Journal Issue 15

Across 72 pages of essays, photography, poetry, and field dispatches, Issue 15 of the Mad Agriculture Journal explores the practices, traditions, and relationships that shape how we live with the natural world. Moving across farms, vineyards, oceans, deserts, Indigenous homelands, and rural communities, these stories examine what is carried forward through acts of stewardship and what becomes possible when knowledge remains rooted in place. At a time when efficiency and scale increasingly define our systems, this issue turns toward the people who understand that the manner in which we grow, harvest, create, and care is inseparable from the outcomes themselves.

Within these pages, we encounter an Indigenous seed keeper safeguarding generations of agricultural knowledge, ranchers and researchers navigating the evolving conversation around cattle and climate, oyster harvesters whose livelihoods depend on healthy coastal ecosystems, and vintners cultivating intimacy with place through the vineyard. We follow the journeys of sheep, llama, and alpaca shearers across working landscapes, explore the cultural and ecological significance of hides, and meet farmers, artists, and storytellers whose work blurs the boundaries between craft, ecology, and culture. From queer farming communities reimagining belonging and land stewardship to photographers documenting the quiet rituals that shape daily life, these stories reveal how identity, memory, and place become intertwined through the act of making and tending.

Issue 15 asks what happens when we return meaning to the act itself. The simple choices that often go unnoticed: how a seed is saved, how a vine is tended, how animals can shape and even transform our lives, how a landscape is stewarded, how a community remembers. Together, these stories suggest that regeneration is not merely a destination but a disposition. A way of moving through the world that honors both what has been inherited and what remains possible.