Regenerating the Regenerative Farmer - Gail Fuller
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Gail Fuller of Circle 7 by Fuller Farm in Severy, Kansas has experienced the highs and lows of both conventional and regenerative agriculture. Currently he is farming with his partner Lynette Miller on 162 acres on the edge of the Flint Hill prairies that he purchased in 2019. He will be speaking at the 2025 REGENERATE Conference and he will also be leading a workshop on helping other regenerative producers learn how to create healthy bodies, minds, and hearts.
Gail has been a leader in regenerative agricultural practices for over 15 years, but the price for that experimentation was high, too high. With the loss of income, friends, and family because of a legal battle over his crop insurance claim being turned down due to regenerative practices, he ended up using a capital gains 1031 exchange for his farm of 3,200-acre and moving to Severy. With those loses came a deep depression and thoughts of suicide.
That bottoming out also led to Gail to shift his series of yearly workshops that he began in 2012 as a deep dive into water and mineral cycles and energy flow. In 2023-24, he began his “Heal the Farmer, Heal the Farm” workshops that focused not on regenerative practices for the land, but for the body and soul. These workshops focus on physical, mental, and spiritual healing and are attended by as many as 100 people over the country, ready to dig deep and engage in these important discussions. “Everyone is looking for community and we are all broken and we are all trying to heal that,” says Gail.
“When Nicole Masters came to our workshop, she challenged us that we can’t heal farms without healing the farmer. That perspective has really helped me in healing my depression. I can say I have not been on a farm that is regenerative, because we aren’t focusing on ourselves. We are just focusing on the land and animals. We can’t help others if we don’t put ourselves first. It’s a matter of loving oneself more than loving one’s cows.”
Getting In Tune with Your Whole Body
The prelude for this work began in 2019 when Gail invited Zach Bush to come to his yearly workshop in 2019, the last one he held at his old farm in Emporia. At that workshop Zach noted that all cancer is caused by stress. He then corrected himself and said all metabolic disease is caused by stress and who is more stressed than farmers? “What I’ve learned over the years is that there is no one size fits all solution for this work,” says Gail. “We all need to get in tune with our bodies, just like learning how to be in tune with the land.”
Gail said he did not have depression before the crash of 2013 with the crop insurance challenges. He admits he did have a lot of anger issues. He has since learned to separate anger from depression, but at times they did go hand in hand. It was the perfect storm of isolation in 2013 that caused Gail to spiral as he had to lay off his crew and work alone to get the work done. “My isolation went through the roof,” says Gail. “I just wallowed in my pity as I saw how fast the debt was piling up. Then things got worse after my brother died. We were on the outs so that made his death harder for me.
“What I discovered as I began talking in public about what had happened to me, it helped me let go of some of the shame. And the more I opened up, the more the other farmers opened up to me. And the more stories I heard, I realized that my stories were no better or worse than others. Others were going through the same thing.
“In 2021, after I heard Nicole Masters speak, I began to see a nutritionist and I started really focusing on my mental health. But as the 2022 drought really intensified along with the financial stress, I started thinking about suicide again. That emotional crash was devastating; I had come so far. I was armed with my new knowledge, so I thought I was past thinking that way again. I put so much emphasis on these new areas of growth, but I still wasn’t focusing on my spiritual and physical well-being. That’s when I realized we can’t do this piecemeal. We need to work on all these areas at the same time. It’s a journey that has to happen all at once.
“Since that realization, I’ve been on journey to focus on all three things—physical, emotional, and spiritual health. I’ve allowed my inner youth back out to let go of my foolish pride and ego and get in touch in my feminine self. I’m still masculine, but I’m more balanced. Now I let myself share my tears and troubles with the land and vice versa. It’s part of letting each other heal.
“On the physical side, the first real step was to get off pop and sugar, and get processed food out of my diet so I could work on gut health, which I started doing in 2007. Gut health ties the mental and physical together. Thoughts don’t start in the brain; they start in the gut. If we don’t have our gut health together, the rest of the healing is hard to accomplish. Our gut is our ‘soil.’ We have to heal that first.
“The mental side is the most difficult to shift for me. Knowing what I need to do and doing it are two different things and it is very difficult to quit beating myself up. It was only the sheer desire to not kill myself that pushed me to look at this issue. I’ve had to quit making fun of myself even jokingly. You can see it coming, so I tell myself ‘Let’s work on this. What can I do next time? How I can learn from this?’ These things are not role modeled. Our problems have been handed down for generations. We didn’t have the tools and capabilities so I am in no way assessing blame on anyone.
“As difficult as this was to do, the next step was one million times more difficult—to congratulate myself when I had a good day of grazing or when I remembered to do something. Telling myself I was proud of me and how I loved me was so difficult! That’s a scab nobody wants to tear off. I had a mentor who said that he literally wrote ‘I love you’ on the bathroom mirror and said that to himself. He did it every day for a year and it took a year to believe it. I believe I’m a good person and I’m making a difference. Some days I can believe I am loveable. I am now able to like myself every day.
