This podcast is a collaboration between Quivira Coalition and Mary-Charlotte Domandi of Radio Cafe.
Liz Carlisle‘s new book, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming, is a fascinating exploration of food, agriculture, and cultural traditions of the North American, Mesoamerican, African, and Asian diasporas that have survived against all odds in the United States. Despite brutal social and political oppression, these communities have preserved soil-friendly polyculture techniques and cultural practices, like reciprocity and community participation, which point toward more sustainable and regenerative ways of producing food and of living with one another.
Liz Carlisle is an author and agroecologist and is Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on food and farming. Her previous books are Grain by Grain and Lentil Underground.
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SHOWNOTES
Cover art by Patricia Wakida
4’24 the question of how to sequester carbon evolved into a bigger question about shifting our society’s relationship to land––and looking at how other cultures do this
7’37 bringing the buffalo “relatives” home
8’47 how buffalo co-evolved with and shaped the prairie
9’59 bringing buffalo home is part of revitalizing culture
10’53 differences between buffalo and cattle on the land
11’32 buffalo as teachers
12’24 cultural and social norms are part of regeneration
12’16 Blackfeet nation treaty about the buffalo from the native perspective
17’38 differences between managing buffalo as domesticated animals and wild animals
21’31 Olivia Watkins building on the legacy of African farming and agroforestry
22’08 Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver
23’21 Watkins exposed to agroforestry in Hawaii
24’30 went to Soul Fire Farm in upstate NY
26’11 made her family land a sanctuary space for black people and wildlife
26’49 president of Black Farmer Fund
27’28 the difference between natural forests and tree plantations
29’23 seeing trees––or people––as part of an interconnected community rather than an individual
30’02 “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together” African proverb
31’48 the broken promise of “forty acres and a mule”
34’26 Aidee Guzman and the biodiverse farms of California’s central valley
34’20 traditions of polyculture farms from both Mexico/Central America and southeast Asia
36’14 polyculture farms had healthier soil
37’16 the immigrant communities are restoring this very degraded place with their own traditions from their home countries
38’12 how the “three sisters”––corn, squash, and beans––polyculture works and how it evolved and spread across the continent
41’12 even specialized squash bees prefer the polyculture squash to monoculture squash farms
42’48 looking to cultures that don’t separate the different stages of food production––growing, harvesting, preparing, eating
43’34 the book Zapotec Science
44’48 no waste in these food systems, everything was recycled because everyone was participating
46’01 monoculture seems to go hand in hand with exploitive labor, while regenerative ag seems to make a fairer and more enjoyable food system possible
47’41 Braiding Sweetgrass book and creation stories
49’01 monoculture makes sense only as an extractive industry to make money and enforce hierarchy
50’19 imagining a food system that people want their kids to stay in
52’06 the organic movement started actually in India––see Sir Albert Howard’s book, The Soil and Health and the “law of return”
52’42 Franklin Hiram King who also observed and wrote about farming in the far east in his book Farmers of Forty Centuries
54’17 20th century law barred Asian people from working on or owning land, even as the organic movement is embracing their organic techniques
56’03 the importance of continuity and stability for building soil
58’04 reframing the idea of “waste”
1:00’13 moving away from extraction and toward reciprocity in agriculture
1:00’42 the importance of getting involved in the farm bill and making it more regenerative, and lots of other ways to create alternative food systems
from the radio Cafe and the cira Coalition you’re listening to down to earth the planet to Plate podcast I’m your host Mary Charlotte Domi this is a program about regenerative agriculture and the many different paths people are taking to fix our broken food system restore soil and mitigate climate change today we’re going to be talking to agroecologists Carlile about her fabulous new book that’s right after these announcements this program is sponsored by The Agrarian trust agrarian trust is charting A New Path forward for the land trust movement they’re advancing an Innovative and robust model of land ownership in which agrarianism social and environmental justice Community well-being and the Earth itself are seen as fundamentally intertwined they’re doing this by helping regenerative farmers and ranchers to secure long-term affordable land leases that helps to strengthen local food systems and to transform Community relationships to the land across the country visit agrarian trust.org to learn more this program is sponsored by the greenhorns listeners to down to earth might enjoy the newly released sixth edition of the new Farmers Almanac a literary miscellane written by and for working agrarians this year’s volume is called adjustments and accommodations and it’s full of essays poetry and images that explore how people are facing challenges and uncertainties on the land learn more and order your copy at greenh horns. and here’s one more announcement from the Kira Coalition are you motivated to build engage teams on working lands that successfully Implement management activities aligned with healthy soil principles do you want to increase resilience in ranching and farming by working together to build healthy soil consider attending the new planning for soil Health series from Kira’s carbon Ranch initiative it started on January 26 but there are three more sessions coming up Envision teams on working lands improving soil Health who decided what when and how to improve the soil Health you can attend one or all sessions it’s free for more information kir coalition.org events planning hyphen series and kir is Qi v i r a and now to our program it’s a great pleasure for me to welcome Liz Carlile she’s an agroecologists of several books she’s assistant professor in the Environmental Studies program at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she teaches courses on food and farming her new book is called healing grounds climate Justice and the deep roots of regenerative farming and it’s beautifully written and so accessible to readers no academic jargon or esoteric terminology it’s a down-to-earth exploration of food and Agriculture and culture itself which is what we’re going to be talking about on the program today welcome Liz Carlile to down to earth it is great to be here Mary Charlotte so this is a book about regenerative agriculture and it’s just as much about human cultures cultures with deep and complex I conditions of food and Agriculture and community and you make the case in a really beautiful way I think over the course of the book it’s a wonderfully written book that these cultures not just the techniques of regenerative agriculture but the cultures themselves provide a key to restoring not only soil but also our ways of being our ways of being with land and with each other as human beings it feels like this book and I’ve read some of your other work too it feels like this book kind of represents a shift in perspective maybe some growth for you can you talk about how this book came to be yeah absolutely that’s really perceptive Mary Charlotte um I’ve been working in the field of agroecology and regenerative agriculture for about a dozen years and I’m really compelled by this idea that even though agriculture is currently a really big slice of the climate problem that it could actually be part of the climate solution and so one of the most joyful things about my work is that I’ve gotten to meet Farmers from around the United States which is primarily where I work who are experimenting with with techniques on their own Farms to try to make this massive shift so things