a farm girl’s search for the promise of regenerative agriculture...

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A FARM GIRL’S SEARCH FOR THE PROMISE OF REGENERATIVE AGRICULTUREBY STEPHANIE ANDERSON

https://www.terrain.org/2019/nonfiction/promise-of-regenerative-agriculture/ 4/10/19, 5?27 PMPage 1 of 18

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Excerpted f rom One S ize F i tsNone: A Farm Gi r l ’s Search forthe Promise o f Regenerat iveAgr icu l tu re(h t tps : / /www.nebraskapress .un l .edu/un ivers i ty-o f -nebraska-press/9781496205056/ ) byStephan ie Anderson, bypermiss ion o f the Un ivers i ty o fNebraska Press . © 2019 by theBoard o f Regents o f theUnivers i ty o f Nebraska.

m in western South Dakota, rolling across the prairie in a blue 1970s-erapickup truck, when I first see them. Buffalo—faraway brown dots on ahillside that become massive bodies outside the passenger window as we

approach them, their faces accented with beards and curved black horns. They areprimeval, ancient, mammothlike. They have a wise look about them, but also awildness, as when they flash the whites of their eyes, spin around, and gallop off,showing us they’ll never be completely tamed.

I’m at Great Plains Buffalo Company(https://www.greatplainsbuffalo.com/), aranch where Phil and Jill Jerde and theirchildren raise more than a thousandgrass-fed buffalo. These buffalo willeventually be slaughtered, providingconsumers with meat, but they are muchmore than food sources. They are thekeepers of this grassland. With theirhooves they aerate the soil and pushseeds into it. With their waste theyfertilize it. Through their grazing habitsthey encourage the growth of grassinstead of woody plants. They maintainsymbiotic relationships with birds andinsects. They make the prairie functionin a way it hasn’t since their ancestorswalked it, before we converted the GreatPlains to corn and soybeans.


(h t tps : / /www.nebraskapress .un l .edu/un ivers i ty-o f -nebraska-press/9781496205056/ )

“Susta inab le” has long beenthe ra l l y ing cry o f agr icu l tu ra lprogress ives ; g iven that muchof our nat ion ’s fa rm and ranchland is a l ready degraded,however, susta inab leagr icu l tu re o f ten meansmainta in ing a less- than- idea ls ta tus quo. Indust r ia lagr icu l tu re has a lso co-optedthe te rm for market ingpurposes wi thout implement ingbet ter pract ices . Stephan ieAnderson argues that in orderto prov ide nut r ient- r ich foodand fight c l imate change, weneed to move beyondsusta inab le to regenerat iveagr icu l tu re , a pract ice that i s

The buffalo show us what the prairieonce was and how humans have changedit—to some, destroyed it—and this inturn is a reminder of all the landscapeswe’ve changed. “Wrong side up,” said aSioux who watched a white sodbuster ripthe grassland open with a plow. TheNative Americans knew why soil was bestleft undisturbed: roots, 25 miles of themin a single square yard of prairie turf justfour inches deep, held the soil in place,had done so for thousands of years. Witha single plow swipe the settlers set it freeto blow. Result: the Dust Bowl. Laterresult: desertification turning the GreatPlains into a desert. Less than 4 percentof the original tallgrass prairie remains,and those defiant acres are rigorouslyprotected. Still, it is feasible that thetallgrass prairie could be gone before Idie. A human being’s lifespan is roughlyhow long it took to destroy 96 percent ofit, which does not bode well for the last4.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Thebuffalo before me represent a newagriculture that can help restore theprairie and other landscapes withoutsacrificing the amount of food produced.These animals show us that there are


Y

h igh ly ta i lo red to loca lenv i ronments and renewsresources.

Learn more about the book.(h t tps : / /www.nebraskapress .un l .edu/un ivers i ty-o f -nebraska-press/9781496205056/ )

many ways to farm and ranch, that wecan change how we define those terms,that we can reverse the damage we havedone and create a better agriculturalfuture. The buffalo are walking,breathing proof that human beings donot have to destroy the earth in order toeat.

ears ago, I would not have seen the buffalo as keepers of the range. I grewup about 20 miles from Great Plains Buffalo on a conventional ranchoutside of Bison, South Dakota, where my parents raise cattle, wheat, corn,

and hay. Had I not discovered a love for writing that drew me to college, I probablywould have stayed there the rest of my life, working alongside my father until I couldstart my own operation. I’m serious about this.