“I’m also at the early stages of letting my inner youth out. I’ve been able to connect with that inner child once farming was more fun. I remember running along streams and being in the mud and dirt and grass when I was a kid. Now that I’m a grandfather and I’m looking back on life, I feel scared about my grandkids. When I was a kid, I was a bookworm and my imagination was completely off the charts. But I was made to conform by the education system and peers, and I did the same thing to my kids. Now I see my grandkids and how unique they are in their own imagination. But they are also being ‘trained.’ I want to protect them from that. I want to let that kid back out for myself and tell him it’s okay to spend part of the day looking at turtles and chasing butterflies.
“I don’t declare myself ‘healed,’ but I am feeling better than I’ve felt since I was a teenager. And the land is definitely healing. Even in this drought, this farm has changed dramatically without rain. While the Flint Hills are unbroken prairie, and there is a lot of diversity because of that, this land is still hurting from all the damage we’ve done. For example, when I started planting cover crops back in Emporia, a secondary outcome was we had more quail. I was glad to see them as they’ve been in big trouble with habitat loss. So, when we moved to Severy, I was looking forward to having quail because of all the diversity, but there were none. Now we have 7 pairs from the work we’ve been doing here. We still have a long way to go, because we have no prairie chickens, but the quail have returned. I want to have beaver as well.
“All our plant species have increased in number and quantity since we moved here. We still have bare ground but there is less of it. The land is responding. We had the Ecydsis research team out here in June of 2023. We had them sample a ‘go back’ area (reestablished pasture after farming). They found an insect that they never found in a production ag area. We are just seeing life explode with snake populations up as well. It’s still dry and hot, but the farm is showing more life. The organic matter is up 50% in 3 years (going from 3% to 4.7%).”
Listening and Seeing the Possibilities
Gail is currently grazing all 162 acres with multi-species grazing (including cattle, sheep, pigs, laying chickens). The stock density he uses varies greatly, depending on the landscape and his landscape goals. Sometimes he will move the animals as much as 3 times a day, other times only once a day, with density varying from 50,000 lbs/acre to over 1,000,000 lbs/acre. “Drought affected our grazing because the water points are not set up the way we want at this time,” says Gail. “It’s actually improved my grazing. We do night penning where there is no water so we water them before dark and use the dew in the morning to utilize water that way until they are moved. It’s incredible on the days when we use dew how well they perform, even with wet cows.
“Drought is a cleanse; the land needs it; it resets. Without the drought I wouldn’t have changed my grazing mentality. Even with the drought this year it’s been one of the best grazing years I’ve had. As I get in my personal journey, letting go of my ego, getting in touch with feminine, it has allowed me to look at the land better and communicate with the animals. When it rains, we have terraces and so I follow where the water goes. The sheep really changed my mindset. If you want sheep to graze a challenge plant, they’ve got to have another plant to eat along with the challenge plant. So, I watch what they eat and then I plan my management from what they’ve told me.”
Gail acknowledges that he is still under huge financial stress, but he doesn’t want that stress to push him back to an unhealthy lifestyle. “We took a hard look at our lives and the expenses we had,” says Gail. “We asked ourselves, ‘What do we need? What can we do without?’ And we cut all those things out. We’ve found that looking at our finances this way allows us to open the door to creativity.
“For example, we have 40 acres of rewilding cropland. There was about 5-10 acres of Illinois bundle flowers growing there. Colin Seis was visiting us and said what a great income stream that would be. But I was too busy moving cows and I was still not in tune with the farm. I did harvest some of it using a tractor with a loader to harvest the seeds. That bucket was filled with walking sticks and praying mantis. If I had really done a good job harvesting that seed, I could have sold the seed to a seed company or sold them retail to the public. That experience helped me see how I still need to explore more these concepts of ecology and spirituality. Now when I’m moving cows, I spend a couple of minutes, looking at cow pies and what’s flying around."
As another income stream Gail has added agritourism with having an AirBnB, as well as being signed up for Hipcamp and Harvest Home. This enterprise also is another way to connect to consumers, and hear their stories. They have questions about doctors and diseases, so Gail and Lynette share their experiences and spread the word.
“I came out of a conventional world,” says Gail. “Now I’m doing retail which is difficult because I have no background in it. I didn’t know how to tell my story. But agritourism has helped me develop that skill. It’s made me a better story teller and it has allowed me to hear other people’s story and lets them let their burdens out.
“From my perspective the key to all of our healing is that the war with nature has to end now. We have to reconnect with nature. Being out in nature doesn’t mean you are connecting with it. Walking in a typical row crop grain field isn't exactly the same as walking in a prairie or timber. You have to spend time with and listen to her to get better connected with nature. Agritourism allows people to do that.”
It took Gail 20 years on his old farm to double the soil organic matter, increase water infiltration rates by 10 times, exponentially increase biodiversity and add more diversity through alley cropping and food forests. He and Lynette want to accomplish that in 5 years at their farm in Severy. The only way to do that regeneratively is to focus on their spiritual, emotional, and mental health which will allow them to be more capable of listening to the land, seeing the opportunities available to them, and working in loving partnership with Nature and their human community.