Before Taylor MacDonald set out to do his part to save the Earth, he was in the business of moving people and their belongings from one point to another on it.
At Chattanooga-based Bellhops, his focus was figuring out how to do that faster and more efficiently.
But something was eating at MacDonald’s thoughts like a grub munching on a root.
In 2019, he and his wife, Emily Collins, had bought a farm in Chickamauga where they hoped to make a home for themselves with minimal interference. Neither knew much about farming, and as they tried to learn while also working full time, they turned to a co-op in a nearby town for advice.
“We talked to a bunch of good ol’ boys who’d been farming since they were 3,” MacDonald recalls. “They had all sorts of advice about spraying this and dusting that. It was expensive, and it was always, ‘Do this thing, then do it again and again and again.’
“And I said, ‘There has to be an easier way.’”
Then MacDonald and his wife happened upon “Kiss the Ground,” a 2020 documentary narrated by Woody Harrelson that explores regenerative agriculture as a potential response to climate change.
The film sent them searching for ways to restore rather than deplete their land. It also sent them tumbling down the permaculture rabbit hole.
Permaculture seeks to design farms more like natural ecosystems, where plants, animals, water and soil work together rather than in isolation. Instead of repeatedly imposing order through chemicals and labor, farmers harness natural processes to create systems that sustain themselves.
In other words, it’s modern industrial agriculture turned on its head.
What MacDonald learned as he dug deeper troubled him. He came to see industrial agriculture as an environmental threat – a system that not only produces greenhouse gases but releases carbon stored in the soil and contributes to the degradation of the topsoil needed to grow food.
Most alarming to MacDonald was the possibility that the world’s supply of usable topsoil could dwindle dramatically within decades. The problem, in his mind, had taken on an existential urgency.
Some time after MacDonald emerged from the rabbit hole, he was in a meeting with Bellhops colleagues talking about customer acquisition costs when something inside him snapped.
“All of a sudden, my work meant nothing to me,” he says. “All I could think was, ‘What the hell am I doing here? We have to save the planet.’”
The realization didn’t immediately provide MacDonald with a plan. But it did give him a question – what could he and Collins possibly do about a problem so enormous? – and the conviction that the answer lay somewhere on their farm.
Hidden order
There’s a picturesque quality to the quintessential American farm, seen in long, arrow-straight rows of corn, orchards rising and falling with the contours of a hillside and enormous round bales of hay dotting a field.
MacDonald’s homestead – a 20-acre patch of northwest Georgia with the provocative name Death Farm Permaculture – appears to share little with this image, at least from his vantage point beneath a ramshackle hay barn he says is standing only by the grace of God.
The long, open structure is nestled at the bottom of a shaggy hill that rises toward the house where he and Collins live with Talia, their Great Pyrenees. Beyond the barn lies a clearing that could easily be mistaken for barely tended wildland. Tall trees and a carpet of underbrush border the small field.
Leaving the hay barn, MacDonald ascends the hill, hiking up a path he’s cut through hip-high foliage. At the top, a towering hickory draws the eye across uneven fields of switchgrass.
To the uninitiated, human hands might seem to have left little mark on this tangle.
A more practiced eye, however, would see the handiwork.
MacDonald has dug shallow depressions – called swales – horizontally across the hillside to capture rainwater flowing down from the farm’s highest points, reducing erosion and allowing more of the water to soak into the ground around the trees growing there.
He stops beside a plum tree growing among beautyberry, wormwood and comfrey. Together, he explains, the plants form what permaculturists call a guild – a collection of species chosen to support one another.
Some attract predatory insects that feed on pests. Strong-smelling plants such as onions can make desirable plants more difficult for insects to locate.
Comfrey performs another job. Its roots reach deep into the ground, drawing nutrients into its broad leaves.
MacDonald grabs a handful of the leaves, tears them away and drops them around the surrounding plants, returning those nutrients to the surface as the leaves decompose.
“You can do this to him all day and he won’t mind,” MacDonald says.
While Death Farm might not look like a neat, corn-covered Iowa farm or a charming Tennessee apple orchard, beneath its messy veneer is a place designed to let nature do much of the work – without synthetic chemicals and many of the inputs used in conventional farming.
But this patch of Eden leaves a question unanswered: How did a tech entrepreneur end up creating it a stone’s throw from the Scenic City?
From tech to farming
At first glance, MacDonald’s switch from the business world to permaculture might look like a hard left turn. After all, how many entrepreneurs end up digging swales on a bushy hillside?
