It takes an hour and a half to walk the perimeter of the Light family’s ambition. With the din of birdsong coming from the canopy above and the endless crunch of gravel underfoot, Brian and Amanda Light ‘18 weaved through the years of their labor. It was a hike through their own history — a 90-minute patchwork of trial and error that had slowly transformed a stretch of Texas dirt into the Ronin Farm. 

“I used to walk around here thinking it feels like someone else’s life’s work,” Brian said. “But more recently, it’s started to feel like our own life’s work.”

Across 15 acres and 15 years, the couple has looked over a sprawling cast: renovated barns, pigs, a pregnant cow, 80 chickens, a rather vocal turkey, a beehive, three dogs and an African spurred tortoise aptly named Trouble. It’s the backdrop against which they’ve built a business and, most importantly, raised three kids, Amanda said. 

“That’s what we’re raising at this time, which is not very much for us,” Amanda said. “We joke that it’s not very much, and people are like, ‘Oh, that’s a lot.’”

With anywhere from 65 to 80% of Ronin’s vegetables coming from their own land, the Lights said the Texas climate is what allows them to produce almost year-round, the couple learning what works and fails through a system of faith and adaptability. 

“And neither of us have agriculture backgrounds, so everything that we’ve done for the last 15 years, we’ve fully learned on books, YouTube, trial and error,” Amanda said.

After buying the property in 2011 from the daughters of Don Ganter, a local celebrity and the founder of Dixie Chicken, the Lights renovated one barn to accommodate a professional kitchen and slowly cleared the nearby woods of Ganter’s belongings. Officially licensed in September 2012, the Lights introduced Ronin as a catering company, Brian said.

“He [Ganter] was a total pack rat,” Brian said. “ … So when we were building this out, we were like, ‘Maybe one day we should string up some lights and do a dinner out here.’”

When January 2013 wasn’t booked out, the Lights decided to do just that. 

“Ganter used to build all of the chairs and tables for the [Dixie] Chicken on this property,” Brian said. “So there were a bunch of pieces, and I was kind of like, ‘Okay, I see what I’m doing here.’”

Using Ganter’s abandoned table supplies, the Lights created an outdoor oasis framed by a generous canopy, a few strings of lights and the Texas starscape above — all centered around the glow of the full moon. 

The idea for the first Full Moon Dinner came from a Japanese cookbook, Brian said. The book detailed a group of locals in Osaka, Japan, who were known to have a moon viewing party on a boat that floated the river every October. 

“I said, ‘Okay, we don’t have a river, but we have a little forest,’” Brian said. “And on the Tuesday before [the first dinner], we had four people — two of which were my parents — and I was talking to my mom, I was like, ‘Mom, it works in Japan,’ and she said, ‘Brian, you’re not in Japan, you’re in Bryan-College Station, this may not work.’”

By that Friday, though, the Lights had a guest list of 16. The next three months of Full Moon Dinners further proved to be a successful business venture for the farm, Amanda said, with more and more guests asking if the farm was available for weddings, corporate gatherings and Texas A&M events.

“We never opened thinking that our home would be a venue,” Amanda said. “But that’s kind of what it’s turned into, and now it’s especially gonna be that with this nice climate-controlled space.”

After running their brick-and-mortar restaurant in downtown Bryan from 2018 to 2025, the Lights were forced to close their doors when the landlord decided not to renew their lease, according to a post on the Ronin Farm Instagram. 

“We had a staff of about 40 to 45, but then we had to let everybody go because we’re basically having to restart,” Amanda said. 

The hardest part about closing the brick-and-mortar business wasn’t the uncertainty of what would be next, Amanda said, but rather losing the people who made Ronin special, staff and guests alike. 

Bringing those seven years of experience and connection to their farm, the Lights are readying their property to welcome guests back to their home, Amanda said. With the hopes of booking weekday events and establishing hours of operation, the Lights want to bring more farm experiences to the people of Bryan-College Station and beyond. 

“The thing that we’re still missing is a connection to where our food comes from,” Amanda said. “Like, not everybody raises a cow or knows how to raise chickens or knows how to plant things. So, you know, it’s very neat to be able to have something that’s close to the ground in that way.”