If you’ve been dreaming about moving out to the open range and starting a farm in harmony with nature, someone already beat you to it. 

Enter Molly and John Chester, the couple behind the Biggest Little Farm, a Hulu documentary that chronicles how they brought new life to a dead farm using regenerative agriculture techniques. When snails swarmed their orchards, they brought in ducks, whose poop was creating toxic algae blooms in a pond on the property, to eat the snails. When crops attracted gophers, who were then killing trees, they brought in owls, who then ate gophers. (Their poop reinvigorated the trees, too.) Everything was meant to be cyclical. 

When the documentary, which was directed by John Chester, debuted in 2018 and came to Hulu in 2019, the film and its subsequent accolades familiarized the public with regenerative agriculture, the practice of rebuilding natural agricultural resources like soil and biodiversity rather than degrading them, as often happens on traditional farms. The ultimate effect? A farm that works with nature, rather than against it.