Healing Grounds

Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming

Liz Carlisle

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781642832228
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that's meant learning her tribe's history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it's meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the native cuisines of those who fled the "American wars" in Southeast Asia.In Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors' methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people.Cultivating this kind of regenerative farming will require reckoning with our nation's agricultural history—a history marked by discrimination and displacement. And it will ultimately require dismantling power structures that have blocked many farmers of color from owning land or building wealth.The task is great, but so is its promise. By coming together to restore these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet, we can heal our communities and ourselves.

CHAPTER 1

Return of the Buffalo

Technically speaking, it was nearly summertime when Latrice Tatsey drove out to the Blackfeet Buffalo Ranch to dig the first soil pits for her graduate research. But having grown up on the Blackfeet Reservation—a dramatic convergence of mountains and prairie along the Canadian border in Northwest Montana—Tatsey knew she could encounter any kind of weather during June fieldwork. As the wind whipped up, she pulled a gray sweatshirt over her head, cinching the hood around her face to shield herself from both the chill and the soil, which kept gusting into her eyes.

Once she’d managed to dig a foot down into the chilly buffalo pasture, Tatsey stretched her body full length onto the earth, peering into the sink-sized hole. Here in the deep recesses of the soil, she hoped to find clues about how her people had lived in balance with this prairie for thousands of years—and how that balance might be restored.

Tatsey’s path to bison ecology started when she was a young girl, growing up on a cattle ranch and going to rodeos with her dad. As a member of the Blackfeet Nation—or Amskapi Piikani, as Latrice’s people call themselves—she was given the name In-niisk-ka-mah-kii (Buffalo Stone Woman). “At first I was really upset,” Tatsey recalls, “because I really loved horses and I wanted my name to have something to do with that.”

But as Tatsey got older, she began learning the story of Buffalo Stone Woman. As elders shared with Tatsey, there had once been a very hard time, a starvation time, when the Blackfeet people couldn’t find the buffalo and were running out of sustenance. One day, a woman went out to gather wood and came upon an iridescent, dark gray stone. When she picked it up, she was given a song to sing. The woman brought both the stone and the song back to her people, teaching others to sing with her. The next day, when they went out to hunt, they found the buffalo again. “When I first heard that story I was like, oh, wow,” Tatsey recalls. “And I thought, maybe this isn’t such a bad name after all.”

Tatsey began dreaming of raising buffalo on her family’s ranch, mentally superimposing the image of a herd onto the view out her window. “I would say, Grandma, you know where you see all your cattle?” Tatsey recalls. “One day I’m going to bring buffalo out here.”

After finishing her undergraduate degree in natural resources, Tatsey landed a position with the agricultural extension service, administering US Department of Agriculture programs for the Blackfeet community. Her job gave her ample opportunities to visit the tribe’s growing buffalo herd, which stoked her curiosity about the animals. Tatsey realized she had lots of questions about these native herbivores and their role on the landscape, but not nearly enough answers. So in 2017, she went back to school, this time for a graduate degree in environmental science at Montana State University. Which is how she found herself staring into a soil pit and trying to keep the dirt from blowing up her nose.

Only by looking underground, Tatsey told me, can you fully appreciate the key role that buffalo play on this carbon-rich but fragile prairie. By comparing soil samples from the tribal buffalo ranch and an adjacent cattle ranch, Tatsey hopes to document some of the interactions between buffalo and soils, which have important implications for the climate. But even on her first visit, she could already see potential signs of the buffalo that had been grazing this pasture for over twenty years. “There’s more diversity in the plant species,” Tatsey told me, “and the plant species are a lot larger in the buffalo pasture versus the cattle pasture.”

