A story by Bebe Raupe on Drausin Wulsin. This article is also featured in the July 5, 2024, issue of The Ripple.

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As a boy, Drausin Wulsin yearned to be a farmer, a way of life far removed from his suburban upbringing. It took a few decades, but he eventually achieved his childhood ambition, establishing Grassroots Farm in Hillsboro, Ohio.

“Land is primal,” he says, yet modern commercial food production “is an insult to nature and civilization.” Drausin wanted to create a productive ecosystem rooted in land stewardship and healthy nutrition

Before pulling on his work boots full-time in 1989, he held various financial industry positions, experience that would inform Grassroots Farm’s development, from dairy to meat producer to its current focus, selling wetland mitigation credits to developers.

Through these three strategic waves, Drausin’s spiritual connection to the land has grown, as has his respect for Earth-centric farming.  

“It is a struggle to raise handcrafted food at a scale that provides sufficient return of rest and profit for producers,” he says. “This very struggle, however, is like a source of minerals flowing from our hearts to our food, imbuing it with unique richness.”

Drausin’s initial version of the farm was a grass-grazed organic dairy, one of the first in Ohio. It took 20 years to become profitable, he says, with success building slowly but steadily.

Next, Grassroots Farm became a purveyor of free-range beef, lamb, pork, and chicken. Excess meat supply inspired his wife Susan to create a prepared food business.  

With every step in their farming journey, Drausin says he and Susan were unintentionally opposing the industrial food system, which he considers “a most worthwhile pursuit.”

“It was fortuitous we didn’t know at the outset exactly how large the challenge would be to face this Goliath or we might not have undertaken it,” he says. “But in doing so, we have stretched ourselves to limits previously unreached, discovering new inner strength and a few cracks in the armor of the giant.”

Failures and struggles marked the early years, but with experience the farm became successful, Drausin says, and through it all, he, and Susan never waivered in their commitment to handcrafted food.

Capitalism demands that a business be successful in five years, but nature runs at its own pace, meaning that it may take 20 or more years for economic success, he says.

“You never know what’s going to happen on a farm, so you have to have faith,” says Drausin, adding that “I was never spiritually fulfilled in regular jobs but in working with the land I found myself fully engaged and found strength I never knew I had.”  

But as he neared 70, Drausin realized “we had to set the stage for the rest of our lives.”

Seven-day workweeks and hard physical labor would need to be curtailed. Drausin knew he would not always have the physical stamina to maintain the farm’s many businesses. Ensuring that grass-fed cattle have enough to eat, for instance, means someone must herd them to fresh pastures every day, a task that entails walking many miles in all kinds of weather, he says.

Today he and Susan have shuttered the prepared foods business and started relinquishing care of their livestock to a younger couple with a farm nearby.

Ever astute planners, Drausin and Susan were well-prepared for the shift away from hands-on farming.  About 25 years ago they began the lengthy process of developing a wetlands mitigation bank.  

“At a time when I was fully immersed in the vision of grass-fed food, I found another [business] possibility in restoring the farm’s wetlands,” he says.

Daily observations gained by walking the land gave Drausin insight into every part of the farm and that knowledge formed the basis for developing a 450-acre wetlands mitigation bank.  

Mitigation banks are sites where wetlands have been established, restored, or preserved, he says. Once approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a bank provides credits that developers can purchase to satisfy regulatory mitigation requirements.  

This passive income allows Grassroots Farm to continue its goal of land stewardship with an impact that reaches far beyond its boundaries, says Drausin.

And now farm life has bestowed upon him another title: author.  For more than a decade Drausin posted stories on the Grassroots Farm website detailing adventures he, Susan, and their animals experienced.

He has compiled some of these stories in two books and is working to complete two more.  

The books encapsulate Drausin’s life close to the land which he says has been “a privilege--thrilling and vitalizing.”