like planting soil building cover crops rotating a more diverse array of crops from different families to increase biodiversity reducing tillage changing their grazing practices and as I was starting to research this book I was thinking a lot about about you know how do we sequester more Carbon on farms and that’s been a real focus in recent years in the larger discourse around regenerative agriculture and how agriculture becomes a climate solution but by the end of this book I was convinced that um carbon is really just kind of the tip of a larger Iceberg if you will of what regeneration really means and that what we need to do fundamentally is shift our society’s relationship with land and in so doing we have so much to learn from ancestral regenerative Food Systems that indigenous peoples on this continent have practiced and also on the African continent the Asian continent other parts of the Americas and people from all of these places are in diaspora right here in the United States and have been actually struggling in order to be able to implement these practices for hundreds of years as part of their own community’s processes of Liberation and so the there kind of those two things for me by the end of the book is realizing like oh regeneration means shifting our whole society’s relationship with land not just you know tracking one element carbon and regeneration is just tightly interwoven with processes of Liberation as well you start with a chapter about the buffalo buffalo and bison we can use either word but for the sake of argument same animal let’s use buffalo and in a lot of ways this book is about polycultures as opposed to monocultures in agriculture we can talk about polycultures in society too which is what the United States is or could be if we Embrace that but in nature biodiversity is like the Prairie the Bison the the Buffalo Prairie it can’t be reduced to a few variables uh it can’t really be broken down and the people who you talk to the people who were bringing Buffalo back to the land they’ve understood this for countless Generations one of the things that I think is really interesting and important to understand is that the Buffalo not only migrated through the grasslands but they literally created the prairie ecosystem and the people shaped it as well talk about that yeah yeah I mean I think that you know the genius of indigenous Food Systems that have lasted for thousands and thousands of years is this understanding that if you want to sustain a food system for Generations into the future it needs to really mimic the natural ecosystem in that place and be woven into that natural ecosystem and so I’m from Montana originally and so it was really important to me as part of this book to learn from indigenous people in Montana about their food systems and there’s a really inspiring effort to restore Buffalo um bring the relatives home um as folks native folks in Mont kind of talk about it um and so I got to talk with uh Latrice tatsi at black feet Nation who’s in a really interesting position because she’s part of this uh Buffalo restoration movement um so is her dad and they also own cattle so they’re they’re thinking about how to bring these relatives inii Buffalo inii and their language home and they’re also thinking about how bringing those relatives home and restoring their relationship to Prairie and to the people can also inform cattle grazing so that tribal cattle producers can then graze their animals in patterns that mimic what the Buffalo do and as you said you know Buffalo being in relationship with the Prairie they shaped they co-evolved with those grasslands they um move a lot more than cattle and over further distances they spend a lot less time just in riparian zones and they graze a much wider array of vegetation and their grazing patterns um they hit an area really hard and then they move on and that area has time to rest and grow back and so um black feet people and other native people on the Prairie saw this cycle of Where the Buffalo were moving and how the vegetation was regenerated and they actually Amplified that by setting carefully timed fires that brought that new growth on a little bit earlier in the spring and increased even that much more this biological activity on the Prairie and that regrowth of the vegetation that you see above ground and all that incredible biodiversity of prairie grasses and wild flowers that’s you know wildlife habitat that’s also reflected below ground in what the roots of those plants are doing which is really really important when you think about the role of the American Prairie in the carbon cycle in the nitrogen cycle in keeping us in a climate balance and in an ecosystem balance and so Buffalo restoration at black feet nation has everything to do with restoration of the ecosystem and also restoring climate balance and it’s also such an important cultural food and um sort of key Stone of of how the black feet relate to land their society’s relationship with land so bringing Buffalo home is part of you know continuing to revitalize that culture that really underpins um that that balance that they’ve um you know kept in place where where they call home for since time in Memorial it’s interesting because people are doing regenerative grazing with cattle successfully all over the world using holistic management rotational grazing and we talk about that a lot on this program and often this is on land where there were buffalo and as you’re talking about you know it’s it’s buffalo biomimicry in a lot of ways but one of the things that I thought was really interesting in your book is that you talk about places where the Buffalo are just better adapted to the land than cattle yeah yeah and that’s been really visible in recent years as climate change has made those temperature extremes even more Amplified in Montana and so there have been some really extreme winter snowstorms and there have also been some really extreme summer droughts and buffalo have been more resilient in the face of both of those things um one thing that um tribal Buffalo program managers talk a lot about is how Buffalo behave in a storm um that they know better how to deal with a snowstorm um and and survive it and not get lost than cattle do and then the other thing you know that Latrice talked a lot about with me is just that in indigenous Buffalo restoration they think a lot about the role of Buffalo as teachers and so not only are the Buffalo essentially managing these grasslands through their own movements and behavior but they’re also a kind of model for everyone else living on the Prairie of how to um you know thrive on what is seasonal what is given which is something another one of the indigenous women I spoke with for this book talked a lot about is that idea of um recognizing the gift before you when it is before you and building your food system around that and so it’s more more I think than just one species with you know its own set of ecosystem interactions it really is this seen as this teacher and this relative that then has you know all kinds of cultural implications for how people understand their food system and their relationship to place and that was the thing I kept coming back to in this book around what does it really take to regenerate and to live in Balance it’s those cultural and social norms and structures um that we take with us throughout our day throughout our life um not just in you know sort of one purchase you make of you know a regenerative food for your meal you know three times a day but that guides you know all the ways in which we relate to land through all of our daily activities the black feat Nation created a new treaty in 2014 regarding the Buffalo it’s called let’s see it’s called the the black feet Nation medicine line Northern tribes Buffalo treaty now given the excruciatingly painful history of broken treaties in the history of Native America a treaty sounds almost like a like what’s going on here what was this about what did it do yeah this was amazing to hear about this eni initiative and I spoke a lot with Latrice dad Terry tatsi about this because he’s been involved for many years and he told me you know yes our treaties with the US