We tend to think of grazing as a process of using up a finite resource, Tatsey explained, but for buffalo and most other native herbivores, it’s more of a mutual relationship with plants. By selectively grazing over long distances, buffalo helped create one of the most ecologically productive landscapes in North America. Looking up from her soil pit, Tatsey can see for miles across this ancient prairie, 1.5 million acres of which still belong to the Blackfeet people—an area slightly larger than the state of Delaware. Rising up behind her, the Rocky Mountains create an “edge effect” on the Blackfeet Reservation, a zone of overlapping habitats that hosts some 80 percent of Montana’s large vertebrates. “Our people call it the backbone of the world,” Tatsey says.

To the many other species that call these prairies home, the buffalo’s forage-boosting behavior means more food. But for humans in the twenty-first century, the impacts of buffalo grazing may have another important implication. “When you have healthier plant species,” Tatsey says, “they are taking more CO₂ out of the atmosphere and bringing it back into the soil profile. Which potentially means buffalo could help us respond to climate change.”

Architects of the Prairie

Before Europeans arrived on the North American continent, some thirty million buffalo roamed its vast grasslands. (Scientists refer to the animals as bison, while most Indigenous plains people call them buffalo. “Sorry if I switch back and forth a lot,” Tatsey explained in the middle of our interview). Ranging east from the Rocky Mountains, buffalo herds traveled nearly the entirety of what is now the United States, with the exception of Michigan, New England, Florida, and the Eastern Seaboard. The historic range of the continent’s largest mammal also covered a wide swath of Western Canada, all the way up to Alaska, and stretched southward into the northern part of what is now Mexico.

But buffalo didn’t merely travel across these carbon-rich grasslands. They created them. Recently grazed areas generated nesting habitat for birds that needed bare ground, while areas the buffalo hadn’t been to for a while were perfect for other species that required more cover. Since buffalo moved constantly, such patches of diverse habitat were scattered over the landscape, supporting butterflies, grasshoppers, and small mammals. Buffalo also rolled their thousand-pound bodies across the earth, rubbing off insects and shedding old fur. In the process, they formed depressions, or wallows, that filled up with water and became seasonal ponds. These wallows provided habitat too: researchers have identified several species of frogs and other amphibians that breed in them.

Buffalo formed a particularly intricate relationship with the plants they ate. As buffalo journeyed long distances, recently foraged vegetation had time to regrow before the animals came back. As the grasslands and the herbivores evolved together over many thousands of years, the grazing activity of the buffalo actually began to stimulate the plants in some cases, a phenomenon ecologists refer to as compensatory growth. Buffalo grazing also delayed some grasses from setting seed, keeping them in their growth phase for a longer period of time. It certainly didn’t hurt that buffalo were leaving behind concentrated packets of fertilizer, which they reliably deposited out their backside everywhere they went. And as ecologists have recently learned, an enzyme in buffalo saliva helped stimulate plant growth as well. Along the way, the buffalo played referee among the prairie plants, grazing down the most dominant grasses to make space for less aggressive species like wildflowers.

By maintaining such a diverse mix of native plant species aboveground, buffalo were simultaneously shaping the ecosystem below the soil surface. To adapt to grazing pressure from the massive herbivores, prairie plants evolved to apportion a great deal of their efforts underground to support their extensive root systems. These root systems, in turn, delivered carbon into the soil, where it could be bound up in minerals and stored for eons. Over the millennia, buffalo helped build up the North American prairie into some of the most carbon-rich earth in the world. “The thing about native prairies,” explains renowned soil scientist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, “is not only that they store a lot of carbon, but they stabilize it underground for long periods of time, potentially hundreds or thousands of years.”

Equally central to the intricate dynamics of these prairie ecosystems were the Indigenous people who lived in close relationship with the buffalo. “Bison were our wealth,” Tatsey explains. “Bison were our economy. And how we managed them was our savings and what that meant is when the herds were healthy, our people were healthy.”

