Nate Olive
Courtesy of Nate Olive
The mission of the Virgin Islands Sustainable Farm Institute (VISFI) is to "provide a working educational farm enterprise that integrates sustainability in education, environment, and community through quality instruction in Agroecology and related fields." This is accomplished via a combination of "experiential learning, outdoor lecture, field laboratories, personal and group research projects, leadership development, and local environmental awareness into a comprehensive educational experience."
Nate Olive is someone who has put this mission into action. "My path on this route began when my grandfather, Billy Kidd, planted seeds of sustenance living in my head by showing me what family farming was," he explains. Nate admits he "grew up soft" in the suburbs where survival was "more about wearing the right clothes and staying away from the rough neighborhoods than scratching a life out of the ground." However, it was while driving his first car in the North Georgia mountains that he learned an all new perspective on survival. Olive got lost—alone—and his flashlight promptly died. "Although I was fearful and apparently out of my element, something clicked with me there in the darkness," he says. "I felt this strange sense of … being alive. I discovered that I was not a stranger in that place that seemed like 'wilderness.' That feeling, that instant, let me know beyond a doubt that true life was out there waiting for me. Nature called me out. It was time to come home.
Today, Nate Olive works as the VISFI program director and was kind enough to take some time to have a conversation with me.
WATCH VIDEO: The Clagett Farm CSA
Solar Energy at the VISFI
My Conversation With Nate Olive
Planet Green: What led you to the work you do now?
Nate Olive: After college, with the yolk of expectation dropping away, I was inspired by a friend who had recovered from a nearly fatal auto accident. He told me he realized life is short and precious, and then asked me to hike the Appalachian Trail with him. I never paused, never looked back. After 7 joyful years and 8000+ miles later, I had walked nearly every major long-distance trail in the US, but still I felt my return to nature was incomplete. The problem was that despite all my unbounded freedom, I still had to find a road and a store with food every week somewhere, and use money to buy it. I realized I was shackled by my own ignorance—my inability to hunt, gather, or grow my own food. I was trying to live with the wolves, but still had to find the teat of the pig to stay alive. There were times when I felt true hunger. I don
PG: Where did you turn?
NO: Thankfully, this new wave of young small farm "greenhorns" took me in with open arms. I moved to small homestead outside of Athens, GA and dove in to farming with no guidance other than a country-fied neighbor who had pity on me. Fueled with questions from failure after failure, I started to meet others who were steps ahead but in the same boat. Then things started to work... I started to listen to plants and they responded. At the same time, I took up learning primitive survival skills like hunting, trapping, and friction fire-making. Life was rapidly deepening in richness. I wondered what this feeling of richness, a deep content, was all about. So I went to grad school to study in a program that explored what they call "Flow Theory," or the science of strengthening capacity for inner happiness. I saw that living close to nature provides just the right amount of challenge and skill requirements to make people feel good about life from the innermost core. It turns out, we are a part of nature—we
PG: What do you feel you bring to the VISFI that's unique?
NO: Overall, I bring two things to the table. First, I am hopeful person. I don
The other thing I bring to the table is what my naturalist mentor Tom Brown Jr. calls "dirt time." That means time spent actually doing things versus intellectualizing them. That
PG: Why St Croix?
NO: Truth be told, I came here to follow my girlfriend 10 years ago, whom I met in college and was from this island. I always shunned the beach and considered myself a mountain man. Leave it to a woman. It turns out that not only does St. Croix have beautiful beaches, arable lands, and lovely people but it also has an isolated mini "rain forest" up in the mountains where VISFI is, where I am right now. From this windowless pane of my converted cargo container house, I can see over the rugged green hills of what they call the Northwest Quarter through the boughs of a mango tree to a pocket view of the Caribbean. It
Get involved/Find Out More
- Contact Nate: nate@visfi.org 706.534.5033