But upon closer examination, the switch looks more like a shift in priorities. His focus changed, but the way MacDonald approached his work didn’t.
MacDonald was making money long before he settled on what he wanted to do with his life. While attending community college in Knoxville, he sold BMWs, earning more than $100,000 in one year while still living with his mother.
He poured much of that money into the stock market, where early success gave way to overconfidence.
“I became super stupid with it,” he admits.
After moving to Chattanooga, MacDonald took what was left of his earnings and turned to real estate, buying a house for $8,000. The price reflected its condition: The house needed extensive repairs, and MacDonald, who’d never considered himself handy, couldn’t afford to hire someone every time something broke.
So he learned.
“That house forced me to pick up a hammer for the first time,” MacDonald says. “Before I bought it, I’d never done any kind of handiwork. But I learned that if you paid somebody to do something, you could have done it yourself three times for the same price. Plumbing, electrical, drywall, flooring, the roof – there was nothing in that house I didn’t have to fix at some point.”
MacDonald and his wife later moved to a one-acre property in Rossville, where he built a shed that would become a turning point. After obtaining county permits, MacDonald says he was cited upon completing the shed for having the wrong permits and ordered to appear in court.
MacDonald won his case, but the experience left him determined to find a place where he could build with less interference.
“I said, ‘I’m going to find a new property and build another shed there, and the property is going to be so big that the government won’t even know I built it.’”
Their search brought them to a cattle farm in Chickamauga. At the closing table, the owner delivered one final piece of information.
“The animals are still there. The second you sign that line, you’re a cattle farmer.”
MacDonald’s path was jagged, but a pattern had emerged: He likes figuring out how things work – and when something strikes him as too expensive, inefficient or unnecessarily complicated, figuring out whether he can do it differently.
So MacDonald looked the seller in the eye and said, “We’ll figure it out.”
Learning the hard way
“If only it had been that easy,” MacDonald muses.
As he and Collins took possession of the farm, MacDonald found himself holding a proverbial hammer without knowing how to swing it. This time, however, the lessons would come with consequences.
The seller had assured MacDonald that the cattle were self-sufficient, drinking from the property’s two ponds and grazing on its abundant grasses. For the most part, MacDonald says, he was right.
“For the most part,” he repeats. “There were days when they’d get out and I’d have to cancel everything because it was an eight-hour ordeal getting them back in.”
Meanwhile, the farm’s menagerie began to grow.
“It was like giving a mouse a cookie,” MacDonald says, referring to the children’s book in which one small favor triggers an escalating series of requests. “If you give a Southern woman cows, the next thing you know, you have chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, rabbits and quail.”
It sounds quaint until MacDonald adds ominously, “Unfortunately, when you give a tech bro and a teacher a farm full of animals, carnage can ensue.”
After a nearby farm went into foreclosure, MacDonald bought 200 quail for $100, including about 50 hatchlings that needed to be kept beneath a heat lamp. Each day, he’d return home to find another dead chick beneath it, trampled as the young birds crowded together for warmth.
After several days, MacDonald lowered the lamp, thinking easier access to the heat would solve the problem. Instead, he came home to a scene he compares to the zombie horror thriller, “World War Z”: The quail had piled atop one another toward the lamp, leaving a mound of dead birds beneath it.
“That was a lesson I learned the hard way,” he says.
Not every problem, however, was of MacDonald’s making. Coyotes from the adjacent Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park preyed on the farm’s livestock, leaving MacDonald feeling as though he were fighting on all fronts.
That problem eventually arrived at a solution weighing about 120 pounds.
Talia now patrols the property with a deep bark and a vigilance that seems to have drawn an invisible border around Death Farm. Since her arrival, MacDonald says, the farm hasn’t lost an animal to a predator. Even the local armadillos appear to have gotten the message.
Life on Death Farm today bears little resemblance to its early days of trial and error. Beneath a shade tree, chickens peck around three homemade dispensers MacDonald designed to attract black soldier flies and funnel their protein-rich larvae directly to the birds.
Nearby, Kunekune pigs – each named after a variety of potato – wallow in the mud to escape the midday heat. MacDonald plans to rotate his “organic tilling machines,” as he calls them, through the pasture, where they’ll clear vegetation and fertilize the ground.