Even now, more than ten years after graduating from high school, my “if I had all themoney in the world” plan is to buy a ranch somewhere, raise cattle and horses, andwrite. The ranch I’d run today, though, would be nothing like the ranch my parentsrun.

We’re longtime pals, my father and I. I don’t know how many pictures my mother tookof me as a kid sitting on his lap in a tractor or in a pickup truck or on an ATV (we callthem four-wheelers in South Dakota).

Blonde, brown-eyed little me, all smiles, usually gripping the steering wheelpretending to drive, leaning against Dad with his shaggy brown hair, big 1980s glasses,and baseball cap with a cow graphic printed on the front. He taught me to drive astick-shift pickup at nine, a tractor at 12, and a swather (a hay-cutting machine) at 14.I rode horses on cattle drives and rose before sunrise during calving season to check


the pregnant heifers. He taught me almost everything he knows about farming andranching, lessons I now consider somewhat dubious because, if I wrote them down,they’d form a book on how to farm conventionally, which is also to say industrially.

My dad and I are still pals, don’t get me wrong. We just disagree on almost everythingabout agriculture, though we don’t talk much about that. Still, it’s a significant riftconsidering my father’s life is the farm. This is not hyperbole. All my father knows isthe ranch; he was in his late 50s before he flew on a commercial airplane or wadedinto the ocean.

He seldom meets up with fellow farmers for a beer, and he has not a single hobby. Herarely visits his grown children in their far-flung city apartments. He reads mostlyfarm-related news, and he did not attend college. I respect his salt-of-the-earthpersonality, his dedication to his trade, and his strong work ethic, and I know hisworld is small because he likes it that way. My father doesn’t do much besides farmingbecause he simply doesn’t want to. That’s how much he loves it.

So having his daughter call the type of agriculture he practices into question is a bigdeal. I’m not trying to embarrass, hurt, or accuse him or anyone who practicesconventional agriculture. Quite the opposite. I wrote this book because mostconventional farmers and ranchers are good people trapped in a bad system. I believethat beyond a doubt. I respect my father and others like him too much to simply writethem off. I’m deeply concerned about their future, because it is my future and yours,too—the world’s future for that matter, since the decisions farmers make affect globalmarkets, landscapes, and climates. If we continue farming industrially, then we’ll ruinour planet. But if farmers change their practices, we can dramatically increase theodds of reversing climate change. It’s time to have a serious discussion about whichoption they will choose—and that conversation won’t be easy, but it’s certainly notimpossible.


I

(https://www.terrain.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/stephanie-father.jpg)Stephanie Anderson and her father, wearing that distinctivetractor cap.Photo courtesy Stephanie Anderson.

worked for a farm-and-ranch newspaper in Sioux Falls right out of college. Thebiweekly had a total writing staff of two, myself included, so I covered the bigstuff right away: the closing of the Sioux Falls Stockyards, the annual Black Hills

Stock Show and Rodeo, four state fairs, freezes, floods, and the status of the cornharvest. Some people scoffed at my job—You write about cows? And corn?—which onlyincreased my “I’ll show ’em” attitude. Before long I was promoted to special sectionseditor. And I got to wear jeans and cowboy boots to work, an undeniable plus.

I was 21 and naïve, a good little worker bee, born and bred to believe Americanagriculture was sacred. My writing, I thought, was a beacon of truth in the lies beingspread about farming by the liberal media and the tree-hugging hippies in places likeCalifornia and New York City. I felt a sense of honor in protecting the farmer and


rancher, my heroes, from slander. I sought the facts, which in my mind were asfollows: U.S. farmers nobly feed the world by producing nutritious food, protecting theenvironment, and keeping their rural communities alive.

I believed what my sources told me, because my sources were land-grant universityprofessors and state agriculture officials, scientists and county extension servicespecialists, people my journalism professors had taught me to seek out. Unbiasedpeople, or so I thought. My sources were also farmers and ranchers like my parents,people whose families had farmed the same ground for generations. Good people.

Some stories were harmless, such as profiles of teenage Future Farmers of Americastate officers. Other stories were less innocent. I wrote on the benefits of geneticallymodified corn varieties and the latest and greatest machines able to plow, plant, spray,and harvest in record time. I did an especially troubling story about how consumersneedn’t worry about antibiotic residues in ethanol by-products that are fed tolivestock all over the nation. I kept interviewing “family farmers” on “family farms.”But I grew increasingly uncomfortable. The tractors, fields, livestock herds, dairies,farm buildings—everything was super-sized, way bigger than what my father and mostof our neighbors had. I toured concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOS forshort, where the cattle looked miserable, and megadairies with sophisticatedstainless-steel machines that sucked the milk right out of the udders. I watchedmassive sprayers douse fields with chemicals. The more I learned about how thesefarms operated, the more shame and confusion I felt.

