Regenerative Farming as a Path to Peace

Long before Andrew Tuttle began working with drones over regenerative farms or building immersive learning tools for students, he was a young soldier working on Marine One, the aircraft used to transport the President of the United States.

From March 2011 to October 2015, he served as an Airframe Mechanic in the United States Marine Corps during the administration of President Barack Obama, stationed in Quantico, Virginia. The work demanded precision and trust inside aviation maintenance where reliability was absolute, and every component depended on disciplined coordination. It was a world of procedures and interlocking parts, a world where complexity only held if nothing failed. He has described it as formative not only for its rigor, but for how it shaped his instinct to understand how individual elements contribute to something larger and more fragile than themselves.

That experience also left him with a deeper question that would begin to define his life: what does it mean to build toward peace in a world organized so tightly around power and control? Over time, that question became less background and more mission.

For Tuttle, that mission has gradually crystallized into a central conviction: regenerative farming and changing how we grow food is a pathway to peace in the world. This has been his vision all along. In conversations and talks, this is often the message that resonates most deeply with others. He frequently hears from veterans who approach him afterward, telling him they understand exactly what he is trying to do. Having witnessed destruction and despair in their own lives, they recognize in regenerative agriculture something that feels like repair, not only of land, but of meaning itself. For them, it carries a kind of grounded hope about what the future could become.

But before that took form, there was Lynden, Washington.

Tuttle grew up in Lynden, a small agricultural town in Whatcom County near the Canadian border. The landscape is shaped by working farmland, dairy operations, berry fields, and cultivated stretches of soil held in careful management.

His grandparents were early organic gardeners and homesteaders, and their influence gave him one of his first close encounters with land as something living rather than simply productive. Alongside that family lineage, he spent formative time at Cloud Mountain Farm Center, a nonprofit education farm where people learned by planting, tending soil, saving seed, and observing how living landscapes respond over time.

Even in that early landscape, he was aware of tension. The same region that taught stewardship also revealed how agriculture could strain the land it depended on. As a child, he remembers becoming violently ill after swimming in a stream near industrial berry farms, an experience he did not yet have language for, but one that left a lasting imprint on how closely land use and human health can be intertwined.

Those contradictions never resolved into simple answers.

One of the early turning points came while he was still serving on Marine One.

During that period, he was reading Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, written by Toby Hemenway, while living inside a life defined by aviation logistics and constant movement. The book introduces permaculture as a way of designing land in the image of natural processes: diverse, layered, self-sustaining environments that regenerate rather than deplete. It translates ecological patterns into practical design principles that can be applied to food production and land care.

For Tuttle, the book arrived as a revelation. He described a growing unease watching the scale of fuel and infrastructure required to move a single person, the President, across vast distances. Inside that contrast, Gaia’s Garden felt like it was describing a completely different way of organizing life and responsibility.

The book opened a door, but not a certainty. He remembers being drawn to it while also questioning whether what it described could actually exist beyond the page. Permaculture suggested something almost opposite to what he was immersed in: relationships rather than separation, feedback rather than control, interdependence rather than isolation.

Years later, he would encounter Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead in Orcas Island, WA, a place that made the book feel less like imagination and more like evidence.

He recalls standing inside a restored ecosystem that, in many ways, resembled what Gaia’s Garden describes in practice. Degraded land had been rebuilt over time into a functioning ecological landscape: soil restored, plant communities interacting in layered succession. What he experienced was not a single intervention, but accumulated care expressed through years of patient ecological work.

“I was struck with this profound spiritual experience,” he said. “It was all real. They did it.”

That moment sharpened a question that had been forming since his time in uniform: whether human beings are separate from the living world they inhabit, or capable of participating in its repair rather than its depletion.

In his twenties, Tuttle moved through a period of ecological minimalism. He spent stretches of time in relative isolation, learning wilderness skills, foraging, and experimenting with low-impact living after encountering Mark Boyle’s The Moneyless Man.

Boyle’s book follows an attempt to live without money, offering a critique of consumer culture through daily experiments in self-reliance and exchange outside formal economic structures. For Tuttle, it was less a model than a challenge, an invitation to imagine life with radically reduced impact.