Only the rabbits give MacDonald continuing trouble. Typically, they stay in their pen, eating, napping and making more bunnies. But occasionally, one engages in what MacDonald calls “hardcore parkour” in an effort to escape and become a free-range rabbit.
“It’s easier to keep in pressurized water than it is to keep in rabbits,” he sighs as he spots two escapees exploring the bushes bordering their pen.
While MacDonald has brought a measure of order to the chaos he and Collins inherited – and sometimes created – as novice farmers, the livestock tell only part of that story.
Death to industrial agriculture
MacDonald says he and Collins jokingly referred to their fledgling project as Death Farm as they struggled through the early days of learning to raise livestock.
But the name eventually came to mean something more. As MacDonald searched for a way to grow food and create abundance outside the industrial model, Death Farm Permaculture evolved into a mission statement: “Death to industrialized agriculture.”
He also wanted Death Farm to show others how they could do the same.
“We ended up with this idea of becoming a demonstration agritourism farm,” he says. “Anything we’re doing here can be scaled down to a quarter-acre backyard or up to a 200-acre farm.”
Death Farm became a living classroom, where visitors could see swales, food forests, composting systems and livestock working together rather than simply hear MacDonald explain the principles behind them.
MacDonald points to a young walnut or pecan tree – it’s too early for MacDonald to tell which – that’s growing beneath false indigo. The nut tree could take 10 to 15 years to produce a meaningful harvest, he says.
In the meantime, the faster-growing false indigo is helping it along, providing shade and enriching the surrounding soil. When MacDonald breaks off a branch, the corresponding root dies and releases nitrogen into the ground.
But the arrangement isn’t permanent.
Eventually, MacDonald says, he’ll cut down the false indigo. Its removal will open the canopy above the young tree while its roots die back below ground, releasing all of the stored nitrogen into the soil.
“It gets a big boost both above and below ground,” he says.
Nearby, a black locust offers a more dramatic example of the same principle. MacDonald says he planted the tree when it was about a foot tall. A year and a half later, it’s shot past 10 feet.
Black locusts are pioneer species, he explains – fast-growing trees suited to colonizing disturbed ground. At Death Farm, MacDonald uses them to establish an upper canopy while slower-growing fruit and nut trees mature beneath them. Eventually, the relatively short-lived locusts will give way, opening the canopy just as those trees are ready for more sunlight.
Even then, MacDonald says, their usefulness isn’t exhausted. Black locust produces dense wood that can be burned as firewood or used for weather-resistant fence posts, and the trees can regrow after being cut nearly to the stump.
“It’s almost like God said, ‘Hey, y’all are going to need wood, so I’m going to give you trees that will keep producing it.’”
He pauses at the obvious conclusion.
“And we didn’t listen.”
The challenge of transition
MacDonald, who left Bellhops nearly a year ago, believes working with nature rather than against it can make farming more economical, too.
“As we did this, I realized that the costs of regenerative ag are far lower than those of the industrialized model,” he says. “With the industrialized model, you’re buying things like nitrogen fertilizer and seeds every year. It’s rinse, repeat.”
MacDonald believes permaculture offers a way out of that cycle. Once the systems he’s building are mature, he says, the farm’s annual costs could fall low enough that he could give away its produce while still supporting the farm and his family.
Getting there is another matter.
“The challenge is the transition,” he says.
Creating a regenerative farm requires an upfront investment in the infrastructure, plants and other systems intended to reduce costs later, MacDonald acknowledges. For farmers already operating under the conventional model, making that change can be economically difficult.
Death Farm is still making that transition. Trees need years to mature. Systems that might one day sustain themselves must first be built, planted and tended. And as MacDonald learned from escaped cattle, dead quail and countless other lessons along the way, working with nature doesn’t mean nature always cooperates.
Still, standing amid the apparent disorder of Death Farm, MacDonald sees something different from the farm he and Collins stumbled into knowing little about what they were doing. He sees relationships – between plants, animals, water and soil – that can be understood, encouraged and put to work.
At a pond near the top of the hill, swallows have made their homes in gourds MacDonald has strung over the water. The birds dart through the air like tiny jets, feasting on mosquitoes, gnats and other aerial pests.
MacDonald says visitors rarely notice what’s missing – the buzzing in their ears, the constant need to wave away flying pests – until he points it out.
“Nature is amazing,” a visitor tells him.
“It was built to be symbiotic,” MacDonald replies. “And we as humans can use our knowledge to manipulate that to our advantage, as long as we choose to.”
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