government have been mostly broken they’ve been mostly disappointments um those the the US government hasn’t kept its word but the idea with this treaty this Buffalo Nations treaty would be that it was an agreement among indigenous Nations and then the um the US and Canadian governments would sign on as witnesses to an indigenous treaty so it was kind of flipping the script um and this e initiative I should sort of just back up and say that black feet nation is actually part of a larger community of indigenous groups that are related to one another across the US and Canada and they were separated from one another by the forces of colonization by the establishment of reservations um that only covered a really small portion of their historical territory and separated these related groups from one another and the US Canadian border was another really important um separation between relatives of the same Blackfoot Confederacy that now live on either side of the border and are subject to different federal laws in terms of how they access at least some portion of their rights to their land their culture and so all of these members of the Blackfoot Confederacy that are now recognized as individual tribes or First Nations within the US and Canada had relationships with Buffalo and shared those relationships with each other and were really co-managing this landscape with their buffalo relatives and so this treaty was all of these groups coming together to say you know as a group we want to work to restore Buffalo not just within the individual borders of of our individual reservations but across our whole shared historical territory and so they’ve been working with Glacier National Park Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada adjacent National Forest lands to establish really a landscape level plan for Buffalo restoration not just within the territory that the tribes currently control but within that whole historical territory that they have relationships too and how’s that going I mean I think it’s been really inspiring it’s always like you know you can either use the yard stick of you know the past 50 to 100 years or you can use the yard stick of like where we need to be and what would be right so the steps taken are still nowhere near where I think we need to be for indigenous land rematriation and repair of the extraction of the past and the needs of the landscape to heal in order to you know for all life on Earth to thrive in the face of climate change there’s still a long way to go to fully rest restore you know Buffalo to their traditional homelands in that part of the continent and the Prairie to health but compared to 100 years ago you know gosh Latrice and Terry tear up thinking about the cultural practices and traditional animals and landbased practices that they have access to that um you know like Latrice great-grandparents would have been severely punished for um speaking their own language and even seeing Buffalo you know hundreds of Buffalo are now you know grazing on black feet Nation um not as much land as they had historically but black feet nation has a couple of different very large pastures and they rotate the Buffalo through summer and winter range so they have enough grazing land and so Buffalo and people are reestablishing these relationships with these traditional lands the national parks have been increasingly receptive to the idea of having free roaming bison you know as this program grows which there again you know gosh 203 years ago that was like a noo uh so yeah I think it’s an inspiring case of people opening their minds to different possibilities from what was thought to be kind of institutionally feasible in the past and one of the distinctions that I think is really interesting is is looking at the difference between managing Buffalo as domesticated animals like cattle and managing them as wild animals it’s still management there’s still meat production but but it’s a different what is the difference yeah yeah and this is really interesting and nuanced because you know I’ve just been talking about Blackfoot Confederacy but there are other Buffalo Nations other Prairie indigenous peoples that are also working on Buffalo restoration um all over the place numerous Lakota groups are working on this other groups in Canada so there’s a really wide swath of um you know this part of North America where different indigenous groups are working on this and they have different goals um some are working more on Buffalo that will be managed more domestically some are working more on free roaming bison and some like black feet Nation are working on a really nuanced combination of having both um so uh you know Buffalo is a wild animal you know sort of restoring their uh historical relationships with Prairie is sort of One Vision and in terms of you know current US law that they would be managed more like Wildlife essentially in terms of how they would be legally categorized and sort of which agencies um would be involved but you know tribes are also developing their own institutional structures to kind of create different categories here as opposed to the idea of Buffalo as livestock which is the way they have to be managed if there’s only smaller areas available which is pretty much what um indigenous Nations have been dealing with for the past several decades of this Buffalo restoration movement is that they only have access to enough territory to manage them more like cattle they don’t have enough space for the Buffalo to migrate as much as they would um sort of as a wild animal but there’s advantages to having Buffalo managed in that way as well as indigenous nations are trying to boost their sovereignty in the context of an economy they did not choose to be embedded in and so black feet nation is is one among many groups that’s saying well you know we can have some Buffalo that are managed on smaller areas um that are livestock and that are going to be managed and processed more like that and there’s economic benefits that come from that there’s the potential to earn more income potentially from Buffalo manage like that and then also working on restoring a wild free roaming herd that has a lot of benefits in terms of reestablishing that relationship um that the buffalo have had when they are uh wild and free roaming and then there’s also um you know potentially tourism possibilities that indigenous nations are exploring so another sort of income stream that could come from those buffal that maybe aren’t earning as much in terms of meat production livestock production so there’s all of these kind of complex variables to consider as tribes are pursuing sovereignty in the context of yeah an economy and a political system that they didn’t choose right there’s some themes that run throughout all of the different chapters of this book and as you said you talk about the the Northern Prairie you talk about the sort of more Southwestern and Mesoamerican and Africa and Asia and one of the things one of the themes running throughout all of this is not only the brutal oppression and exploitation of Labor whether it’s slavery and farmw work political persecution imprisonment death all these horrible things that are part of our history here in the United States but also a sense of kind of reciprocity rather than domination as an attitude ude and the next chapter of the book is about the African Legacy on this continent and it’s framed around this really interesting woman named Olivia Watkins she’s doing a kind of Agro forestry on land that was in her family for a long time and still still is was not sold not lost not taken away and part of what’s going on with her she’s like literally in dialogue with the land asking the land what food she should grow tell us her story yeah yeah Olivia Watkins is amazing and as I learned she’s building on this really deep Legacy of Agro forestry in Africa and throughout the African diaspora that has a lot of really interesting connections to parts of American history that people might be familiar with for example Harriet Tubman was really familiar with the woods and um the wild plants that grew there and that was part of what made her successful with the Underground Railroad