Lessons Learned from Uncompaghre Farms
- 3 days ago
- 15 min read
Guest Blog by Brittany Duffy of Uncompaghre Farms
Note: This article is taken from a presentation titled "Depth Over Breadth--Why Growing Together Matters" that Brittany offered at the 2025 REGENERATE Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Read this blog for more information about Uncompaghre Farms and how HMI's Financial Planning course helped them focus and grow their business.
Today I’m going to tell you a story about a woman with great ambition who—without anyone’s help or support—is building thousands of acres of topsoil every minute, single-handedly saving our food supply, ecosystems, and species everywhere. She’s always kind and patient, always beautiful and sparkly clean, and basically a superhero. Just kidding. This isn’t that story.
Today, I’m going to tell you a real story—about two friends, a big dream, a lot of awkwardness, dirt, trial and error and get-back-up-and-try-again, and a thousand small acts of kindness from others that, little by little, make our corner of the world a better place. It’s a story of laughter and tears, of trying again, and of trusting that small ripples make big waves. By the end, I think you’ll see it’s not just our story, but yours too.
Our story starts, as most do, not with acres of land or fancy equipment, but with curiosity and the bravery to just try stuff.
While I was working and saving and dreaming of owning land, Caleb Valdez— my best friend and business partner who couldn’t be here today—came across No Risk Ranching by Greg Judy, which is an amazing resource for first-generation ranchers like us. Inspired, he started knocking on doors, asking if anyone might lease a few acres. That courage sparked everything.
We began with five cows on three rented acres while still working full-time at the Forest Service. That first pasture sat right on the highway—if any of the 5,000 drivers passing by daily noticed, they would have seen two rookies moving hotwire fencing around five bemused cows like it was the most important thing in the world and we knew what we were doing. We didn’t.
But we learned by trying. Every mistake became a class in itself—adaptive grazing, irrigation, running a market booth, leading ourselves, and eventually, others. Caleb had a vision for what things could be, and he’s incredibly good at getting back up and trying again. “That’s all you can do,” he says. “You just keep trying.”
And we have.
From those three acres and five cows, we’ve grown to several thousand acres—still mostly leased—and a lovely herd of red and black baldies. We provide grass-finished beef, lamb, and dairy directly to our community through a farmstand and farmers’ markets, we sell some calves and nice replacement heifers, and we have a really good time!
Yes, we’re still building and there are goals we want to accomplish, but once you get that basic rung of Maslow’s hierarchy met, the interesting question becomes:
What else can we do with our time and energy for our community? Who can we bring with us? So today, I’m here to pay forward some of our lessons learned and some of how we do things, because this good life is meant to be shared.
We live in a culture that glorifies maximizing—more acres, more followers, more output. But maximizing often comes at the expense of tomorrow. Instead, we try to focus on optimizing—not always perfectly, but we try. We’ve taken the diversity route in building, and we’ve chosen not to ship. For us, we want a Polyface in every community—and that means avoiding those externalized costs from the Amazon model and leaving room for others to thrive. Just like we’ve been able to grow a small direct to community business, we want other first-generation folks to have that same opportunity to meet their neighbors and provide food to them. We are lucky enough to have a community that is incredibly supportive, and I realize some folks are more isolated, but I think as the local food movement grows, we hope everyone can feel so fulfilled. Friends text photos of their wedding brisket or Christmas roast or the fancy burgers they made to dress up a weeknight dinner, and having their faces in my minds’ eye helps me remember my purpose on the hard days.
For us, optimizing for the world we want to see also means no social media. While we experimented with it early on, I never liked it, and Uncompahgre Farms doesn’t use it anymore. I talk to so many people who complain about it as a necessary evil, they hate spending the time on it and playing the game, and when I offer that we’ve been able to grow 25-30% year over year without it, they say I wish I could do the same but we need it. I don’t think there’s anything particularly unique about us, nothing that would make analog word of mouth work for us but not anyone else, but of course everyone has to find what works for them. For us, I just think about what a regenerative community looks like, I hear the stats about isolation and the exploitation of algorithms, and we decided we do not want to be a part of people sitting and scrolling their lives away. I want people outside, cooking something delicious, talking to their neighbors. So, we offer opportunities like farm tours, music festivals, harvest potlucks. Small scale, for sure, but I hope impactful, and at least more fun for me than being on my phone.
