Last week, we met Lisa Dohner and she told us about her move to Piedmont and the concierge business she started to help others realise their Italian dreams.
This week, we’ll meet an inspirational couple who not only transformed their own lives, they rescued a run-down farm and turned it into a wonderfully productive property that provides the highest quality produce and is helping to save Mother Earth from climate change.
Molly and John Chester are film makers, and very fortunately for us, they’ve made an award-winning documentary about the rebirth of Apricot Lane Farm.
The documentary is called The Biggest Little Farm, and it recounts Molly and John’s work over eight years to redesign Apricot Lane Farm into a model of integrated, sustainable, regenerative farming.
The news video focuses on the farm as it today. As the news story introduction says, Apricot Lane Farm is now an Eden of abundance in the otherwise dusty scrub of southern California.
We can especially marvel at their success in rejuvenating the lifeless soil which had been exhausted by decades of modern monoculture and rejoice at the variety and the health of the animals, the vegetables, and the fruit trees, all of which are so obviously thriving at Apricot Lane Farm.
What we don’t see in the video is Molly and John’s backstory and the sheer magnitude of their achievement. In 2010, after being forced to vacate their tiny, rented Los Angeles apartment, the couple bought an 80-hectare lemon plantation about an hour north of the city.
The countryside of southern California is very familiar to us, courtesy of countless Hollywood films and television programs, and so we can easily picture what Apricot Lane Farm looked like when the new owners arrived.
Molly was a specialist chef, providing her private clients with nutritious meals sourced from the best produce. It was her dream to own a farm where she could grow all of the ingredients she used in her cooking.
John was an independent, wildlife cameraman.
Molly and John didn’t have the money to buy the Apricot Lane Farm, but what they did have was buckets of ambition, determination and enterprise.
Initially they sounded out friends and family for the funds, and eventually found investors who supported their aim to develop an alternative to the short term, destructive nature of modern farming.
It’s a bitter-sweet experience for us in Australia to watch The Biggest Little Farm. Many of the practices used at Apricot Lane Farm seem very reminiscent of permaculture – the integrated use of animals and ground covers, planting by design and the water saving techniques.
There’s even a chicken tractor!
Permaculture was developed by an Aussie, Bill Mollison. Bill recognised the serious shortcomings of post-war agriculture, that short-term productivity comes at the cost of depleted soils and a spiralling vicious circle of fertilisers, insecticides and herbicides.
Sadly, permaculture is the exception in Australia and around the world, and Bill Mollison and his message much more ignored than lauded.
The Biggest Little Farm documentary is an inspiration and a joy, and Molly and John proof positive that we if dream big enough and hard enough, magic happens.
To know more about Molly and John’s journey, here’s a link to an interview where they talk about their lives, their work and the philosophy that has made Apricot Lane Farm such a success.
Watch how this couple traded in city life for a 200-acre farm fantasy below.
