Meet Modern Farmer’s Guest Instagrammer: Skyelark Ranch
This week my wife Alexis and I will be taking over the Modern Farmer Instagram from Skyelark Ranch in Brooks, California. We lease 60 acres of land for our flock of 60 California r...
Meet Modern Farmer’s Guest Instagrammer: Skyelark Ranch
This week my wife Alexis and I will be taking over the Modern Farmer Instagram from Skyelark Ranch in Brooks, California. We lease 60 acres of land for our flock of 60 California r...
This week my wife Alexis and I will be taking over the Modern Farmer Instagram from Skyelark Ranch in Brooks, California. We lease 60 acres of land for our flock of 60 California red sheep, 15 or so Dorper sheep, and 2,000 hens. The sheep are raised for both wool and lamb and hens both for meat and eggs. When we leased the land in 2010, we unexpectedly became the owners of a hog. One pig was left on the land from the previous tenants. But there you go, we have continued to raise them.
After meeting in Tasmania, Alexis and I settled in California in 2007. We had met in Tanzania of all places. I had moved their from Scotland, where I am from, and she was there an exchange program. In 2007 we settled in California with hopes of having a farm of some kind.
Neither of us had what I call, being born with a silver pitchfork. We had very little experience farming. We had both studied environmental management, ecological agriculture, and Alexis had focused on argo ecology. We first tried our hand at farming and we quickly found out that I wasn’t very good at growing vegetables. I didn’t like the monotony of digging carrots for hours on end. We both did like working with animals, so we decided that was the better route. Alexis and I were complete greenhorns. We have been so lucky to be surrounded by such great masters of the land and sheep. We call them “our sheeple.” Everyday we are learning something new. I used to think it was just new farmers that were still learning, but it is everyone. Everyone is trying new things and hearing new things. It keeps you on your toes.
Alexis makes fun of me for being on our Instagram all the time, but I truly like it. Originally we wanted a newsletter for the ranch, but it was clear that it would take up lots of time from the ranch. It only takes a couple of minutes and you can keep everyone up to date. Besides being good for our customers, a lot of our mentors and good friends are on Instagram which allows us to connect with them. Being from Scotland it is also lets me keep in touch with my family back home.
You can follow us this week at Modfarm and always on our Skyelarkranch.
(All images courtesy of Skyelark Ranch)
Follow us
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Charles McFarlane, Modern Farmer
November 10, 2014
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.