she could feed people and gather medicines in the woods as they were moving to freedom I love that story yeah she knew how to navigate that space and that was part of what made it a space of Freedom you know George Washington Carver who folks might be familiar with maybe as like the peanut guy actually was like one of the sort of founders of regenerative agriculture in the United States and similarly was inspired in his research around compost by materials that he gathered in the woods he actually collected a couple of specimens of fungi that were noted in a Journal article in 1906 that are named after him so there’s this really deep history of AGR forestry and connections to the woods throughout the African diaspora that also has all these really interesting links to Black Liberation and Olivia Watkins so she was she grew up in New York she grew up in New Rochelle had kind of an urban upbringing um but she was really fascinated by soil ecology she took a class in college and was just um filled with a sense of wonder about what my seal iium do in the soil and all these microbial interconnections and how it’s such a foundation of life and so she described to me that every time she had a break from college you like spring break summer break she just wanted to go farm and so she got all of this farming experience and she ended up spending a lot of time in Hawaii on farms that included trees that were practicing either alley cropping which is where you have tree crops in between row crops like vegetables um Farms that were using wind breaks and she saw how powerful trees were on farms in doing things that otherwise required a lot of work like protecting the vegetable crops that could get sheltered by the trees they could absorb the rain better things like that and so she kind of tucked it away in the back of her mind as she was thinking about where she might build her own Farm like I think I want trees to be part of this so she’s thinking about starting her own Farm someday and then her mom tells her that her grandma is thinking about selling the family’s land in North Carolina 87-year-old grandmother and at first she doesn’t really think that much about it she hadn’t had a huge relationship to this land she’d been there once as a kid and she was looking for a farm and this was like a forested piece of land 40 acres of forest so you know it wasn’t kind of what she had in mind but then she she did a training at soulfire Farm in Upstate New York which is plays a really really important role in agricology and regenerative agriculture globally and it’s a farm that’s focused on Black Liberation and the regenerative practices that are indigenous to the African continent and part of the African diaspora so they do a ton of amazing education so Olivia Watkins went to one of these training programs and she learned about the legacy of black land loss in this country where over the course of the 1900s some 98% of black land owners were dispossessed of their land through a variety of flavors of racism you know ranging from like outright violence and terrorism of white mobs in the Klux Clan to discrimination at the USDA in loan programs that actually led to the the largest civil rights class action lawsuit in history at the time so as she learned about that she realized that it was actually really remarkable that her family had held on to their land an ancestor of hers bought it in 1890 and was one of the first black land owners in the you know what we Now understand as the Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill triangle area of North Carolina and in the face of all of these racist pressures her family resolutely held on to that land which was a really important space of sanctuary um in the midst of kind of the worst of that white racism in the early 1900s it was a place where her family members had felt safe and so as she learned about this she became increasingly unwilling to let that land go and she ultimately tells her grandmother her 87-year-old grandmother I’m going to take care of this land I’m going to Steward this land and so she decides that she doesn’t want to cut the trees down that this is a sanctuary space that’s not only been a sanctuary space for black people where they felt safe but it’s now a sanctuary space for wildlife in this rapidly urbanizing region and so she wants to preserve that Sanctuary for both you know people black people and the natural world and the soil carbon that’s being sequestered by all of those diverse trees um in an area where you know diverse heart wood is is hard to come by most of those forests have been cut down and then when they’re replanted it’s mostly As monocultures so she decided to grow mushrooms in the underst story of this forest and she’s experimented with bees she has lots of ideas about other kinds of shade loving plants that she might grow in the understory in ways of building community and then she’s gone on to be president of black farmer fund and to raise capital for other black Farmers existing or aspiring um people who want to have food businesses to reconnect to land in that ancestral line that people have of really positive connections to land and regenerative practices one of the things that she realizes and I think is important to talk about at least briefly is that when we talk about forests biodiversity is really important and as you said sometimes they’ll cut down forests and replant monoculture essentially kind of tree plantations and people think oh well they’re trees they’re sequestering carbon that’s not necessarily the case yeah yeah I definitely learned a lot from Olivia about the difference between trees and a forest like a forest is a community of organisms working together and it includes trees and diverse trees and it also includes a lot of other things including a whole underground ecosystem um and she’s particularly interested in the melium and the fungi and if you cut down all the trees in a place and then you just replant a monoculture especially of like an introduced species you have disrupted all of those ecological networks including underground and you’re not rebuilding them so nature definitely works in polycultures and if you’re interested in the all of the ecosystem services that flow from a forest whether it’s carbon sequestration or Watershed health or wildlife habitat that flows from the diversity of the organisms in that forest and all of their interactions it’s not all just from the trees and certainly not just one species of tree and I think Olivia would argue that even to see a tree as an individual organism is actually kind of hard once you start studying ecology and spending time on land because it’s so interconnected with the mushrooms and with the organisms that live in and around it it’s all just kind of this Collective being in a sense well and I think of I mean you can’t help or I can’t help when encountering this work of regenerative agriculture to make analogies to human societies and you know we live in a society that’s based on individual rights and there’s a lot to be said for that you know not having to pay for the sins of your great-grandfather or something like that but at the same time seeing ourselves as individuals and not in relationship to community and land and food and where everything comes from that we eat and where everything goes that we get rid of I mean it’s impossible it’s the same thing like a tree is just like a tree is an individual and it’s not an individual yeah yeah and I think one of the things I learned from all of these ancestral regenerative Traditions is that they directed people’s attention to these principles of interconnection in the natural world again and again and again to really yeah change the way that people identify and to see themselves as part of an interconnected whole um to see their flourishing as connected to Mutual flourishing and so like a Liv IA shared with me that her dad would often quote an African proverb if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together and she said when she started studying melium in college that proverb hit home all that much more that she really started to see how you know forests were working as collectives and that inspired even