Through careful observation, the Indigenous people of the Great Plains developed a sophisticated understanding of both the buffalo and the prairies, which allowed them to harvest abundant food, fiber, building materials, and tools without diminishing the population of the massive herbivores or disrupting the habitat on which they depended. “This Indigenous prairie food system was the longest-lived food system in North America,” says Jill Falcon Mackin, a historian of Plains Ojibwe descent who is collaborating with buffalo restoration work at Blackfeet Nation. “It sustained us for thirteen thousand years at least; we believe longer than that.”

Instead of confining the buffalo and attempting to turn them into livestock, the Amskapi Piikani and other Indigenous plains peoples followed the animals’ movements, learning to anticipate their migration patterns. The people knew what time of year the buffalo would move to higher grounds, when hunting bands could harvest the animals by driving them off cliffs known as pishkuns, or buffalo jumps. They knew where the buffalo would go looking for tender young shoots in the “hungry season” of early spring, when most of the vegetation had yet to emerge from winter. And they even learned how to bring on these tender shoots a couple weeks earlier, by burning certain areas the previous summer or fall.

Learning from the animals’ movements and employing selective burning practices, Indigenous plains people not only maintained the mosaic prairie structure created by the buffalo but significantly amplified it. “If the native foodways of the original prairie people in North America had not been interrupted in the way that they were by colonization,” says agronomist Ricardo Salvador, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Food and Environment Program, “you really can’t put much of a time boundary on how long those systems would have been viable. They had learned to be in equilibrium with an ecosystem that was grass based, that had herbivores in equilibrium with that grass-based ecosystem.”

Listening to the Land

When Europeans first arrived on the North American continent, they encountered many such food systems, fashioned over centuries by Indigenous communities managing a delicate balance with their unique ecosystem. On the East Coast, colonizers met the Haudenosaunee, whose practice of growing corn in mounds—often alongside beans and squash—sustained an impressive level of soil fertility for over four hundred years. When the governor of New France marched through Haudenosaunee villages on a mission of destruction and conquest in 1687, he could not help but be amazed by the productivity of the agriculture he found there. “The quantity of corn which we found in store in this place, and destroyed by fire is incredible,” the governor wrote, boasting that he had demolished some 1.2 million bushels. The man’s surprise is understandable, explains Jane Mt. Pleasant, a horticulture professor at Cornell University who has reconstructed and analyzed Haudenosaunee farming systems. Haudenosaunee corn growers produced three to five times as much grain per acre as European wheat farmers in the same time period.

In the southwestern portion of what is now the United States, European colonizers found sophisticated societies living on mere inches of annual rainfall. Carefully harvesting what rain they received, and in some cases developing intricate irrigation systems, the Indigenous people of the arid Southwest successfully farmed the desert—without the devastating impacts of the massive water-moving systems that would remake the landscape in the twentieth century. Desert peoples learned to recognize and encourage a special class of plants, most of them succulents like cacti and agaves, which were uniquely evolved to dry conditions. While most plants rely on daytime sunlight to grow, these plants had the extraordinary capacity to harvest all the energy they needed at night, when they wouldn’t lose too much water in the process. Their secret was a special photosynthetic pathway that became their namesake: the Crassulacean acid metabolism, or CAM. In the hottest, driest part of North America, Indigenous peoples built a significant portion of their food system around these CAM plants, which historically made up about a third of the plant species in their diet.

When colonizers eventually made it to Hawai‘i, they found the Indigenous population managing interconnected ecosystems that ranged from forested mountaintops all the way down to the ocean. Through the ahupua‘a system of land districts, Indigenous Hawaiians carefully conserved the upland forest, so as to ensure healthy watersheds and nutrient cycling for their crops below. With a human community whose numbers nearly matched the island’s present-day population (which depends on imports for 90 percent of its diet), the Hawaiian archipelago was largely self-sufficient in food.

