Introduction to Farming on the Spectrum

Yes, we're in the middle of the summer season. But I had an experience on our farm over the winter that perfectly encapsulates what Mark and I mean at Treehorn Farm by "Farming on the Spectrum." What follows is the introduction to a series of long-form essays that we'll publish about our approach to agriculture.

—Melissa

Snow blankets the ground, muffling all sound in the cedar grove except the crunch beneath my boots. I’ve left Mark and our baby back at the farmhouse to enjoy these few quiet moments alone. Suddenly, a rush of wings. Two bald eagles appear overhead, locking talons as they tumble through the air. I hold my breath, watching, until they break apart and glide across the sky toward the Hudson River.

In 1976, the year of my birth, habitat destruction and the pesticide DDT had driven bald eagles to the brink of extinction—only one pair of nesting bald eagles remained in New York State. But conservation efforts, the ban on DDT, and the listing of the bird under the Endangered Species Act brought them back. Today, almost half a century later, there are nearly 200 pairs in just the Hudson Valley alone.

As the eagles vanish from view, a red fox appears on the other side of the spring, just thirty feet away. It stops short, one paw raised, locking eyes with me. We study each other. Like humans, the fox thrives in places where other species falter—farmlands, forest edges, even residential areas. The moment offers a glimpse of a world where humans and other animals can coexist.

But the realities of human encroachment quickly surface: the distant hum of highway traffic and the knowledge that 600 acres of farmland just down the road have been sold to developers. A gunshot rings out in the distance, and I flinch as the fox darts away. It’s hunting season for red fox, grey fox, coyote, bobcat, and many other animals native to the area.

The cold air, invigorating just moments ago, now feels punishing. My lungs freeze with each breath. A pressure builds behind my eyes—the unmistakable sign of an impending migraine, and with it, a meltdown. I lean a hand against the trunk of a cedar as I’m hit with a tsunami of catastrophic thinking.

When I bought Treehorn Farm—12 acres of farmland, forest, and riparian wetland at the foot of the Catskills in the Hudson Valley—Mark and I didn’t just see land. We saw potential. Over the last centuries, colonial conquest has resulted in genocide and the displacement of Indigenous and local peoples, while industrial agriculture has depleted the land’s vitality and stripped entire communities of their agency and connection to their ancestral lands. We wanted to create something different—an approach to farming that nurtures the land with respect and reciprocity, and, in doing so, allows us to extend the same care to ourselves and our community.

At 48, I was diagnosed with autism, level 1—a revelation that reframed decades of feeling “too much.” Teachers, classmates, and family had often deemed me overly emotional, stubborn, unconventional, and far too fixated on social justice issues. In middle school, I fought against the school board to stop the use of polystyrene in schools—and while I won that fight, I lost many others. In high school, I protested against the KKK and argued with my family about the dark underbelly of Monsanto and NAFTA. As an adult, I began seeing myriad issues, from racial justice to Indigenous peoples’ rights to climate activism, as all parts of the same tangled web. How could you stand up for some people, but not for others? Despite believing I was in the right for standing up for what I believed in, for years, I thought my intensity was a flaw. “Learn to control yourself,” people told me whenever I dug in my heels or had an emotional outburst that ended in anger or tears.

My diagnosis didn’t diminish me; it revealed why I had always felt out of place—a square peg forced into a round hole. It brought my unique strengths into focus and gave me a new vocabulary to articulate my experiences and advocate for change. The problem wasn’t me; it was a world designed by and for non-autistic people, one that hadn’t yet learned to embrace those who think and experience life differently. I began to ask myself: What if I could use my disability to help others see the world through a new lens?

The man, the legend: Bob Ross

Imagine, for a moment, a forest. Allistic, or non-autistic, people often view it as a whole, taking in the vastness of the Sierras, the sprawling Deschutes, or the lush canopy of El Yunque—like an aerial view from an airplane or a Bob Ross painting. Or they might focus on a single tree—like the cedar I was leaning against, a tamarack from the Wisconsin woods of their childhood, or a magnolia from their parents’ front yard. Autists, or autistic people, often perceive the world on a different scale. We notice the intricate details of the understory first, before the larger picture in the canopy emerges.