more to get involved in cooperative and Collective human institutions like the black Farm fund which has a really nuanced intricate and super inspiring governance structure for a really large community sort of the whole black farming community in the Northeast to figure out collectively how to distribute money that’s being raised philanthropically so yeah I totally agree with you about these connections between people seeing that interconnectivity and reciprocity in the natural world and then applying it to really complex human governance systems and social norms you write about some of the deep Heritage of African Agriculture and and AGR forestry and it’s really amazing how much of that survived and how much more of it would have survived if there hadn’t been these terrible swindles and land losses due to violence I mean all the things that you talked about for example after the Civil War there were families black families EX slave families that got together and acquired like an entire Plantation and the idea was really to kind of recreate the village imagine what it would be like if that had survived yeah and this was something I learned for the first time researching this book I knew that there had been this promise of 40 acres in a mule so a bunch of black ministers actually approached a general Union General William T Sherman after the Civil War with this proposal that um freed black families should be given 40 acres and a mule so that they could start their own farm so that you know after having had their labor stolen that people needed a foothold in an economy if we were going to have a free society that was multi-racial and the general originally agreed and I knew that President Andrew Johnson had uh rescinded that quickly thereafter and that there’s been a lot of resentment of that unfulfilled promise ever since and that’s the basis one of the really important bases for the whole discussion about reparations is that that promise was never fulfilled but what I didn’t know before researching this book is that there were a few such land reparations that actually happened before this order was rescinded particularly in Georgia South Carolina and the sea Islands and so that was where some of these Villages were established where people did actually get access to former Plantation land and black families collectively created farms and communities and then there were a few of those that actually survived after the order was rescinded but most of it the land was just taken back when they heard like oh 40 acres in a mule is no longer like US policy we’re just going to take all this land back that we just said we were going to you know give to you as reparation so yeah it it does really give me pause thinking about the opportunity missed at that point in history the second half of your book focuses on the Central Valley of California which is this huge area that grows onethird of the produce that’s eaten in the United States but it’s grown from soil that’s so depleted that I think you describe it as kind of Hydroponics like water and chemicals or what our friends we had on the show Once Carrie Brandoff and Janine Fitzgerald from Fort Lewis College they call it zombie agriculture you’re raising food that looks like it’s alive but it’s from dead soil it’s kind of like the undead food um but in in the Central Valley there are these hotspots of biodiversity dotted among these huge corporate monoculture Farms throughout the valley tell us about this the work of this amazing woman aay Gusman who studies these hotspots of biodiversity yeah yeah this is an amazing story because people think of the Central Valley as like the belly of the Beast of industrial Agriculture and so when Ida Guzman started her PhD in agriology at UC Berkeley and she said I’m going go to the Central Valley and study Diversified Farms people were like uh where are you going to find Diversified farms in the Central Valley and she was like no no no they’re there because she grew up in an immigrant family her parents were Farm Workers in fireb which is a little town in the Central Valley and her parents had immigrated from Mexico where her dad’s Family actually had a diversified small farm growing all kinds of cultural Foods actually wild harvesting chil tapen which are wild peppers just very Diversified annual and perennial plants and she knew that there were families that had brought those both those seeds and also those traditions of growing them in poly culture with them not only from Mexico but also from Southeast Asia um when she went to migrant school she was in class with children from mung families who had also really Diversified Farms that were kind of off the radar screen of researchers uh people in extension the whole kind of like former agricultural establishment was just missing these Farms often times people didn’t speak English often times the Farms were smaller they didn’t tend to go seek out connections with you know the Farm Bureau for example so IA Guzman she she used GIS she used satellite maps to find where she thought polycultures might be and she also just drove all over this area where she grew up and she found 30 Farmers I think 30 plus farmers who were willing to participate in her study half of whom had these really diverse poly cultures and so she was able to make this comparison between Farms with many crops being grown at once a poly culture and Farms with just one crop and she found that the poly cultures had two times as many types of arbuscular micor risal fungi which are a microorganism in the soil um that’s a really important indicator of soil health and the ability of the soil to do things like infiltrate water store carbon and provide fertility for farms in the absence of you know as you said all of these fertilizers and irrigation and kind of fossil-based inputs that have been used in the last hundred years to make this area grow food in ways that we might not have access to in the future and that in any case our resource wasteful so you know IID found this really interesting story of how people who have migrated and really um built the cultural diversity of this area have also built the crop diversity which then in turn has really Reb built the diversity of the organisms in the soil and she also actually studied bees and found that it had beneficial impacts for pollinators as well and so it just really pushes back on a lot of the negative narratives that she heard about immigrants growing up and their impact on this region and really shows that this is a region deeply in need of ecological restoration and it’s precisely immigrant communities bringing their own ancestral regenerative Traditions that are restoring this place one of the polycultures that maybe a lot of our listeners have heard of is the three sisters corn squash and beans that’s just one example of the many polycultures that I they found in California in these little numerous hidden biodiverse Farms it’s such an interesting story to read but maybe use that as an example to talk about how biodiversity really is more than the sum of its parts yeah yeah I mean this is an amazing crop combination that’s been developed by indigenous peoples in the Americas over thousands of years and there’s this great map that the scholar Devon Peña has drawn of the indigenous Corn Belt as he calls it and it stretches all the way from southern Mexico and even um like the northern part of South America all the way up to like um present day Upstate New York and Indigenous peoples were trading corn seed and bean seed and squash seed all throughout this area and adapting all of those plants to their own context I mean we’re talking people at sea level people thousands of feet above sea level people in cold climates people in warm climates they develop these poly cultures to suit their own place and the amazing complimentarity of those three plants um as I’m sure many of your listeners know corn is a really nutrient-rich staple food but it requires a lot of nitrogen to grow beans have this amazing ability to partner with ryia bacteria in the soil which actually live in their roots in order to convert nitrogen from the atmosphere which is very abundant into the kind of nitrogen that plants