Brandon TurbevilleNatural Blaze
January 25, 2016
After several years of fighting both the Michigan Department of Natural Resourcesand the USDA, Mark Baker of Bakers Green Acres recently announced what seemed like to many, including Baker himself, to be a long struggle of financial hardship and personal stress simply to end up where the authorities wanted him to begin with –out of business and out of sight.
Thankfully, it appears that Baker has rethought his decision and will be keeping his farm open albeit in a slightly different capacity. Instead of a business enterprise, Bakers Green Acres will be converted to an operation that exists for the purpose of helping veterans to rebuild their lives after serving in combat. As opposed to a focus on production and commerce, the farm will now be focused on education and rehabilitation. It will be a place where veterans will come to live, learn skills, and begin to heal the scars of war. Baker himself is a 20-year military veteran.
In a video (below) released by Baker on January 10, he stated the following regarding the new role that his farm will play:
We started that process [to sell our farm] and as we went down that road I realized, for a lot of reasons, that it wasn’t the best thing to do. For a lot of us. Not just me, and not just my family but there’s other people involved as well. I got a lot of input about it. Some of it was heart wrenching, about closing this down.
Now this whole thing, the reason why I’m talking to you right now, came out of a bad situation but a lot of good has come out of it. We have a really good network of people that we can count on right now and we’ve explored a lot of things.
