“If there were a poet laureate of holistic management, his name would be Daniel Griffith.”
Allan Savory, President, Savory Institute & Author of Holistic Management.
Daniel Firth Griffith is a storyteller, a hunter-husbandmand, and a lover of the wildwoods. He is an undeserving father to three wonderful children and an unworthy husband to the best partner this world has to give.
A first-generation agrarian with a background in high-technology and entrepreneurship, Daniel’s life pivoted after being diagnosed with a life-threatening and degenerative genetic disease.
After seven painful and all-too-real years of health trials (from living in hospitals spending months learning to walk again) and the like, he turned to farming as “the last resort” in his health’s journey. What he found was a life complete with abundance, joy, and health.
In 2013, Daniel’s interest in the nourishing meeting ground between regenerative systems and ancient origins culminated in the academic partnership with ONIRIS’ (Nantes-Atlantic National College of Veterinary Medicine, Food Science and Engineering) bioengineering department in the effort to examine paleoanthropology’s then budding insights into the formation of early Hominoid genetics via the in-person examination of Paleolithic French Cave Art and systems from Nantes to Lascaux, France.
Today, Daniel is the founder and director of the Robinia Institute, the Mid-Atlantic Hub of the Savory Institute and works closely with Allan and his team to advocate, educate, and demonstrate the abundance, joy, and regenerative power of holistically managed and wild living systems. Robinia offers holistic management and wildland ecology courses, apprenticeships, land transition consulting and system design services across the United States and leads the implementation of the Savory Institute’s Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV) protocol in the Mid-Atlantic region. Under Daniel’s leadership, Robinia is pioneering land transition and regenerative scaling capital and consulting projects alongside bioregion-wide producer network emergence to co-create a uniformly diverse abundance in their region.
Daniel also runs Timshel Wildland with his wife and three children, a pioneering rewilding project on their family’s 400-acre emergent and process-led landscape in Central Virginia. Timshel nurtures peace, grass-fed and finished beef and lamb, happiness, heritage hogs, a multiplicity of wild and chaotic gardens that produce heritage poultry, heirloom vegetables, and fruits. Alongside pioneering systems, “The Wildland” in 2021 embarked on a journey under Daniel’s leadership to develop a decentralized network of privately-funded, human-scale, and ethical meat processing abattoirs that utilize holistic field harvesting, whole-animal utilization, and a general lack of mechanized infrastructure as its foundation.
Daniel is a Certified Permaculture Designer and Educator, Accredited Professional of the Savory Institute, Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV) Hub Verifier and Regional Trainer, and a Doctorate Student at the Ashbrook Center for Political Affairs.
In October 2020, Daniel published Boone: An Unfinished Portrait, a wild biography of Daniel Boone that has, although not entirely highly-reviewed and received by the commons, become a pivotal work in the academic scholarship of one of America’s foremost woodsmen.
In March 2021, Daniel published, Wild Like Flowers: The Restoration of Relationship through Regeneration, a book about regenerative agriculture gone wild. Wild Like Flowers within its first year of publication has sold many thousands of copies, enjoyed time as a #1 best seller on Amazon, was awarded an Indie Publishing Award in Nature and Environmental Essays, and effected the hearts and souls of the agrarian movement. The book received a wide array of influential “blurbs” from Joel Salatin calling it the regenerative movements’ “devotional,” to Gabe Brown declaring that it provides the “words [that] so many in the Regenerative Movement are missing,” to Judith D. Schwartz calling it a “buoyant riff that gets to the heart of regenerative farming,” to Allan Savory calling Daniel the “poet laureate of holistic management.”