can use and so by growing beans with corn you’re replenishing some of that nitrogen in the soil that the corn needs to grow meanwhile the beans get something out of it too the corn stock is this great structure for beans to vine up around to provide a space for them to grow into access sunlight and then the squash um and folks who grow squash probably have noticed this it spreads out across the ground as a kind of natural mulch it has these great big wide leaves that capture the sunlight in another way by spreading out laterally and then it’s also covering the soil which reduces the amount of moisture that evaporates from the soil it kind of keeps the soil more wet and fertile and able to Harbor life in a sense and so they’re sharing the light resource and the architecture that that they grow in together so each plant is getting light from a different angle and they’re sort of making the most of the total sunlight resource they’re sharing the Water Resource because each of their Roots access soil water in a slightly different way you know one goes deeper one goes shallower one goes wider and then they’re providing these resources to each other of you know structure to grow on nitrogen to grow with and mulch to prevent evaporation and keep the soil more moist and fertile so it’s this incredible collaboration between these plants and then it turns out they’re also complimentary in our diets so beans provide protein corn provides all these carbohydrates and squash is really rich in minerals and so this is why a number of indigenous people referred to these as the three sisters they’re in relationship with each other uh Robin W kimmerer writes really beautifully about this in braiding sweet grass one of the things that I thought was so interesting that when you’re talking about pollinators there are these bees called called squash bees and they they only go to squash blossoms but they prefer polycultures that have squash in them to monoculture squash Farms so even the pollinators who are specialists want the polyculture yeah this was one of Ida’s most surprising findings was with the squash bees because yeah folks assumed well they’re squash Specialists probably they’d love a farm with nothing but squash but the thing is is that bees need both both pollen and nectar so even though squash bees um as I understand it they exclusively feed their young with pollen from the squash they also need nectar to support their daily energy needs and so what she found on the polyculture farms that were growing some squash but also other things is that over the course of the day after the squash flowers had closed the bees would go to other plants where the flowers were still open and continue to get nectar and then the other thing she noticed is is that on the monoculture squash Farms they had squash season and then they had nothing whereas on the polyculture farms they actually had different kinds of squash growing throughout the year rotating throughout the farm they would have summer squash for a period of the year and then in another part of the farm winter squash would appear so over the course of a year there were actually more days of the year when squash would be available to a bee in addition to the fact that there were additional nectar resources one of the things that’s really interesting and important about this chapter is the cultural piece you take us back to the Mayan world where there’s no word for agriculture the closest word which is a word I’m not going to try to pronounce means working with nature and then there’s another part where you talk about something called manento which is a concept of food that doesn’t really separate growing and eating eating and all the different things that’s part of the whole story yeah absolutely yeah it’s definitely pushed me on my concept of Agriculture and kind of realizing that that’s a culturally specific concept to think about you know first of all well there’s a small segment of society that grows food and we call them farmers and the rest of us are not Farmers that’s just an idea that I was socialized into and have always kind of taken for granted agriculture is an occupation some people do it then they sell what they grow and the rest of us eat it um but in there’s a really amazing book called zapot science and in that book the author travels to a zapote village tala and initially interviews people he’s looking for farmers and he kind of wants to know like what percentage of the Town farms and so he starts asking people like what’s your occupation and they’re like oh yeah you know when the people come from the Mexican federal government like we check the box and we’ll say like I’m a farmer I’m not a farmer but really in our community we don’t even use that category we don’t think about agriculture we think about as you said Mento the maintenance the care of life and so everybody’s involved in that um and we see our food system as involving everything from the care of the land you know the restoration of the land after a planting season the saving of seed people who are nalizing corn for it to be prepared into tortillas all of that is part of a food syst system and everybody has some role in it and we don’t distinguish among the different parts of that process as different occupations because everybody’s pitching in in various ways and everybody knows about the whole cycle and one of the things that the author Roberto Gonzalez noted was that there was very little waste in this Village and in this food system because everybody was so familiar with the processes that people were ready to step in and find a use for something and sort of like recycle it into the system because everybody was participating and so that’s just so different from the world I grew up in where one to 2% of the US population farms and most of the rest of us are are pretty distant from it and so when we encounter food as a consumer in some ways we’re much less prepared to kind of co-manage our food system or our lands you know in a way we’re kind of too ignorant to know that it’s a bad idea to like go shop for strawberries in January because we’re not connected to the system that would tell us like how many additional resources are required for us to choose that food at that time of the year so yeah I was really struck by that different concept of you know we’re all part of the care of living matter monten Mento and different ways as opposed to the idea that we just sort of like relegate this to a small percentage of the population that’s supposed to do it on behalf of the rest of us another piece of that is that monoculture seems to go hand inand with exploitive labor whether it’s slavery or whether it’s sharecropping or whether it’s the present day Latino Farm Workers whereas regenerative agriculture communities and this is true you know here in New Mexico or wherever they seem to be enjoying their lives they seem to be really embracing what they’re doing having fun it’s not quite so hierarchical and it reminds me I heard once an Inca story it was a creation story about how the creator of the universe sent forth his children and they found the people living off the land and just unhappy because they were just taking what was there and sort of scrapping and surviving and the the children of the Creator endowed them with the practices of Agriculture and animal husbandry and making corn beer and they became happy and they danced and sang and had a wonderful time doing Agriculture and I thought about that myth and it’s the exact opposite of the Genesis myth where in the Garden of Eden people are eating what’s off the you know off the trees and just what’s there and they’re happy and then their punishment is agriculture and knowledge and and the labor that comes with it and it’s just so important I think to talk about and to think about about whether agriculture is a burden or a blessing and it just seems like it depends on how you do it absolutely yeah I mean and that again reminds me of Robin wal kimmer’s book braiding sweet grass and the importance of these really deep cultural stories about what agriculture means and what its goals are and she also talks about the Genesis story and she Compares it to the skyw women