Why Chesed Ranch exists
Editor’s Note
The story below began as a letter written in 2020 for a Myasthenia Gravis support community that no longer exists. Much has changed since then, but the events, challenges, and lessons described here ultimately led to the creation of Chesed Ranch. Rather than starting with fruit trees, livestock, or weather stations, the story of Chesed Ranch begins much earlier—with a farm in Iowa, a lifelong dream, and a season of life that nearly ended before this chapter could begin.
Growing Up on the Farm
I was raised on a century-old family farm in eastern Iowa where we raised hogs, cattle, and row crops. Farming wasn’t a hobby or a weekend activity—it was simply life. Long before I knew what I wanted to do professionally, I knew the rhythms of planting, harvesting, caring for livestock, and the responsibility that comes with stewardship of land and animals.
In 1990, I joined the United States Navy as an Electronics Technician. That decision eventually brought me to Florida, where I spent much of my service between NAS Jacksonville and the USS Vicksburg in Mayport. After leaving the Navy, marriage and family kept me in Northeast Florida, and I began what would become a long career in information technology.
Over the next two decades, I built a career, raised two sons, and settled into suburban life. But something was always missing.
Not long after leaving Iowa, I realized how deeply I missed farm life. No matter where life took me, I never completely let go of the dream that someday I would return to the land.
By 2015, that dream had begun taking shape through a small homestead in Nassau County, Florida. It wasn’t much compared to the farm where I grew up, but it was a start.
I believed I was finally finding my way back.
When Everything Changed
In 2018, life took an unexpected turn.
Within a matter of months, I began experiencing symptoms that would eventually lead to a diagnosis of Myasthenia Gravis (MG), a rare autoimmune neuromuscular disease. At first, the symptoms were subtle. Then they weren’t.
By early 2019, I was struggling with severe ocular, bulbar, and generalized symptoms. Double vision made driving difficult. Swallowing became dangerous. Walking required effort. Eating became something I feared rather than enjoyed.
At the same time, my personal life was unraveling.
The marriage ended, and I was faced with dismantling the homestead I had spent years building. What had been a dream in progress suddenly felt like another dream slipping away.
After months of worsening symptoms, bloodwork confirmed what I already suspected. I was positive for Acetylcholine Receptor antibodies and had Myasthenia Gravis. Within days I was hospitalized in severe crisis.
During that hospitalization doctors discovered a large thymoma—a tumor on my thymus gland.
What followed was one of the most difficult seasons of my life.
The Fight for Survival
Over the next several months I endured repeated hospitalizations, treatments, surgeries, complications, and setbacks.
There were moments when I genuinely believed I would not survive.
My weight dropped dramatically. Most meals came through a blender because swallowing had become nearly impossible. Multiple treatments provided only temporary relief. I spent countless hours reading medical journals, research papers, and anything I could find related to autoimmune disease and Myasthenia Gravis.
Somewhere during that season, I made a decision.
If I was going to fight for my life, I was going to become my own advocate.
I worked closely with my physicians, researched every treatment option, monitored my health obsessively, and searched for ways to support my recovery alongside conventional medicine. Every change, every test result, every observation became part of a larger effort to understand what was happening and how I could regain control of my future.
If someone had told me in early 2019 that I would survive the year, I would have struggled to believe them. Hospitalized five times in four months, coded four times, intubated twice, suffered a flash pulmonary embolism, developed ventilator-induced pneumonia, and spent weeks in intensive care—I had an amazing run of bad luck.
Candidly, in June of 2019 I laid in an ICU bed in downtown Jacksonville begging the Good Lord to bring me home, I had lost the will and energy to fight this.
What I learned during that time continues to influence how we approach life at Chesed Ranch today.
A God Wink
In the middle of that difficult season, something completely unexpected happened.
I met Michelle.
What began as friendship quickly became one of the greatest blessings of my life.
She stood beside me through hospital stays, setbacks, uncertainty, and moments when hope was difficult to find. Through some of the darkest days, she never left.
We often joke that our story began with a “God wink.”