Where others see an entire forest, I see the moss on a fallen log, the damp leaves decaying below, myriad insects breaking it down, and the vast mycelium web beneath the soil—a network as intricate as global communication systems or the firing neurons in our brains. I don’t just see the forest; I feel it hum as its parts communicate in symbiosis. In my forest, every part matters. Every connection counts.

This way of seeing is a beautiful way to live. And our ability to notice the finer details that others often overlook fuels innovation—think of the contributions made by other autists, including Albert Einstein, Greta Thunberg, Daryl Hannah, and Temple Grandin. But it also brings challenges, particularly sensory overload, which can lead to what’s known as an autistic meltdown. A meltdown isn’t a tantrum or emotional manipulation, as people in my life often assumed. We can’t just turn it on and off like an emotional tap. It’s an intense, involuntary reaction to stimuli.

Luke Beardon, an expert in autism studies, describes a meltdown as an “intense response to overwhelm.” To me, that feels like an understatement. A meltdown is more like a hurricane — emotional chaos and catastrophic thinking, paired with physical symptoms. The French use the poetic phrase la petite mort, or “the little death,” to describe an orgasm. But that metaphor feels far more fitting for a meltdown. Orgasms have never made me feel like I’m dying—meltdowns have. Leaning against the tree, my skull throbs and my gut twists into knots. I wonder if I’m not having a meltdown at all, but a heart attack.

Meanwhile, the world outside mirrors my inner meltdown. Biodiversity is vanishing at an astonishing rate—wildlife populations have declined by 75 percent in just a few decades. The climate crisis looms larger each year, driving human-caused, weather-related disasters that have displaced tens of millions of people. Entire ecosystems are unraveling, while deforestation and pollution decimate habitats critical to survival. But this isn’t just about the destruction of nature and ecocide; it’s also about human conflict. Wars and genocides, often fueled by resource scarcity and environmental collapse, continue to leave scars on both people and the planet. The devastating effects of centuries of colonial conquest, industrial expansion, and the unchecked exploitation of land and resources have pushed us to our breaking point. Vast glaciers have melted, ice sheets are collapsing, forests burn. Even the weather in my region has shifted dramatically. Last year, severe drought turned much of New York into a tinderbox, sparking forest fires across the state and even brushfires in Manhattan and Brooklyn. And just last week, temperatures on my farm were a balmy 50 degrees; now, finally, a recognizable winter cold snap has gripped the land.

A book written by a local about the hamlet I live in tells the story of a time when so much snow fell in our corner of the world that kids would toboggan down the thin county highway in front of my house. Now, we're lucky to get any snow at all. And a farmer at the apple orchard next door, now in his late eighties, recalls a time, in the 1950s, when the forest on my land was open pasture. Today, it is a second-growth forest, a patchwork of new growth, much of which has been decimated by disease and pests. The fields on my farm haven’t fared any better—their soil is compacted and filled with invasive species, bearing the scars of decades of monoculture hay production left largely untended.

I bought this land not just to live and farm with my family, but to help it heal. My partner Mark and I envisioned it as a canvas for flowers, willows, and climate-resilient berries like elderberry, honeyberry, and aronia, which have long been revered in Indigenous and folk traditions and medicine. We saw the land as a network—forests, fields, wetlands—all interconnected and in need of care. In tending to it in its entirety, I hoped to find the accommodations I couldn’t find in a world built for neuronormative people. Just as the land supports diverse life—from microbes to trees—society must support a wider spectrum of people, including the approximately 75 million of us around the globe who are autistic.

In the outside world, I was overwhelmed by sensory and mental noise—chemical-laden scented candles, car alarms, fluorescent lights. I was also overwhelmed by people and the myriad ways they hurt each other. Hyperfixated on social justice, I often saw details and connections others missed. I couldn’t understand why, despite wanting the same things—security, love, community—people ignored that if any of us struggle, we all struggle. The farm offered peace—a place that could contain sensory balance, a place that made sense. This is why Mark and I chose regenerative agriculture: it builds biodiversity, rather than extracting from it—and its practices veer from the use of the sort of chemicals—synthetic pesticides and herbicides—that overstimulate, and ultimately destroy, fragile ecosystems.