Because we’re first generation and started from scratch, Caleb in particular has been really thoughtful about investing carefully. Thank you to every podcast and book and speaker that talked about investing in assets that grow living value- our herd, our relationships, and the soil. Leasing land and sharing equipment keeps cash flowing and builds community. Borrowing a trailer often leads to sharing a meal. Asking for help opens doors. I’m more of the go fast, go alone type, and I probably wouldn’t have gotten very far if I wasn’t forced by limited funds to slow down, ask for help, listen to how others do things, see other perspectives.
We can be accused of a lot of things, but we haven’t been afraid to just try stuff. I grew up on a sailboat in Miami, and while I still catch a lot of flack for having a 305 phone number, I can’t help where I was born, and if I’d let that stop me, or if I’d given up because I didn’t have enough street cred to be a “real rancher”, I would still be working at the Forest Service dreaming of the day I could farm. If I let even the slightest inkling of imposter syndrome seep in, I wouldn’t be standing in front of you today. But I figure heck, maybe one of the most valuable things I can offer is that if I can do this, you can too!
Caleb too-- he bought those first cows before he had any ground leased, and maybe that seems a little cart before the horse, but once he had it scheduled to go pick the cows up, he was out there door knocking to make sure they would have good grass to graze. We’ve joined boards to serve our community and gain a broader perspective, we take continuing education classes, write and help others write grants, pretty much everything we’ve been able to do has been an experiment that we’ve never done before, and totally worth trying!
We’ve hosted a music festival twice, the Cowpoke Palooza, flew in musicians, organized vendors, hosted a silent auction, held the Cowpoke games, so that people could try their hand at changing gates, running the barrow race, just silly good fun. We can take ourselves so seriously that it’s intimidating, or we can show people a good time and open hearts and minds, and pave the way for real connection and community. We’d never done anything like this, and it was super fun to see what we could bring together, and I am so grateful to everyone that made it possible!
This year, we're helping Valley Food Partnership host a film festival of short- and feature-length films featuring local agricultural stories, which we’ll curate and show around the Western Slope later in 2026. This year's theme is "Cultivating Community- How Agriculture Connects Us." Film is such an amazing way to share farm stories and improve food literacy across demographics, and it can happen with such little capital- really just time and energy and the $100 for FilmFreeway, the platform for submissions.
I mention it because we don’t own the idea, open source means people can add their strength to it and make something even more awesome than could have been imagined. It is very low capital to host your own AgVentures film festival, soliciting films made by your own farmers and students and non-profits. This type of screen time is shared- make it a gathering, host farmer panels, director interviews, have a speed dating dinner to match farms with local videographers or even just tech-savvy young people, let other non-profits host screenings and do their own fundraisers around your region, be open and generous and bring others along on the journey. Have we ever done this before? Nope, but it’s a film festival I am dying to see, so heck yes we’re going to get it going.
These projects don’t come from grand strategy. They come from saying yes—to opportunities that bring people together, to laugh, learn, and celebrate the good life. Joy builds belonging.
If you have a dream, don’t agonize over where to start, just start. Start small, make a list of what you need, and then make a list of people that might be able to help you, and get going.
Just trying stuff might look messy sometimes, but I think both of us keep in mind that you can’t take any of this with you. You can own a million acres, but if you haven’t empowered others to care for it when you’re gone, what’s the point? There’s no perfect arrival moment. Just learning in motion.
So even if your farm isn’t picture-perfect, host a tour. Even if your spreadsheets don’t add up, start a coffee group to talk business tips. Even if you don’t have that perfect partner, perfect house, perfect dinner set—have Thursday night potlucks anyway. Show your humanity so others can, too. I will admit that every landowner we lease from has seen me yell at my dog or the cows or even Caleb--I get tired and hangry and I am not always my best self, but I’m human. I do apologize afterwards, to the cows too, and they’ve been pretty understanding.
Raise your hand if you’ve also yelled at your dog, your partner, or even the unsuspecting inanimate object like barbed wire or the truck that won’t start? Yeah, exactly! Thank you for sharing your humanity!
This spring we hosted a farm tour, and the timing worked so that the cows were on a field that we were leasing for the first time. I think I said about 100 times that the theme was progress, not perfection, because I was embarrassingly aware of how much cheat grass was on the east side of the pasture, which of course we had to walk through to get to the cows, but I also know that regeneration doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s okay to show people the baseline, so that they too can come along on the long-term improvement journey with us.
Regeneration isn’t just biological. It’s psychological. It’s relational. Plants, soil, ideas, and people grow in the presence of care.
