Her kids will most likely do the same. She said it the way you say the sun comes up.

I have spent my whole life around men who had to invent themselves from nothing, myself included. She inherited hers. Four generations of the same dirt handed down like a last name. That is what legacy looks like when nobody interrupts it. I stood there thinking about how many families like mine never got the first generation.

What a working food system looks like

I walked that Saturday market on purpose. Not to shop, to watch. I wanted to see what a working food system looks like when it fits in a parking lot.

It looks like Lopez Farm driving up from the Northern Neck of Virginia with watermelons stacked on plywood and corn still in the husk. It looks like pint boxes of blueberries lined up in rows so straight you could check them with a level. It looks like tomatoes and peppers on a folding table with a hand-lettered price sign, and a grower behind them who could tell you which bed they came out of.

Every dollar I watched change hands went into a hand I could see. No warehouse. No middle. No “sourced regionally.” Grown, driven, sold, done.

I look at systems like that and I draw my own on top of them. I have a working picture of what the Sovereign Soil food system will be, and it is never finished. Every farm I walk and every market I stand in, I go home and move something. Who grows. Who sells. Where the money lands. What comes off the table and goes back into the ground.

I do not have land yet. Most people would call that the problem. Right now it is the advantage. A man with land has to live with his mistakes. I get to erase mine on paper as many times as I want, for free, until the plan is worth the dirt it will eventually stand on. That is not a consolation. That is the work of this season, and I take it as seriously as a harvest.

I have even been turning over a food systems degree at Rutgers. Not for the paper. Because I want the whole map in my head, seed to sale to soil, before I ask anybody to trust me with a bed.

The grocery store sells you distance

Here is what a supermarket sells you that a farmers market does not: distance. The peach in the store came off a tree nobody in the building has seen, was picked hard so it would survive a truck, and sat in a cooler until it looked ready. It is a picture of a peach. The one the woman cut for that customer was picked this week, and she could tell you the tree.

That distance is not just about flavor. It is about who holds the knowledge and who holds the money. In the store, the grower is invisible and gets the smallest slice of the price. At the tent, the grower is the whole supply chain and keeps the whole sale. Same fruit. Completely different system.

I am not telling anybody to boycott a supermarket. I shop at one. Five years ago my daughter Michaela was born, and that was the first time I really looked at where my food came from. Four years ago the twins came, Arya and Asha, a little over nine months behind their sister. Three kids in nine months. I call them my Irish triplets. With everything happening with food in this country, that is when I stopped looking and started changing. I began buying produce local. I wanted to know the hand it came from. That was not a lifestyle. That was three kids and a father who did not want to guess.

I also know that mindset is a privilege. Not everybody has the time, the money, or a market within reach, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Here is the part that gets me. What the supermarket also sells is the illusion of freshness. A sign that says FRESH over a bin of fruit that has been traveling for a week. In the inner city there is no alternative down the block and nobody teaching the difference, so we take the label at its word. We were never given a reason not to. That is not ignorance. That is the absence of options doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Supermarkets are not the enemy. They feed millions and they are not going anywhere. But their produce should come from the ground closest to the store, and the people in the aisle should be able to find out where. That is not a radical ask. That is a peach that tastes like a peach.

Why I care

I grew up in the South Bronx where the closest thing to a farmers market was the produce shelf at Pioneer Supermarket, and the produce was an afterthought. Food showed up in boxes from somewhere. Nobody I knew grew anything. That is not an accident of geography. That is how the system was drawn, and who it was drawn around.

Neighborhoods like mine did not lose their farms. They never got them. The land, the knowledge, and the sale all sat somewhere else, and what came back to us was whatever survived the trip. When people say “food desert,” this is what they mean, and it did not happen by itself.

So when I say Sovereign Soil Collective is about food sovereignty, this is the picture in my head. Not a slogan. A tent, a table, a grower, a neighbor, and a peach that never saw a truck stop. The people who tend the land owning the food, the knowledge, and the sale.

Four things I watched growers do right

I took notes. These are the habits that made money move at that market, and they are the habits I am building into Sovereign Soil from day one.

1. Give the taste before you ask for the sale. The woman with the peach did not explain her fruit. She handed it over. Every stand that was busy did some version of this. Trust first, then the transaction.

2. Know your product to the bed. “Which tree?” “Which row?” Every grower I asked had an answer without looking anything up. That knowledge is the product. The fruit is proof.

3. Say where it came from, out loud. Lopez Farm had “Northern Neck, VA” hand-painted on the sign. Nobody hid behind “local.” They named the place, and people trusted the name.

4. Let the neighborhood sell for you. Half the crowd at the busiest tents was talking to each other, not to the vendor. A market is a community first and a store second. The vendors who understood that were the ones with the line.

It is not only produce

Between the food tents were the makers. A local cidery pouring tastes. A painter selling prints of the same brick streets we were all standing on. Candles, bread, baked goods still warm. That matters, because a market that is only vegetables is a farm stand. A market with makers is an economy, and every dollar spent there stays in the neighborhood a lot longer than one spent at a chain.

That is the other half of food sovereignty that people skip. It is not just growing food. It is a community owning the whole table, food and craft and the money that moves across it.

How to walk a market like you mean it

If you have never gone, or you go and leave with a bag of tomatoes and no conversation, try this next Saturday.

• Go early. Before ten you get first pick and the growers have time to talk.
• Ask one question per stand. “How was this grown?” is enough. Watch who lights up.
• Buy one thing you have never cooked. Then ask the grower how they cook it. That is a free class.
• Bring cash and a bag. Small vendors lose a cut on cards, and you will fill the bag.
• Learn one name. One grower, one farm, one place. Next week you will have two.

That is the whole practice. It is not complicated. It is just closer.

What I took home

A bag of peaches and plums, fresh squeezed juice, two loaves of artisan bread, candles, a bottle of hard cider, a plan, and a standard. When Sovereign Soil’s first beds come in, this is the bar: the person who grew it is the person who hands it to you, and they can tell you how. The taste comes before the sale. The place is on the sign. And the neighborhood does the rest.

The woman under the yellow tent did not know she was setting my standard. She was just cutting a peach. That is usually how it works.

Follow the build. The first seeds go in soon. 🌱