I suppose most people have a moment when they realize something they’ve believedall their life is wrong. For a long time I believed that farmers and ranchers werestewards of the land and that they acted differently than corporate or industrial farms.Now I see that I was part of a powerful agribusiness system glorifying the “progress”of conventional agriculture, a model in which the farm is treated as a factory,industrial farming packaged to look like family farming. My time at the newspaperrevealed that everything I thought I knew about farming and food was a lie.


I quit the job at Tri-State Neighbor after a year, not only because of my alteredperspective but also because I wanted an adventure. I moved to Florida and, a fewyears later, enrolled in Florida Atlantic University’s master’s program in creativenonfiction. Agriculture was still bothering me, and it showed in my writing: I producedstories set on ranches, elaborate descriptions of cows, a strange tale about a blizzardthat kills thousands of livestock. People in Florida asked me about the ranch back inSouth Dakota and I never knew quite what to say. I didn’t know how to talk aboutagriculture anymore. All I had were questions: What might a better version ofagriculture look like? Are people already doing it, and how might their disparateefforts create a whole, a national conception of what farms should strive to do andhow they should think? Is it feasible for conventional farmers and ranchers to switchto something more sustainable? What philosophies should we reject, and what ideasshould we hold dear?

When it came time to select a topic for my graduate thesis, I knew exactly what I hadto do: answer the questions. Through extensive research I came to understand theconcepts behind regenerative agriculture, but I couldn’t visualize them. I had to seethem in action, so I traveled to five farms and ranches as part of my quest. I wanted toknow what ideas might apply to all farms and how they could be tailored to fitindividual environments. On another level I was searching for something veryspecific: a model for my family’s ranch. I needed to know whether we had a place inthis better agricultural future.

Because my father believes we probably don’t. I can’t number the times he’s said, “It’stoo late for us.” By this he means it’s too late for our ranch to stop being theconventional, industrial operation it is. It’s too late for regenerative agriculture. Iunderstand why he believes this. Our farm is big, far too much for him and my brotherto handle. He owns a fleet of industrial-sized equipment and has invested all hisresources in growing just two cash crops: wheat and cattle. He depends on chemicalsand fertilizers and on fattening cattle in a feedlot. He’s beholden to operating notes—practically everyone who farms conventionally is. He’s afraid that switching to a new


system will mean bankruptcy and learning how to farm all over again. This is a fear heshares with people around the world, not just other farmers. What if we try to create abetter agriculture and fail?

If I’ve discovered one thing from the farmers and ranchers in my research, however,it’s this: it is never too late to change. Two of them converted existing conventionaloperations to regenerative ones. Two others entered farming at middle age, startingfrom scratch with no experience. People like this show us change is always possible,and it’s not as hard as we think.

The changes described in One Size Fits None are not revolutionary or new. They areabout returning to time-tested philosophies and perspectives about growing food andreimagining them for the modern world.

One argument of One Size Fits None is this: it is time for agriculture to go beyond“sustainable,” the food and farming buzzword of the last decade. “Sustainable” haslong been the battle cry of books and blogs, and in theory the term means agriculturethat returns the resources it takes from the earth, whether through biologicalpractices or careful use of nonrenewables. But the farmers and ranchers I interviewedsay this “give back what you take” approach does not do enough to restore soil health,recharge grasslands, fend off desertification, or provide nutrient-rich food forconsumers.

That is what Gabe Brown, a North Dakota farmer, told me as we bounced over a field inhis Polaris Ranger on our way to see some soils. “That’s the cliché word; everybodywants to be sustainable,” he said. “But why do you want to sustain a degradedresource? We need to be regenerative. If we are going to have healthy food andhealthy soils for the next generation, and generations to follow, we’ve got to build oursoils back.” Given that much of our nation’s farm and ranch land is already degraded,sustainable agriculture often means maintaining a less-than-ideal status quo.Industrial agriculture has also co-opted the term for marketing purposes withoutimplementing better farming and animal production practices. Even Monsanto, the


company that first created genetically modified crops and sells dozens of harmfulagrochemicals, claims to be “a sustainable agriculture company” and produces anannual sustainability report. Unfortunately many “sustainable” farms and ranches arejust large-scale conventional operations in disguise. Regenerative agriculture, incontrast, creates new life and resources—and it is already leading the next wave ofgreen food production.

