Noonday Notes

Issue No. 39

March 20th, 2026

My grandpa died when I was seven. That got your attention. He was a rancher in northern California, raising polled Herefords, and there are two things my mom told me he would say: “it’s okay to make mistakes, just don’t make the same mistake twice”, and “the biggest gamblers in the world are farmers and ranchers”.

I’ve been thinking about both of those declarations this week.

Because I made a mistake. I took a risk and didn’t cover my tomatoes, peppers, basil, and cucumbers at Noonday HQ. And I lost all of them in the insane Sunday night wind. To be fair, even some farmers who did cover their crops still lost them. It was one of those doesn’t-matter-what-you-did kind of events. But still. I know better. I should have covered them and given them a fighting chance.

And at the same time, farming is always a gamble. You try, you risk, you lose, and then…you replant. You start over. I’ve written here in the past how there’s grace in the garden. Well, at least there is at this scale. I was able to go buy more plants and get them in the ground on Wednesday. But when a hail storm took to hundreds of row feet of greens like a paper shredder on my previous farm it was a huge loss.

But even then, what made it sustainable was community. We ran a community-supported farm, where people purchased a share in the harvest ahead of time. So when there was abundance, everyone shared in it. And when there was a loss, everyone shared that too.

Last week I wrote about bending in the wind and being resilient. So cute right? Rarely am I stoked about the wind when it comes to farming or any activity really. I can’t help but think about the repetitive line in Ecclesiastes “this is also vanity and a striving after wind.” Preach. 

In a broken and fallen world that feels chaotic and destructive with so much out of our control, it can feel like nothing we do matters. But it does.

We can bend with the wind and be resilient. But when the winds of life are so strong they knock us down and wipe us out, it’s often through community that we are able to get back up again. We can keep on keeping on like a bird that flew tangled up in blue. Dylan fans get me. The world keeps spinning and the wind keeps blowing. We can keep growing and helping each other get back up.

Read the rest of the newsletter here.