Farming for Health Podcast #9: Lauren Lovejoy

Lauren Lovejoy is a regenerative farmer with an incredible journey to share: during years of personal illness to wellness, she also discovered a passion for healing the land. 

As a healthy twenty-something in graduate school, Lauren’s life was going along as planned—until it wasn’t. She suddenly felt ill and quickly became bedbound. If she tried to sit or stand up, she felt disoriented and needed to lie right back down. So, she needed to move back to her parents’ sixty acres that they rented to farmers for cattle grazing purposes. 

Lauren saw sixty doctors in two years with no accurate diagnosis and no treatments that worked. By chance, she was then with a Lyme disease specialist who quickly recognized her symptoms. Relieved, Lauren expected to quickly recover but, after five years of taking medications, she still struggled. 

By happenstance, she then found herself with a nutritional herbalist who told her she understood why she didn’t feel well and prescribed a nutritional path to wellness. Within a week, Lauren could comfortably sit up, something she hadn’t been able to do in several years. 

Still living with her parents near neighbors who used conventional farming techniques, she recognized that, just as she could be healed, so could the deteriorating land that had been worn down by decades of not being replenished. Her life experiences, Lauren shared, truly changed the way she felt about the world. 

By this point, Lauren had met her spouse and, together, they owned a few chickens and a few goats. She took care of them in conventional ways—that is, until she heard a life changing Ted Talk. In response to what she learned, Lauren asked her parents if she could use a couple of acres of land for regenerative farming purposes, and they said sure.

With this land, Lauren rotated grazing and otherwise practiced techniques that were new to her. Questions naturally arose, so she reached out to regenerative farming connections. 

You can listen to the rest of his story in her own words in our Farming for Health podcast, Understanding Food, Nutritional Healing and Farming. 

Past Episodes of our Farming for Health Podcast

If you’ve missed any of our previous episodes, you can find them here:

• Episode One: Keto, Cruciferous Vegetables, Salt and Your Mindset
• Episode Two: Cooking, Conviviality, and Preserving the Harvest
• Episode Three: Ferments, Food Insecurity, and Wasted Food.
• Episode Four: Anti-Cancer Diet, Food as Medicine, and Vegetables.
• Episode Five: Plants, Happiness and Mindful Neglect.
• Episode Six: Whole 30, Sustainable Habits, and Loving Vegetables. 
• Episode Seven: Iodine, Egg Yolk Enzymes, and Miso
• Episode Eight: Fungi, Bitter Foods, and Food Extinction

Stay tuned for more!