Shannon Hayes, regarded as one of the nation’s leading writers and thinkers in agrarianism and sustainable living,  grew up on Sap Bush Hollow Farm. In 1999, she and her (then) fiancé, Bob, bought a sunny little cabin seven miles up the road. The cabin blossomed into a solar home where she and Bob produced handcrafts and schooled their two daughters while working on the farm with Shannon’s parents. In 2015 Shannon and Bob purchased their town’s former firehouse and post office building.  After training as professional baristas in Seattle, they continued the building’s postal contract, but converted the abandoned firehouse into Sap Bush Cafe, a community farm-to-table cafe that embodies the principles of agrarianism and sustainable living Shannon has championed in her writings.  Shannon and Bob added on their first vacation rental to encourage local-centric eco-tourism.  In 2017, Shannon stepped to the helm of Sap Bush Hollow as the CEO of their now three-generation family business, helping to expand it to accommodate their daughters’ full-time employment, as well as to support a select team of dedicated entrepreneurially-minded crew members who work on the farm while simultaneously developing their own small business dreams.

Shannon holds a PhD in sustainable agriculture and community development from Cornell University and a bachelors in creative writing from Binghamton University. She is the author of seven books, including The Grassfed Gourmet, Radical Homemakers and Redefining Rich. Her writing is frequently used in college classrooms and has been anthologized in Simple Living in History: Pioneers of the Deep Future; Sustainable Happiness: Live Simply, Live Well, Make a Difference; and Writing Appalachia: An Anthology from the University of Kentucky. Shannon has made appearances on national television and National Public radio, and her work has been profiled in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine; Brain, Child magazine, U.S. News and World Report, the Atlantic, National Public Radio, Grit magazine, YES! magazine, Elle magazine, JUNO magazine, the national newspapers of Germany, Turkey, and Canada, the Arab News, and the Pakistan Observer. She has also enjoyed a successful nationwide speaking career, teaching about sustainable business and inspiring rural and urban families alike to live creative lives in harmony with community and planet.

And the best part is she gets all this done while still finding time to play bari sax in a local jazz band, sip coffee in the woods every day with Bob, slip away for an afternoon nap, and dance in her kitchen with her dogs, her family  and cocktails in the evenings.

During the growing season, Shannon writes weekly essays about her life lessons, family farming and cafe adventures & mishaps that can be heard on her podcast, The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow, and appear in print form here on her blog. During the winter, she hibernates and occasionally works on her research and full-length book projects. You can support her continued writing and podcasting by visiting her on Patreon.

Shannon’s latest book, Redefining Rich: Achieving True Wealth with Small Business, Side Hustles & Smart Living, released from BenBella Books in August 2021, was the winner of a Nautilus medal.