Story the creation of her people and she imagin skyw woman and Eve having a conversation and Sky woman saying sister you got the short end of the stick where you know skyw woman is imagined as you know coming into this world of abundance and developing relationships of reciprocity with the other beings in this place who take care of her she’s an immigrant she falls from the sky and she comes humbly and learns how to live in balance with the world that they have already built among each other and so yeah she lives in a garden of joy and friendship she’s not punished for her engagement with the natural world that doesn’t make her less human and so I I think you’re absolutely right that these stories really matter and that you know really monoculture really only makes sense if your goal is is class hierarchy you know if your goal is to take from one place and to you know build up accumulate wealth in another place if your goal is to live well in a place for a long period of time monoculture doesn’t make sense because it’s extractive it it maybe produces you know something for now but you’re borrowing from your children you know and if you plan to be there for many generations you you don’t want to do that you don’t you know people don’t want to steal from their children and grandchildren if they have agency in a place and so I I do think I’m really passionate about this idea that our engagement with the natural world can be joyful can be a really rewarding part of our life um that our engagement with food growing food can be a joyful Health giving thing and that it has been I think for most societies and most cultures and that I think is one of the things that you know Plantation agriculture has robbed from us as a society is that joyful connection to Growing food when it is not oppressive labor that is used to sort of keep people down so I do think that there’s this really important connection between basically building equity and building up the capacity to have a food system that’s rewarding and joyful rather than seen as you know so many so many uh Farmers so many people working in agriculture they don’t want their kids to go into it they see it as a good thing to sort of escape from Agriculture and so I I dream of a food system that you know brings us all in and makes us more human um that’s not dehumanizing but actually enforces our sense of humanity in a really positive way and that continuity between generations and living on the land in a non-extractive way so that the land can produce for Generations leads very nicely into the fourth part of the book which is Asian farmers here in the United States you talk about this wonderful woman whose name is nikiko masumoto who grew up on the land in California then went to UC Berkeley and was an activist and a performer and she was on a whole different trajectory and then she returned to the land and you talk about how you have maybe as a farmer 40 years to understand what’s going on to grow trees to experiment but then when your daughter or son comes in that suddenly it’s 80 years and that sense of extension and continuity plays a really big role in how we see the land what it can grow what we know about our ancestors and so on yeah absolutely yeah and I mean it’s just there’s so much irony in the story of Asian-American farming in the 1900s because the 1900s especially the middle part of the century was really the blossoming of the organic movement in the US and the United Kingdom both maybe folks have heard of rodale um and the rodale family an organic gardening magazine they were all inspired by an English guy named sir Albert Howard who had actually been sent to India by the English government to go teach the Indian Farmers about modern farming but he was humble and he listened and he realized that actually the Indian Farmers had a lot more to teach him and he learned a lot specifically about their system of composting and this became the core of a couple books that he published that were really really popular with people in the early organic movement so the soil and health and he also talked about this wasn’t a title of a book but he talked about the law of return and so you know the organic movement is borrowing practices from Asia um and at the same time actually there was an American Franklin hyram King who traveled to China and Japan and Korea and observed composting and mulching and really interesting living cover crop systems living mulches and rice fields he wrote about it his book also eventually became a classic um farmers of 40 centuries within the organic movement living mulches and also living animals like fish and ducks that was so interesting yeah yeah I know fish and ducks like swimming around in a rice field and their manure becoming fertility for the rice and then them also doing like pest control for the rice yeah so yeah Franklin H King was actually an agricultural scientist in Wisconsin and he was super concerned about the industrialization of agriculture culture he didn’t believe that you could replenish the soil just with chemicals and he was wondering like oh if we’re screwing up this agricultural system and undermining its capacity to grow food after less than a century how did these farmers do it over the course of 40 centuries and sustain their systems you know 4,000 years of continuous agriculture in multiple parts of Asia so both of these books are basically inspiring organic farmers with these ancestral Asian techniques for replenishing soil even when you’re planting annual crops on a regular basis when you’re growing vegetables and Grains and things like that but meanwhile in the United States Asian people who have migrated to the United States to work in farming most of them recruited as Farm laborers are being restricted from engaging in farming in incredibly racist ways so there’s the Chinese Exclusion Act which restricts immigration from China then folks start immigrating from Japan Ali land laws are passed which uh disallow Japanese people from buying land ultimately then from leasing land from managing land from working on land and then on top of all of that you have wrongful incarceration during World War II and interment of people just for their Japanese American descent and so at the same time that the organic movement is really embracing all of these Asian farming techniques it’s rejecting Asian people and subjecting them to All This Racist discrimination in the United States and nikiko masamoto’s family experienced that um her great-grandparents weren’t able to buy land because of the alien land laws her grandparents experienced interment but they they fell in love in one of these concentration camps and they decided Against All Odds that they were going to make a life together on land when they got out and they did and they had to buy this really marginal land in the Central Valley that was all they could afford was poor soil and so they had to build it up they had to to you know put their own Blood Sweat and Tears into building up this land with the belief that their future Generations would actually be able to continue a life on that land that like literally their kids would harvest the fruit of the trees they were planting even though they had no reason to believe that given all of the Discrimination that they and their parents had experienced but that happened um Niko’s dad came back to that Farm after he went and got a degree at UC Berkeley and he converted it to organic she’s now the third generation and she does talk a lot about how you know people need to have that ability of continuity and stability if they’re going to invest in the soil and invest in the land and all of these practices that we talk about that are beneficial for climate on farms require time and so people need to have that time to you know put that organic matter into the soil and know that they’ll be there to see the benefits the fruits of their labor and in their case it literally is fruit they grow peaches and cin and apricots um they’re really well known throughout California for these delicious varieties of fruit that industrial agriculture had kind of Left Behind um that they take care of and uh you know deliver to direct customers and restaurants