When I was in college raising my brothers, I volunteered at a local botanic garden. John, the head horticulturist, took me under his wing—giving me seeds and clippings, small extra plants, and endless advice. I had stumbled across permaculture and had a vague inkling that a yard could be something more, and slowly but surely, I converted our lawn to a butterfly garden and food forest.
At first it looked scrubby and the neighbors complained. But eventually, the plants filled in, the butterflies arrived, and people stopped to see what was blooming. Friends and neighborhood kids wandered through the garden counting caterpillars. We even got an Audubon certification.
Years later, when we sold the house, the new owners bulldozed the entire garden and built the biggest house the lot would allow. Of course this was a little predictable, but still kind of a bummer. But then, one day a few years ago, I was talking to my brother who is a native plant expert and wetland conservationist in Florida, and I was kind of dumbstruck by how knowledgeable he’d become. I asked him what had sparked his interest, and do you know what he said? The little brother who always did the exact opposite of what I wanted and who had been the bane of my existence when we were kids? He said it was when we turned the lawn into a garden, and he realized how much more beautiful and hospitable and interesting a landscape, even a small yard in the middle of a city, could be.
I was thunderstruck. I had no idea that that small, impermanent act could create such a ripple.
And now, as I watch him teach his kids about butterfly lifecycles and to love the outdoors, I think about John, the horticulturalist who’d given me my first plants; Rhea, who I volunteered with and who taught me that “you plant when you’re happy and weed when you’re not”; and my mom, who once kept a tiny aloe plant alive for ten years when we lived on the sailboat before planting it in real soil—where it exploded with joy and multiplied. My brothers and I all still have descendants of that aloe today.
That’s regeneration. It’s not about control or legacy. It’s about sparking something in others that continues to grow long after we’re gone. We talk about positive feedback loops in our soils, slowing water infiltration, building soil aggregate and organic matter, and watching a field get more productive every year. We each are also capable of sparking a positive feedback loop with the folks we interact with every day.
Neural networks are strengthened by re-tracing our day and mining our memory for the gems, so on the way home from farmers’ market or a class or a fieldtrip to another farm, ask your interns for their favorite interaction of the day or a major takeaway. At farmers’ market, instead of the same script of “How are you? I’m fine, how are you? I’m fine.” don’t be shy about introducing people to each other and asking what’s your hidden talent? Who’s the voice in your head that keeps you motivated? What scent reminds you of your childhood? What generational patterns do you notice in yourself? So many of us are wandering through life sedated into just buying stuff, ask something like this and you’ll see glazed eyes refocus, and your day will be so much more interesting. Encourage them to ask the same question of others, so they can keep the deeper connections building.
This is Emiliano and Mac, both come to the farmers' market every weekend to get two sliders and shoot the breeze with whoever they meet. Having been lucky enough to know both of them these last few years, I happen to know that both retired this year, both have an interest in healthy soils, Emiliano was a soil scientist for the USDA and having grown up in Iowa, Mac and his wife saw the impacts of conventional agriculture on the land and their communities, so they moved out to Montrose and bought a small lavender farm to try something different. A few weeks ago, I got to introduce them, and they stood in front of the booth and ate their burgers and chatted for almost two hours. Lots of people at lots of farmers’ markets do this, it is a lovely bubble where people are deliberately seeking community. Why I asked them if I could take their photo, and why this moment exemplified to me my very real responsibility of being a bridge, is that I also happen to know that both are super involved in their respective political parties, campaigning on their behalf, and if I had introduced them as a red and a blue maybe their first meeting wouldn't have hit it off so well, but as it was they had a good conversation and even laughed and humored me to take a cheesy photo to commemorate the moment. Yes, this is a small moment, in which two people who live in one small community make a small connection. But that’s how change happens. Trust and community are built on small moments. That’s the ripple effect of kindness.
I know, all of this might seem like small potatoes when we are facing giant issues- erosion, extreme weather events, wolf reintroduction, economic uncertainty, the crisis of meaning and purpose- but just like it took the same old short-term, extractive thinking to get here- it will take all of us- reds, blues, purples, greens, regenerative and conventional, young and old, horse people and cow people (I hear you can only be one or the other), to make changes, and to bring people along they need to feel like they have a place, that they are needed, and their effort is appreciated. We can’t just write off the other half of the population- choose your favorite scapegoat, blaming men or women, brown or white, red or blue, tall or short- we need to bring everyone along with us, because regeneration- of our soils, our economy, and our communities, will take a village.
