“It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile…”
E.M. FORSTER
We chose our name, Square Mile Ranch, to continually bring us back, bring us in, and bring us down underfoot. The quote above is from the novel Howards End, but is drawn from Wendell Berry’s land ethic and human prospect essay “It All Turns on Affection.” Wendell’s essay gets at the core of why we have chosen this life. At its most distilled, it is about the irrefutable and irreplaceable fact that one cannot “manage” land in harmony and concert if one does not have an intimate relationship with it. What the “home place” means to us isn’t light reading, but out of it grows the seed.
Square Mile Ranch is about connection, compassion, and community. It is about questioning the insidious assumption that scale and the craze for motion are in any way ultimately good for the human soul. It is to remind us that small isn’t just beautiful, but very likely the only scale that humans can actually think in without mucking up everything around us. It is about practicing affection in one or even a handful of the moments we are given the opportunity to do so. It is about inhabiting the actual space we live our short lives in, to see that fertile ground for the soul and fertile soil are inextricably linked.
It is about investing in the most obvious sources of stability and security. It is about scaling down so we can actually hear the voice of originality and creativity. In that, we believe, there somehow lies an elixir for belonging to the moment—for life itself while we have it—which is in many ways what so many people are at home thinking about on this very day.
It is about truth and place and what makes something just and beautiful. It is about imagination, nourishment and reciprocation. It is about the outer and inner landscape, the seen and the unseen, sky and root, culture and soil, mind and heart. It is about abiding in and living in “some chosen and cherished small place.” To know and love that place.
It is also about returning self-worth to our farmers by allowing them to deeply care for something, not forcing them to extract from it or pressure them to make it into something more than it already is. It is about valuing one rancher’s knowledge of one creek bed over the invention of new tech. It is about the actual stock that feed us and keep our air and water clean—livestock and their microbes—not market stock. The world, and your family, will be fed through functioning ecosystems, not through manipulating parts of the system. It is about a redistribution of wealth and meaning, and of not being indifferent to our sources.
At Square Mile Ranch, we are not interested in being on a shelf in every store across America, we want to be on your family’s table. We are not interested in endless growth. At heart, we want to return value to those who work with their hands. We want to grow an ecologically and socially responsible business. The seemingly inescapable reality that one must monetize not only their passions, but the world's stored energy in turn, is not an easy paradigm to shake.
We are going to dream big but think small and close to the heart, and see if we can’t do our part to redefine this beast. Please join us.