An Update: News from The Ranch

Seasons have shifted, though not in the typical way. Usually, when you read these updates solar shifts have occurred: a Solstice, an Equinox. This time, however, it is only the season of our life, here that has changed and it feels it warrants a bit of sharing for those of you who've thus far remained invested in us up to this point.

Some of you are aware that in the last few months, there was a significant shift in terms of our primary income source. While things have re-stabilized for now, initially when this happened we began working on leveraging the Ranch as a source of support – through new class offerings and other avenues. However, as we've reflected on the opening this has created in our lives we've realized that this is not what Rancho de la Libertad is, nor what we want it to be. Yes, we hope for this to become a space for teaching eventually, and yes, we hope that we can offer more opportunities for immersion from the public and offering food items out to our broader community in a more stable way than we've been able to thus far. However, to make the Ranch an income source to support itself rather than getting it to the point where it sustains itself more organically through barter, exchange, and so on – this is not the goal.

Because when we talk about income, we bring ourselves firmly into commerce, into the necessity for a surplus of value to be produced. We start to have to target markets of folks who have plenty of income already to spend on supporting a fledgling site, to purchase "high-end" food items rather than their necessities. This violates some hard lines for us: we don't want to sell the bodies of other beings, we don't want to push the land past what it can produce feasibly and sustainably, especially considering our slight water resources, and we don't want to be offering food to folks who already have plenty of resources and options. As has been stated but warrants re-stating: we want to build a community that can support and therefore liberate itself.

Ultimately, despite its name, Rancho de la Libertad wasn't really ever meant to become a "farm" in the production sense. We imagined a relatively self-sustaining, closed-loop site where the gaps in closure were filled by the local community; where residents were fellow artists and those active politically, immersing themselves in the acts of creation while committing themselves to re-learning connection with the land and its cycles; where the beings that reside on the land – those who feed us and who feed the land and who are fed by the land – were not products but allies in this entire process. As we've diverged towards "farm" and "homestead", I fear we've lost clear sight of some of these lines, some of these goals.

The result of this growing awareness has itself sprouted something new. While we cannot share all of our ideations and plans just yet, what we will share and what has more of an affect on you at this moment is that we're going to be taking some steps back from Rancho de la Libertad for a little while. We aren't shutting it down, or selling it, for the time being the work is going to continue to be done, but we are scaling our plans for this upcoming season back quite a bit: we're going to potentially reduce the amount of beings living on the Ranch and cease plans to breed this season, scale back infrastructure plans, and dial back our planting plans to something reasonable to support with the other things that we're focusing on. We've realized that if the Ranch does not create its own revenue, where we live we're ultimately reliant on remote work continuing to be an option, which means we're pigeonholed within a specific industry to support ourselves, and this feels unstable and uncertain, especially given recent events and the trajectory of this industry as a whole. Therefore, we're focusing on a few different avenues, including Siin's work, and considering next steps for the long term.

Practically speaking, this will likely manifest as the temporary (or long-term, it hasn't been decided yet) pausing of activity on our Ranch social media accounts. It will likely also mean we'll be releasing less here for a while. If you're a paid subscriber, this impacts you in two ways:

1. You'll receive a paid newsletter for August, but after that paid material releases will be sporadic for a while. Any updates will be sent directly to you as soon as decisions are made on what we want to do with this online space, depending on how long it is decided that it will be until we return to building out the Ranch more full time again.
2. If this is a dealbreaker and you'd like to cancel or receive a refund (if you've paid for the year) your paid subscription, you can cancel directly at the bottom of this email for monthly subs and for yearly subscribers you can reach out to siin@rancholibertad.com to receive a refund.

For free subscribers, I advise you stick around! It's likely we'll continue to release useful information here, albeit a little less often, and you'll be able to receive updates regarding our direction as they come.

Feel free to reach out to us and let us know what you think about any of this! We understand that some of you, especially those who've become more invested in the survival of the Ranch, may feel disappointed. And I just want to reiterate that we'll still be here, for as long as we can be, and that the goal with all of our endeavors is to return to this work and make the Ranch what it was intended to be. We just have to find some stability before we can continue at the pace we've been working at thus far.

Thank you for reading and for being with us on this entire adventure. We deeply appreciate you. Until next time ~