From the start, so many people have had our backs. That first landowner introduced us to Frieda, 95-years-young and walking us through calving, hosting our farmstand, always asking how the animals are doing and saying how proud she is that we’ve kept going.
Our first intern, Ethan, who was so patient with us and our building the bicycle-as-we-ride methodology, half our age but teaching us some basic business principles, starting farmers' markets and sliders, irrigating, everything. All of our interns were so patient learning as we go, such good sports and bringing so much interest and joy and thoughtfulness to the table.
Heather, who owns Ladybird Bakery and makes the best scones, cookies, and breakfast burritos on the Western Slope, possibly the world, and who has taught us so much about food as a way of bringing people together. Penelope from Valley Food Partnership, who always tells me I’m such a badass, and she has this way of saying it that makes me think, yeah, I AM a bad ass.
The many landowners that allow us to steward the soil, and who always have a positive word to keep us motivated.
While we get the honor of being thanked for what we do, there are so many people that humbly work behind the scenes making our work possible- Our local processing team, who over the years has patiently taught this former vegetarian the difference between a delmonico and a Denver, The ditch rider for our irrigation, Fernando, who even at 6 in the morning when I’m frantically calling about the water is always kind and patient
Our families and our friends who listen to our gripes and moans and weird hangups and yet still stick around and lend a hand,
The animals themselves, who show us how to listen and be at peace, and the fearless wolfpack that is always pumped and ready to go.
Our incredible community, that has kept us going all these years.
And, of course, Caleb, who showed me I don’t need to own a million acres to make a difference. We just need tenacity, and the ability to keep getting up and moving forward, step-by-step.
Each of these people adds a thread to the fabric of Uncompahgre Farms. And I know each of you has your own village—the mentors, partners, and neighbors who cheer you on.
Especially right now—when so many people are struggling economically, when “polarized and divided” seem to be the words of the year, and when the crisis of meaning and purpose is showing up everywhere—we are the lucky ones. We are lucky because we have purpose that is real.
People everywhere, from every background and belief system, need to eat. Food is the most universal point of connection we have. It brings our shared humanity to the surface, even when we forget what we have in common.
Every day, I get up and know exactly why I’m doing this, and who I’m doing it for.
We are lucky because we get to work outside—to get sunshine, to move our bodies, to attune to circadian rhythms, to live in seasons. Those things are not small. They are deeply regulating, physically and mentally. Most people today are starved for that.
We are also lucky to be alive in a moment when people want to know their farmer. When local food is valued. When farming is, dare I say it… cool again. We are not doing this alone in the wilderness anymore—we are doing it in the middle of a cultural return to the land.
And because of that, we find ourselves in a very special position.
We get to be bridge builders.
We get to be in community with reds, blues, purples, and everyone in between.
We get to see the bubbles people live in—and gently poke them, not to divide, but to invite connection.
We get to see when someone is chasing the wrong idol, and we get to softly guide them back to something more rooted, more real.
Because food is common ground.
Agriculture is the foundation of civilization.
And as stewards of soil, we hold one of the most hopeful futures imaginable in our hands.
So when I hear someone talk about a crisis of purpose, I don’t hear despair—I hear someone who is waiting to be invited in. To paraphrase Wendell Berry:
We need more hearts and hands per acre.
And since farming is having a bit of a renaissance right now, let’s be generous with that grace and uptick in cool status. If people are thanking us all the time for what we do, let’s make it a positive feedback loop.
Let’s say:
Thank you back.
Thank you for supporting us.
Thank you for showing up at the farmstand.
Thank you for caring about where your food comes from.
Thank you for letting us do work we love.
Because it truly does take a village. And we are lucky to have each other.
Just as a tiny seed can kick off a landscape transformation, so can a small gesture turn around someone’s life. Take a quiet minute to think of your own village—the people who make your work, your joy, or your purpose possible. Think of someone whose kindness helped you continue. Maybe it’s your partner, a teacher, a mentor, a customer, or a neighbor who waves every time you drive by. Someone who cheered you on, opened a gate, lent a trailer, or believed in your dream before you did.
Do you have that person in mind? Find a thank-you card. Write them a short note, and if you can, be specific. It doesn’t have to be fancy, just real. Something like: “Thank you for being part of my story. Your kindness made a difference.”
Thank you all so much for being here, for caring about this work, and for being part of this regenerative village. The land needs us—and maybe just as much, we need each other. May you go forth and plant community wherever you are.
