Nicole Sauce over at Living Free in Tennessee is hosting a really cool class at the Holler Homestead this October 2 & 3 with Alan Booker and Chase Jones.

If you have followed my work for any length of time, you probably already know Alan. He is one of the smartest systems thinkers I know, and when you get him teaching something like soil microbiology, you aren’t just going to learn a list of organisms and stare through a microscope for a couple hours.

This is a two-day intensive on October 2nd and 3rd in Lancaster, Tennessee, focused on understanding what is actually going on in living soil.

Get your tickets here.

A lot of people get into regenerative agriculture and immediately start looking for the next thing they should add to their soil. Compost. Compost tea. Biochar. Minerals. Cover crops. Whatever the current answer happens to be.

Those things can all have a place, but regenerative agriculture is supposed to be about building functioning systems, not replacing one list of inputs with another list of inputs.

At some point you need to understand what is actually happening in your soil.

That is where microscopy becomes incredibly useful.

For two days, Alan and Chase will be working with a small group at Nicole’s place, splitting the days between classroom instruction, hands-on microscopy, and actual field work at the Holler Homestead. You will probably be looking at soil from a bioreactor I built there last year at some point that weekend.

The idea is to learn the biology, look at it under a microscope, then walk outside and connect what you are learning to an actual living system.

Chase Jones brings another layer to this. He’s a certified Soil Food Web Consultant and microscopy technician whose work includes soil biology, composting, perennial food systems, regenerative earthworks, and site analysis.

Nicole is hosting the whole thing at the Holler Homestead, and she has structured it the way these kinds of workshops should be structured. You aren’t showing up for a lecture and disappearing afterward.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner are included and Nicole knows how to feed you real food from local sources. Camping at the Holler is included. After the formal instruction ends, everyone has dinner together and the instructors stick around for evening discussions, questions and deeper dives into whatever came up during the day.

That means you basically get two full days immersed in the subject with Alan, Chase and a bunch of other people who actually give a damn about building healthy soil and producing food.

The Soil & Microscopy Intensive is October 2–3, 2026 at Holler Homestead in Lancaster, Tennessee.

Registration is $465 and includes both days of instruction, hands-on microscopy and field work, all meals, evening discussions and on-site camping.

One important thing: Nicole needs at least 10 people registered for the class to go forward. So if this is something you’ve been wanting to learn, don’t sit around waiting until the week before to decide.

You can get all the details and register here:

https://livingfreeintennessee.com/event/soil-and-microscopy-intensive/