To family and friends, he’s simply David Clark. But far afield out on the farm-following side of YouTube, he’s known to the internet as Big Dave.

Just south of Jones Chapel, the U.S. Army vet and former West Point student has been steadily kicking up a headlining hay business, while patching up farming equipment (and raising a gentle herd of black Angus cattle) on the side. But you might never know that from following him on YouTube (you can find him by searching the site for “BigDave’s-FarmLife”), where his growing library of outdoor reflections takes his agricultural (and sometimes even spiritual) musings anywhere the day happens to be headed.

“I do plan some of my videos,” Clark says with a smile, while gesturing toward a nearby improvised script he prepared for one thoughtful post. “But that isn’t typical. Really, I try just to give some advice to beginning farmers, and I mostly do it off the cuff. The whole mission of my YouTube channel is to just kind of increase awareness of healthy sustainable farming practices that are better for the land.”

He’s serious about sustainability, a practice Clark frames as having too high an achievement curve for farmers who are just starting out. Hurdles that stand between small-scale beginners and industrial-scale heavyweights, in general, are challenges he hopes his videos can demystify.

“These monocrops are killing us: corn this year, corn the next year, corn the year after — and then you don’t grow anything in the offseason,” he says. “We need to use animals to fertilize and plant seeds more often, and till to plant monocrops less often. Monocrops kill soil and people. You can squeeze a bunch of cattle on a small piece of land for one day, and they will fertilize and plant seeds for you. Nothing on this planet increases soil fertility as much as grazing animals, if the grazing is done responsibly.”

In case you haven’t picked up on it, a lot of thinking has gone into Clark’s ethos of sustainability, a view informed through his own journey, now six years and counting, into farm life. “It wasn’t really a labor of love at first,” he says. “I just saw there was an opportunity in farming. My parents had this little bit of land out here, and I was like, ‘Maybe I can throw some cows out there’ — and then, unexpectedly, I just fell in love with it.”

Clark’s main farming focus is on selling his own hay, as well as offering hay-cutting services locally. But he’s also in charge of Big Dave’s Tractor Works, a general farm services business that handles everything from tractor care to weed busting, plus an Angus herd that, whether they know it or not, serves as background extras (and sometimes as main players) for his whimsically instructive YouTube clips.

Like a lot of small farmers entering the field in recent years, Clark’s keenly attuned to broader farm policy. A conviction born of firsthand experience permeates his thoughts on getting into the business and, once established, on staying there in a way that’s good for plants, animals, people and the soil — and he hopes a few followers online pick up on his suggestions.

Government, he posits, should give sustainable farming a boost not by rewarding a monocrop growing culture, but by offering “incentives for sustainable farming practices,” he says. “The carrot is effective, but the stick would remove tools that we need. The tillers get a bad rap, but nothing repairs compaction as fast as a tiller. Every tool has its proper use. So we use minimum till, and most of our ground is perennial pasture, which can last for years after being planted. and we sure could use a seed drill at our extension office.”

Clark’s always on the hunt for additional hay to cut, offering a down-home barter exchange that has long stood the test of time. “Why would you pay someone to cut your grass and maintain your property when I will do it for free?” he reasons, citing the everybody-wins benefits of property owners who get a trimmed field, while he hauls the hay away for sale.

Whether it’s cutting, clearing, driveway grading or simply solving an equipment issue, you can contact David Clark by phone at 256-531-6245, or via email at Bigdave.dc94@gmail.com. Online, you can find him sharing slices of field wisdom at BigDave’s-FarmLife on YouTube.