But leaning against a tree during a meltdown, I saw how naïve I had been—thinking the land would heal itself if I just applied a few regenerative practices and that I could create a safe place for me and my family. I also had been ignoring some big problems: The regenerative agriculture movement is often synonymous with whitewashing, as its proponents regularly exclude Indigenous, Black, and local communities’ practices and ancestors’ knowledge.

It is also synonymous with greenwashing. McCain, PepsiCo, Nestle, and General Mills have each committed to bold promises to adopt more sustainable initiatives. But recent history shows that many such companies fail to deliver on their promises—take Starbucks, for example, which claims its cups are recyclable, despite most recycling programs refusing to accept them because of their plastic linings. Or the Retail Council of Canada, which reneged on its promise to stop gestation stalls for pregnant pigs by 2022 and commit to cage-free eggs by 2025. Or PepsiCo, which, despite saying they've made an effort to reduce emissions, still emitted 54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in just 2022 alone. Or even companies I worked for, which purported to care about the entire planet, but actually cherry-picked the issues they spoke about publicly, ignoring entirely the interrelated issues of genocide and ecocide.

There was also the fact that the more research I did about regenerative agriculture, the more I realized that it was more of a feel-good slogan than a term with a single definition—while the movement often refers to management practices including no-till planting, non-use of chemicals or synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and improving soil health, there simply aren't any regulations around it, nor are there specific, measurable goals. Essentially, any company—or small-scale flower farm operation like ours—could say they were adhering to regenerative agriculture practices when really, they were doing no more than peddling snake oil packaged in a neat green bow. This lack of structure pained my autistic need for order.

My autistic brain was buzzing—how can I say my farm practiced regenerative agriculture when the term itself was so blurry? No matter my good intentions, my farm isn’t a sanctuary from the world. I can’t hide from a world that doesn’t accommodate me—I must act to make it accommodate me. Standing in my cedar grove, a full autistic meltdown upon me, I realize that to do this, I will need to get a lot less comfortable by putting myself out there more. As the late, great John Lewis said, it’s time to rustle up some “good trouble, necessary trouble.” I can’t use regenerative agriculture as a crutch, fixing a little pile of soil here, and growing a few climate resilient berries over there. For regenerative agriculture to work, a clear definition must be placed around it—and it must be viewed an act of rebellion, not just against environmental destruction, but against larger forces—the billionaire oligarchs, late-stage capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and colonialist global systems that ignore the needs of most living things and the interconnectedness of issues.

When Greta Thunberg became a climate activist, people speculated that autists are hard-wired to support environmental causes. Yet a recent review of many studies suggests that autistic traits are actually associated with engagement in fewer, not more pro-environmental behaviors. This makes sense, as many autistic people have sensory issues, anxiety around using public transportation, physical symptoms, short-term memory difficulties, and other challenges that make working with groups of activists difficult. Yet this doesn’t mean that autists don’t have a strong sense of social justice or desire to want the world to be a better place. What it could mean is that, while some autists, like Thunberg, are able to join various causes, others may find it difficult due to experiencing different degrees of difficulty in social settings.

I’ve always lived on the fringe, but now I see: to create change, I need to use my ability to see the finer details to help shape a world that accommodates all living things. Neuronormative perspectives are valuable, but they can be myopic, often focused on single big-picture solutions. How, then, do we create spaces that are more inclusive of autistic voices—even when autists might not feel comfortable participating in those spaces? And how do we train allistic people to look outside of the box of neuronormative thinking? These are questions Mark and I ask each other often.

To solve the biggest issues of our day, we need a greater diversity of voices and ways of seeing, including autistic people, who notice the connections between things that others might overlook. We assume major social movements like regenerative agriculture or climate activism are working, and we sure want to believe that democracy is intact, yet despite their proponents’ best efforts, they don’t go nearly far enough in addressing the world’s biggest overlapping crises. In the neuronormative world, “can’t see the forest for the trees” implies being too focused on details to grasp the full picture. But as I lean against the cedar, my hyperventilation abating and my brain buzzing, I wonder: I may not be able to solve the world’s problems, but can I encourage people to look beneath the surface—to dig deep into the roots, across mycorrhizal networks, and beyond their assumptions—to see these problems from new angles?

Mark and I agree: It's time to start farming on the spectrum—not just to heal the land we steward and ourselves, but to propose methods we might use in our greater community to heal the world.