Why I Started a Farm I Can Barely Run

Let me save you the inspirational version.

This isn’t a story about a woman with a vision and a plan and a beautiful origin moment she can point to and say — that’s where it all began.

This is a story about stubbornness. About rebuilding. About a place that looks nothing like its name yet and gets one inch closer every single year.

This is the story of Eden’s Edge.

In 2022 I started what would become this farm under a different name — the Kenai Peninsula Poultry Project. Small. Focused. Building something real on land in Nikiski that I’d been working since 2018. I had goats by 2020, chickens, a homestead taking shape, a vision of what this could become.

And then 2023 happened.

I’m not going to tell you what happened. Some things belong to you and not to the internet. What I will tell you is that I lost the farm. Lost the thing I had been building. Lost the ground I thought I was standing on.

For about a year I had nothing.

I want to sit with that for a second because I think we rush past the hard parts too quickly in these stories. We want to get to the comeback. We want the resurrection without the tomb.

But the year I lost the farm was real. It was brutal. And it matters, because what came after it only makes sense if you know it happened.

In 2024 I rebuilt.

From the ground up. Again. With a body that was sicker than it had been in 2022, with resources that were thinner, with the particular exhaustion of someone who has already built something once and knows exactly how hard it is and has to choose to do it anyway.

I have Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. Dysautonomia. Hemiplegic Migraines. Myoclonic Seizures. No sensation in my limbs. I farm on forearm crutches with AFOs on both legs in Alaska where winter is not a metaphor and the ground does not care about your diagnosis.

My body has been trying to stop me for years.

In 2023 life tried to finish the job.

Neither of them managed it.

Not because I’m inspirational. Not because I have some superhuman tolerance for loss or pain or the particular cruelty of starting over when starting over is the last thing you have left in you.

Because I am constitutionally, pathologically, unapologetically incapable of quitting.

When I rebuilt I renamed it.

Eden’s Edge.

People probably picture something lush when they hear that. Something green and abundant and intentional. A farm that looks like it was planned by someone who knew what they were doing and had the resources to do it right.

It doesn’t look like that.

Not yet.

It looks like what it is, a working farm built by a stubborn disabled woman who lost everything and got back up and decided to name the thing she was rebuilding after somewhere worth walking toward.

Not because it’s there yet.

Because every year it gets one inch closer.

That’s the whole vision. Not a destination. A direction.

And the direction is toward something that feeds people. Really feeds them, seniors, veterans, families who are stretched so thin they’re see-through, with real food, no shame, no strings, no expiration date on the mission.

Was I qualified to do this? Debatable. Was I healthy enough? Absolutely not. Did 2023 break something in me that I’m still putting back together? Yes.

Am I still here?

What do you think.

Stubborn people don’t get back up because they’re brave. Bravery implies you considered stopping and chose not to. Most of us never seriously considered stopping. It’s not a mindset. It’s not a discipline. It’s just who we are.

And sometimes that particular character flaw turns into something useful.

In my case it turned into Eden’s Edge.

A place that looks far from an eden.

But gets one inch closer every year.

And I will keep getting up every morning, on crutches, in Alaska, with a body that fights me and a mission that doesn’t care about any of that, until it gets there.

Or until I do.

Whichever comes first.

Not today though.

Today there are animals to feed.

Dana Eden’s Edge, Nikiski Alaska