Such agriculture only works, however, when farmers tailor its implementation to theirlocal environment. There is no one-size-fits-all approach in practicing it, and that’sanother argument here. We have used a one-size model for the last 60 years, which isthe “get big or get out,” input-focused philosophy known as conventional agriculture.As we continue the transition away from conventional farming, we must be careful notto think of regenerative agriculture as a specific set of practices or rules. We need toavoid the one-size-fits-all thinking that got us into trouble and instead embrace theidea that one size fits none. Even large-scale farms, so often vilified, can play a role inthe new regenerative agriculture, as can super-small urban farms. Midsize farms,however, will likely be the backbone of a regenerative agricultural system.


South Dakota farm land.Photo by mrgsimon, courtesy Pixabay.

I turn to farmers and ranchers for evidence. Meet Ryan Roth, a conventional vegetableand sugarcane farmer in Florida whose story reveals how producers became mired inthe conventional system in the first place, to the detriment of their finances, theenvironment, and their communities. This section of One Size Fits All explains whyconventional agriculture is no longer feasible, even when combined with sustainablepractices. Meet Phil Jerde, the South Dakota buffalo rancher using a form ofregenerative agriculture called holistic management and an unexpected animal, thebuffalo, to restore native prairie and provide an alternative to the industrial feedlot.Phil proves that livestock are the cornerstone of regenerative agriculture in many


environments and that, in some cases, large-scale farms actually work. From there,Kevin O’Dare of Florida and Fidel Gonzalez of New Mexico show how regenerativeagriculture that is organic, local, and urban can revitalize communities.

Kevin and Fidel also highlight the positive role of super-small farmers who defy theconventional logic of “get big or get out” and have the unique ability to feed theirneighbors. Finally, midsize farmer Gabe Brown combines livestock and grain farmingto revive soil, heal grassland, feed the local community, and bring back wildlife—regenerative agriculture in diversified form. Gabe also trains the next generation offarmers through his internship program, and he spends half the year on a speakingtour spreading the word about regenerative agriculture. These farmers tailor theiroperations to their specific environments and goals, proving that, when it comes toregenerative agriculture, one size fits none—an approach that offers more life-givingbenefits for the consumer, land, livestock, community, and farmer than sustainableagriculture does in its current form.

I captured a roughly one-year span in these farmers’ lives through on-farm visitssupplemented with follow-up interviews via email and over the phone. I also learnedthe history of their operations. Since those conversations several years ago, they havemade changes, expansions, and improvements. Due to the nature of book publishing,it’s impossible to have an up-to-the-minute picture of anyone’s life—but what isincluded in One Size Fits All is what I saw during my time with them, and their storiesare as authentic now as they were then.

All this brings me back to the buffalo.

As I watch the animals graze, I imagine that I’m on the prairie of old, before whitesettlers arrived, when buffalo marched in herds thousands strong. They remind methat nearly extinct things can be resurrected. We can make these resurrected thingsnew, retool them for a different time, as Phil has with his herd. The buffalo also call usto remember what we’ve forgotten, and they promise that if we do we can recoversome of what we’ve lost.


They are all this, yet more—they are a symbol for the future. They represent thevariety we need in our diets and our agriculture, the end of monocultures and therevival of diversity. They stand for the use of ecosystems, not chemical solutions, togrow food. They remind us of the tools nature provides, tools that are free andregenerative. Buffalo almost disappeared from the earth because we wanted to farmthe prairie they lived on. Now the buffalo gazing at me through the pickup windowembody an agricultural change that’s already started.

Stephanie Anderson i s a wr i te r l i v ing inBoca Raton, F lor ida . She ho lds an MFAfrom F lor ida At lant ic Un ivers i ty, where shecur rent ly serves as an ins t ructor o f Eng l ish .Her work has appeared or i s fo r thcoming inThe Rumpus, The P inch, Hote l Amer ika ,Midwestern Goth ic , Gr is t Journa l , TheChron ic le Rev iew, Sweet , and others . Herdebut book One S ize F i ts None

(ht tps : / /www.nebraskapress .un l .edu/un ivers i ty-o f -nebraska-press/9781496205056/ ) appeared wi th Un ivers i ty o f Nebraska Press in January.

Header photo by skeeze, courtesy Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/photos/bison-buffalo-herd-american-animal-

1374067/).

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a farm girl’s search for the promise of regenerative agriculture...

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