When I shared with her early on that I felt as though there was a concept of using “food as thy medicine” everything changed. She was very familiar with what I was talking about because she had also faced chronic illness and beat it. It’s not a joke when I say that she was the one thing on this earth that saved me.
She was very familiar with the concepts that I was reading about and didn’t make me feel like an alien or someone that belonged in an asylum for the plan I wanted to undertake.
A Second Chance
By late 2019, something remarkable began to happen.
In June we embarked on a different meal plan, Michelle crafted some of the most amazing and interesting things for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The only way I could consume them was by using a Vitamix and her homemade chicken broth, beef broth, or coconut milk and turn it into a smoothie, I know it sounds bad but would seriously surprise you.
My health began to improve, it was slow but things were changing.
Symptoms gradually diminished. Strength returned. Weight returned. Hope returned.
Doctors who had seen me at my worst struggled to explain some of the recovery they were observing.
I don’t pretend to understand every reason why things changed.
What I do know is that I was given a second chance.
And second chances come with responsibility.
Building Chesed Ranch
In November of 2019, I found a ten-acre tract of land for sale. I showed Michelle, and together we went to look at a severely overgrown parcel that had been timbered years earlier and left to reclaim itself.
When we drove onto the property on that first day, we had to climb through the truck window and stand on the toolbox in the bed just to see above the brush. The land was covered in briars, scrub, and volunteer pines so thick that it was difficult to tell where one part of the property ended and another began.
While standing on that toolbox, I noticed two treetops about 150 feet from us, clear and very distinct—a swamp oak and a cypress tree. I turned to her and said “I am going to make that the view you see out of the kitchen window of our house”. I grabbed a machete, and we spent the next 45 minutes cutting our way back to this…
I put together a base land plan, tossed some ideas at her on things we could do and she was all in. We placed an offer, the seller accepted and in early December 2019 we closed on the property and began this new journey.
There were a lot of people who thought we were moving too fast. The reality is they were probably right. I was still recovering, still receiving treatments, and still trying to understand what my future looked like. Yet neither of us could shake the feeling that this was exactly where we were supposed to be.
There were no orchards.
No livestock facilities.
No gardens.
No established infrastructure.
Just a vision and a lot of work ahead of us.
What started as a simple desire to return to farm life has gradually evolved into something much larger.
Today, Chesed Ranch is home to:
- An expanding orchard featuring peaches, citrus, avocados, olives, grapes, blueberries, and more.
- American Aberdeen cattle.
- Chickens, horses, goats and a donkey.
- Seasonal gardening projects.
- Ongoing efforts to improve soil health and stewardship practices.
- Weather monitoring and climate tracking systems designed to better understand our growing conditions.
The ranch is also a place where lessons are continually learned—sometimes through success and sometimes through failure.
The devastating freeze during the winter of 2025–2026 reminded us that nature remains in charge. Much of the orchard had to be replanted. Plans changed. Expectations changed.
The mission did not. In many ways, the challenges have become part of the mission.
More Than a Farm
The word “Chesed” is a Hebrew word often associated with loving-kindness, mercy, grace, and faithful love.
Those ideas have shaped much of our journey.
This property was never intended to be simply a collection of trees, animals, and equipment.
It represents resilience.
It represents stewardship.
It represents faith.
It represents the belief that difficult seasons do not have to define the rest of your story.
The ranch exists today because there were people who invested their time, friendship, knowledge, encouragement, and prayers when they were needed most.
We hope to honor those gifts by building something meaningful here.
Looking Forward
This website serves as a living record of that journey.
Here you’ll find orchard updates, weather data, livestock projects, successes, failures, experiments, and lessons learned along the way.
Some of the trees documented here were planted only recently.
Others survived conditions we never expected them to endure.
Much like the ranch itself, they all have a story.
And in many ways, we’re just getting started.
The pages that follow document that journey—one tree, one season, one project, and one lesson at a time.
Welcome to Chesed Ranch.
“Don’t downgrade your dream just to fit your reality. Upgrade your conviction to match your destiny.” — Stuart Scott