About

Field Notes is a publication on land, food, capital, technology, and leverage.

It is written for people working in or near the food system — farmers, founders, fund partners, buyers, policy people, chefs, parents who read — who have looked at where the food system is and where it is going, and are not satisfied. It is for readers who suspect there are ways to make this work that do not require either nostalgia or surrender. Who want clarity, not slogans. Who want the financial picture as well as the moral one.

The publication's operating purpose is regeneration at scale. Most regenerative writing implicitly argues that the answer lies in small farms, farmers' markets, and slow meals — the occasion side of the food system. Field Notes takes a different position: that the work has to be on the everyday side, where most calories are actually eaten and where most of the harm is currently done. There should be no such thing as a destructive food choice, only different ways of consuming food that, everyday or occasion, regenerate the system they come from.

That argument rests on three commitments, which run through the writing here:

Systems before solutions. Tools without an understanding of the system that contains them produce noise, not progress. The work begins with seeing.

Compounding regeneration. Regeneration scales when it is built on compounding assets — soil, capital, knowledge, trust — rather than on heroic effort. Profitability is not the enemy of regeneration; it is the precondition for it.

Leverage over labor. A system that depends on people trying harder has been poorly designed. The way out is structural — better technology, better capital, better systems thinking, in service of better outcomes.

Field Notes arrives once a week, on Wednesday mornings, with a single essay. It rotates across three beats: the farm P&L, the brand equation, and the money question. It publishes longer research reports a few times a year. The Bookshelf is a curated, growing list of the books that have shaped the thinking — agreed with, disagreed with, and most worth reading.

About Tom

Tom Buswell has been involved in food his entire life. He grew up on a family farm, studied Agri-Business Management at Newcastle from 1999, spent his twenties exporting blueberries and asparagus from New Zealand to China, and owned and managed restaurants in the UK and the US for twenty years. He is now back on the family farm, where Field Notes is written.

Reach him at tom@tombuswell.com.