and everybody’s got you know sweet peach peach juice dripping down their chin um but then Niko always kind of brings it back to the sweetness of Liberation and community and the ability to continue your life in a place without being uprooted I think fruit is one of the best examples of how industrial agriculture fails to deliver food that tastes good and she is uh this Niko is is um she had this thing what is it organic ugly and fabulous fruit Club I love that concept oh you Fab yeah yeah yeah and then she also extends that as you were saying how these things are a metaphor for our own human communities about really appreciating difference and celebrating the beauty of people’s difference rather than norming people um in the way that supermarkets Norm fruit and having this one sole standard of what’s beautiful or what’s productive or what’s contributing yeah another metaphor is gosh it looks awfully pretty but there’s nothing there you know like right and and another piece that she talks about and that’s actually a theme throughout the book is the reframing of the idea of waste when you have Farms that are working properly every piece of waste is actually an input for another piece of the process yeah yeah I I spoke with teiko about this and also a close friend and colleague of hers Nina ichikawa who directs the Berkeley food Institute who also comes from a Japanese American background in California and whose family had a flower farm and she talked about this um Buddhist saying that a lot of Japanese American families bring up especially before a meal itas and she said you know it’s just this one word but it means a lot it means you know if you’re saying this before a meal and you’re saying you know I acknowledge the food I acknowledge the farmer who grew it I acknowledge the farmer who saved the seed I acknowledge the land that grew the food you’re sort of going back in your mind to every single being that contributed to bring this food to your plate and she said you know growing up hearing that like every single day changes your sense of how you value food and she said it it’s it’s like a social and cultural mindset shift around what’s acceptable in terms of valuing food and and whether it’s acceptable to waste it and she said you know it leads to this real ethic of quality that you only prepare quality food and only in the amount that you need and you don’t just sort of Sling around her her words were this cheap food that nobody binds to threw away um that there’s really a sense of valuing the food as part of a web of relationships and you know kids are taught this from their earliest years through this ritual you know onew Grace in a sense your book represents not only a kind of document of all these different places and cultures and way of doing agriculture but really A a kind of hope for a very different future for agriculture in our country what is your feeling about what that future really could be I mean it’s it’s a tall order to imagine dissolving industrial Agriculture conglomerates and breaking up monopolies but for me this book really does kind of point in that direction yeah yeah I I do dream of a future where we move away from extraction in agriculture and towards reciprocity as we’ve been talking about I think this whole hour and I think that there are so many Pathways that all have to be explored simultaneously so I definitely encourage folks to get engaged in the farm bill it’s being reauthorized right now that only happens every five years and this is this major package of federal legislation it’s the biggest bill that affects agricultural policy it just happens once every five years and through that bill we can do a lot you know we’re currently subsidizing with tax pay money industrial agriculture we’re propping it up through a crop insurance system that’s very favorable to monocultural corn and soy that’s grown in industrial ways uh we could you know repurpose some of that money to instead support the public benefits that come out of Agriculture and support people who are doing things like um planting perennials and growing more cover crops on their land and working to feed their Community healthy food rather than just growing Commodities that go into fuel animal feed and also through the farm bill and through other legislation we can pass new antitrust laws and we can enforce the ones that we have because so much of the market power that these conglomerates have is is really pushing against my understanding of constitutional protection of you know the quote unquote free market so many sectors of Agriculture whether you talk about meat packing or grain processing or seed you have like three or four firms that control you know 60 to 80% of the market and so that’s part of why it’s so difficult for these alternative visions of Agriculture to get any kind of foothold in the economy is that they’re subject to what I think is illegal Monopoly and oligopolistic practices in power so Corey Booker has been talking a lot about this to his credit for years and years and years and there’s been much more discussion of this at kind of the highest levels of government but then there’s also lots of things that people do in their own local communities in order to essentially CH their daily experience of the food system such that more of it comes from a reciprocity system than an extraction system so you know people set up Community Gardens and Community farms and mutual Aid networks and food hubs and community supported agriculture super inspiring groups out there like the Detroit black Community Food security network that’s essentially creating an entirely a whole alternative food system for urban black people in Detroit to live within to access their food within a system that reflects their own values um and so there’s things like that that we can do as well in parallel to shifting these federal policy systems in order to actually regulate the Bad actors out of business so that they’re no longer drawing on you know our common resources like Clean Water and Air in order to fuel their profits so yeah I think we can build the alternative system as we’re dismantling the system that is extracting from our communities and that alternative system is really the only sustainable one in the long term yeah absolutely I know it’s always kind of a misnomer to call it alternative because there is no alternative to it and it’s also if you really think about the wide sweep of human history and the wide sweep of the globe it is the predominant way that people have fed each other is in Community Food Systems and it’s still the predominant way that a lot of people are around the world are feeding themselves today it doesn’t have the predominant political power globally right now but in terms of people actually feeding themselves and no matter who you are if you think about your whole ancestral lineage like most of your people through your lineage fed themselves through Community Food system so I think we can all kind of dig deep and find that somewhere in ourselves Li carile thank you so much for being with us on down to earth my pleasure such a great conversation and Mary Charlotte the book is called healing grounds climate Justice and the deep roots of regenerative farming it’s published by Island press and you can find it at island press.org and also at Liz carlile’s own site which is Liz car.com and I’ll link to both of those in the show notes you’ve been listening to downto Earth we would love it if you would support this program which you can do by going to patreon.com downto Earth planet to Plate where you can sign up for as little as $3 patreon is p a t r e o n and also please rate and review the podcast on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts the Kira Coalition is a not for-profit and a Community Network of ranchers Farmers conservationists scientists Educators and many others dedicated to regenerative practices that produce healthy food support meaningful livelihoods sustain biodiversity and remedy the impacts of climate change to learn more about Kira and how you can support their work visit kirao coalition.org Qi v i r a and finally this show is a production with the radio Cafe you can check out radiocap.com