Be The Guy Who Knows a Guy

Local economies depend not on what they can buy, but on what they can do.

I went to buy some apple seedlings from my apple nursery guy. He had a whole box of hazelnut seedlings he didn’t need. He had tried adding nut trees to his business but decided he would leave the nut tree sales to me. He just pointed at the box and said “hey, I have some extra of these, do you want them?”

Of course, I said yes! I’ll stick them into every open slot in my pasture and see what makes it through to next year. The ones that survive become Kansas-adapted, my own Midwest Memory hazelnuts that only exist because I knew the guy.

He threw in some chinquapins too, and those are already sprouting out in my greenhouse. Try finding chinquapins online, they’re sold out everywhere. You only get chinquapins if you know the guy.

That’s how most of my nursery works now. Blackberry seedlings from a connection, chestnuts from trees nobody wanted at an elementary school, hazelnuts and chinquapins from a box at my apple guy’s place. Some of it’s free, some is a trade. It came from knowing people who are doing stuff locally.

If I didn’t slow down and get to know these people, many of those trees would not be thriving on my land.

Grant the Solar Sheepherder

My friend Grant Payne built a greenhouse this spring, all geared up with plants to sell. He’s in the middle of spring plant sales, running hard, and then on a whim he picks up a contract to graze his sheep on solar panel farms. It’s called solar grazing, with the sheep under the solar panels. Next thing you know he’s grazing sheep on several of them at $400 an acre, for six months at a time.

Nobody posted that on a job board. Grant got that contract because he was local, he just had an idea, looked up the landowner on On-X and contacted them. He’s the guy who knows a guy because he’s the guy who gets things done. Many of us would have second-guessed ourselves, but Grant doesn’t. People know what Grant can do because Grant is out there doing it. That’s what happens when you live local.

The Lesson of Sarajevo

Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984. Eight years later the city was under siege. Civil war and balkanization.

The formal economy disappeared overnight. The people who survived were the ones who already had local connections, who knew who could get what, who could do what, and who could be trusted.

This ain’t about black markets or criminals. It’s all gray market, that informal economy that springs up whenever the “real” one stops working. The neighbor who has a connection. The guy at church who knows someone. The woman who trades what she has for what she needs.

Maybe when you hear a story like Sarajevo, you jump straight to collapse. That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s descent, a slow motion suicide. Services getting a little less reliable, decisions made a little further away, until one day you need something and the system that used to provide it just isn’t there. Perpend’s apartment complex trading wrong Walmart groceries in the parking lot is the mild version. Sarajevo is what happens when the descent accelerates. And government is not coming to save you.

Local economies run on Doing

My podcast and Substack are named after David Fleming’s book “Surviving the Future”. That is how hard it hit me.

This quote says it all:

“Local economies depend not on what they can buy, but on what they can do.”

The guy who knows a guy isn’t valuable because he has stuff. He’s valuable because he knows who can do things. Who can weld. Who has a trailer. Who knows how to graft. Who has extra food from their garden, or extra hazelnut seedlings, or maybe some mutton (I’ve never had mutton, so that needs to be on my bucket list).

It’s Skills Over Stuff in action. Sure, your skills matter to your survival and wellbeing. But where they really shine is when you share them and teach them.

Be the guy who knows a guy by mapping the skills in your community. Not on paper, not in a database, but in a handshake. By doing things together, even if you’re not an expert.

What I’m still figuring out

I strive to be one of those guys. People ask if I have chestnuts and I have some stratified chestnuts sprouting or seedlings ready to go. I gather some, I eat some, I trade or share some, and I plant some.

But I need to do more. Not for some future collapse, but because that’s what living local actually looks like to me. It’s knowing what the people around you can do, and them knowing what you can do, and the connections being there before anybody needs them.

It takes time, slowing down, and having a conversation.

The other day I sold a chestnut seedling on Facebook Marketplace. Instead of just trading and leaving, I stopped for a moment and asked “so what is your plan?” The guy told me about his pasture and how he’s planting trees for his deer food plot. He mentioned apples and persimmons and I gave him my apple guy’s info.

The local tree came from my local relationship. That’s Fleming’s localism in a nutshell.

One small thing you can do right now: think about who in your community you’d call if you needed something that Amazon can’t deliver. A skill, a connection, a favor, a box of seedlings. If you can’t think of anyone, that’s the gap. Then start filling it. Go further: Be the guy who knows a guy.

---

I grow chestnuts in Kansas. Why? Because the chestnuts I bought from elsewhere struggled or died. Now I collect local chestnut seeds and grow them into seedlings. I sell the extras that I don’t use.

Buy Midwest Memory trees that will survive and thrive in Midwest Zones 5 -7, go to Grow Nut Trees.

---