I recently sat down with my friend Mike Herbert, a regenerative farming expert from our church, and I walked away genuinely frustrated. Not at Mike. At myself.
My wife and I have been doing raised beds, composting, and all the standard stuff everyone tells you to do. We've put real work into it. And here's Mike—no hired help, no trips to Tractor Supply— who’s feeding his family of eight off his land right in the middle of the worst drought Georgia has seen in over 100 years. And he's not even watering his beds.
I'm out there like an idiot with a hose. Mike hasn't watered in years.
What he's doing is called Hügelkultur, and once you understand it, you'll wonder the same thing I did: why isn't everyone doing this?
What Is Hügelkultur?
The concept is straightforward. You dig a trench, roughly six feet wide and three feet deep. You stack logs and woody debris inside, large pieces first, smaller branches filling the gaps. Then you push the subsoil back in, top it with good topsoil, and cover everything with a thick layer of hay, eight to ten inches deep.
That buried wood becomes an underground water reservoir. Every time it rains, water flows down into that trench and gets held there. The roots of your plants reach down and pull from it when they need it. The decaying wood also feeds the soil with nutrients over time, and the thick hay on top keeps moisture from evaporating and builds rich black topsoil as it breaks down.
The ground stays moist, even in a drought and without irrigation.
Mike has potatoes that have been reproducing in the ground for four to five years. He walks out, digs around, and pulls dinner. He has ginger growing that would cost hundreds of dollars at a store.
His food is hiding in plain sight.
Capturing Water on Your Land
Mike pairs his Hügelkultur beds with another technique called swales, shallow berms dug on the contour of sloping land that slow water down and let it sink into the ground instead of running off. His orchard sits above a series of these.
After a heavy rain, they fill up eighteen inches deep and percolate slowly into the earth, recharging the water table on his property rather than sending it downhill toward the Gulf of Mexico.
The principle underneath all of it is simple: keep the ground covered, slow the water down, and let the soil do its job. Most conventional farming doesn’t even begin to touch on this type of farming.
Why This Matters for Your Family
Here's the question I asked Mike straight out: if the supply chain failed tomorrow, are you worried about feeding your family?
He said no without hesitating. His systems are in place. His kids know how to grow food. If something happened to him today, his family could keep that farm running without him.
He called it better than a life insurance policy. I think he's right.
We've all watched the supply chain scares, and we’ve all seen what happens to grocery store shelves when things get unstable. A warrior poet doesn't just train to fight, he builds resilience into his home so that the people he loves are covered when things go sideways. Growing your own food is one of the most practical and overlooked ways to do that.
And the beautiful thing about what Mike has built is that it didn't require a massive operation. It required knowledge, some physical work upfront, and time.
The Bonus You Didn't Expect
When I asked Mike what advice he had for men wanting to be better providers, he didn't talk about farming techniques. He talked about presence. He said when your wife or your child comes to you with something, you stop what you're doing, look them in the eyes, and truly listen. With six kids, he said, there were countless moments where one of them ran up with a blue-tailed skink like it was the discovery of the century. Every single time, he acted like it was the first time he'd ever seen one.
That's the real harvest. The food is a byproduct of a family working together, learning together, and building something that lasts.
Mike's oldest son is one of the most capable young men I've ever met. That didn't happen by accident.
If you want to go deeper on the techniques, Mike walks through all of it in an interview I recently did on The John Lovell Show. But if you take one thing from this post, let it be this: start. Dig a trench. Cover some ground. Get your kids outside and working beside you.
The time to build resilience is before you need it.
Remember, Train Hard. Train Smart. And build a home that doesn’t just help your family survive but thrive.
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