He remembers that time with clarity.

“I was a full-blown hippie Luddite,” he said.

The aim was to take less, consume less, step back from harm. A close friend helped him recognize what he was circling but had not yet named. Over time, the limits of that approach became clear. The question shifted. It was no longer only about reducing damage, but about whether it was possible to actively contribute to repair.

“I was just doing less bad,” he said. “Not doing any real good.”

That distinction became a turning point in how he understood his work.

Alongside that shift, he began practicing ecological design professionally as a Landscape & Farm Designer with Redtail Edge Design, a role he has held since 2019. The work brings permaculture principles into direct contact with land, shaping farms where water, soil, vegetation, and human use are designed as an integrated whole.

Much of this work is deeply collaborative with Mary Marshall, who serves as lead designer, videographer, and co-founder of both Redtail Edge Design and Edge Perma. She also works alongside Andrew as co-instructor at Edmonds College and Ecoversity. Her design vision and technical skill shape the visual and structural language of the projects, and the entire design and media portfolio reflects her work. Andrew consistently speaks with deep admiration for her clarity, precision, and ecological intuition, recognizing her as the primary force behind the design output and visual storytelling that defines their shared work.

Andrew is Co-Founder of Edge Perma, a project he has helped build since 2021. The platform uses drones, spatial mapping, and immersive storytelling to document regenerative farms and ecological restoration sites. At its core, it translates real landscapes into experiences that can be moved through and studied, revealing how ecological and human life unfold together across space and time.

Edge Perma itself grew out of his time teaching permaculture design at Edmonds College in Lynnwood, Washington, where he and Mary also teach together. When the pandemic disrupted in-person learning, he was cut off from the land-based environments essential to teaching ecology. Like many educators in place-based fields, he was forced into a practical question: how do you teach living landscapes without direct access to them?

In searching for answers, he came across drone imaging and 3D landscape modeling.

“I was like, oh wow!”

That moment became the beginning of Edge Perma, developed as a way to make ecological places visible and teachable beyond their physical location.

The work is not only documentation but translation. Farms become environments that can be entered visually and understood relationally. The guiding question for Tuttle is access. Many regenerative farms and ecological experiments exist far from where most people live.

“This is about education justice,” he said. “I want anyone in the world to have access to the most powerful spaces.”

One of the agricultural models that has shaped his thinking is Alexandre Family Farm, a regenerative organic dairy in Northern California. The farm uses rotational grazing to support grass recovery and long-term soil health, with cattle moved across pasture in patterns designed to strengthen rather than deplete the land. Composting and integrated practices replace synthetic inputs, and production is organized around ecological function as much as yield.

For Tuttle, what matters is not only what is produced, but how it holds together over time.

As his work expanded, he began noticing something that changed how he understood regeneration itself.

On some farms, ecological repair existed alongside strained labor conditions. On others, ecological health seemed to align with healthier organizational life.

The contrast stayed with him.

“They treated people like shit,” he said bluntly of one operation. “That is not regenerative.”

What emerged was a broader understanding: land cannot be separated from the people who care for it. Soil health, water, biodiversity, labor, and culture are part of the same field of relationship.

Regeneration, in this sense, is not only about ecosystems. It is about how life is treated within the places it depends on.

“You have to have this feeling of family,” he said.

When asked what sustains him, he does not turn to prediction. He turns to what he has seen change.

“I’ve seen it in my lifetime,” he said.

Hope, for him, is something carried in observation, places where damaged land has begun to recover, where living communities have returned, where care has changed what seemed fixed. It is not distant or theoretical; it is grounded in what he has already witnessed.

What he imagines for the future is not a fixed destination but a continuation of that pattern. Places once depleted beginning to green again. Watersheds recovering. Species returning. Human communities learning to live in closer relationship with the land beneath them. He says plainly:

The future has more trees.

And in that final line, he returns to what has been consistent across every stage of his path: not separation from the living world, but the possibility of belonging within it in a way that makes repair real.

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About George Cassidy Payne

George Cassidy Payne is a Rochester, New York–based journalist, poet, and essayist whose work explores the intersections of ecology, culture, spirituality, mental health, and community life.