As the journals of explorers and even some military campaigners indicate, Europeans marveled at the abundance of food in the Indigenous societies they encountered. The lush quality of the landscapes was frequently referenced as well, and some Europeans even observed that Indigenous management was responsible for the health and productivity of these ecosystems. But to fully appreciate the genius of such food systems would have meant acknowledging their architects’ rightful claims to their ancestral lands, which the colonizers would not do. Instead, they leaned into the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which characterized the North American continent as an unproductive and “savage” wasteland, in need of the civilizing forces of European agriculture and industry. Willfully ignoring regenerative food systems across the Americas, Europeans proceeded to massacre both the people and the creatures with whom they had lived interdependently for generations.

Broken Ground

One of the most widely depicted elements of this genocide was the slaughter of buffalo, which became a preoccupation for hunters and the federal government alike. Photos and paintings from the nineteenth century are rife with such images, depicting White men posed proudly atop piles of buffalo skulls five times as tall as themselves.

Tribes fought back against the destruction of their food source, even going without meat to conserve the buffalo that remained. Latrice’s father, Terry Tatsey, tells the story of Many Tail Feathers, a Piikani man who was supposed to help with one of the last buffalo drives in the late 1800s. The people had the buffalo gathered on high ground in a pound, or corral, and were planning to run the animals off a cliff to harvest their meat. But Many Tail Feathers had a dream that he had to let them go, because their numbers were so small at that time. So he released the buffalo, catching heat from a number of his fellow tribal members who were concerned about the ever-worsening shortage of food. “We were just going into that starvation era of our people,” Tatsey says, “but that was his responsibility from his spiritual helpers to sustain those animals.”

The efforts of Many Tail Feathers and others notwithstanding, however, nearly all thirty million buffalo were killed over the course of the nineteenth century, most of them in a particularly bloody twenty-year period. As land speculators and the US military understood, their strategy of exterminating most of these animals would profoundly undermine the way of life that had supported the people of the plains for thousands of years.

Less visible—to White observers anyway—were the other components of the prairie ecosystem that were simultaneously destroyed. Without buffalo and people tending the landscape, prairies lost the key drivers of their ecologically productive mosaic structure, which not only created habitat for grassland species but cultivated a diverse community of soil microbes belowground. Gradually, biodiversity on the prairie declined, slowly homogenizing the landscape as one niche after another disappeared.

Worse still, the majority of these prairies, once stolen, were redistributed to European immigrants, who were wholly unfamiliar with the arid grasslands of western North America. The settlers were instructed to plow up the “virgin” prairies, which rapidly released somewhere between one-third and one-half of their soil carbon to the atmosphere. During the twenty-eight years following the first European tillage, the productivity of the Great Plains decreased some 71 percent. A century later, much of the remainder of that soil carbon would be gone too.

In place of deep-rooted and diverse prairie vegetation, settlers were encouraged to plant large monocultural blocks of annual grains: shallow-rooted plants that could not survive on their own and had to be replanted each year. Unlike the Indigenous food system that preceded it, this agricultural method made no allowances for giving back to the land that supported the crops. Eventually, as settler agriculture drew down the land’s fertility, farmers were instructed to use chemicals to supply nutrients to their plants. This did nothing to replace soil carbon and in fact added yet more carbon to the atmosphere, since fossil fuels were needed to manufacture the new fertilizers. Such fertilizers—far too concentrated for plants that evolved to take up slow and steady streams of biological nutrients—also turned into greenhouse gases themselves. Plants simply could not absorb all the ammonium nitrate, particularly given that monocultural farming systems didn’t keep plant roots in the ground year-round anyway. Much of the chemical fertilizer either ran off into the watershed or migrated into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, causing three hundred times as much warming, molecule for molecule, as carbon dioxide.

In places like Montana, where some land was clearly too hilly or dry to be productively farmed in this way, large areas remained grasslands. But while the changes wrought on the open range were not as immediate and violent as those that followed the plow, settler agriculture nonetheless gradually undermined the ecological balance of these untilled prairies too. In place of the buffalo that had evolved with these grasslands, European American ranchers imported cattle, which had been domesticated in ways that made human management easier but also necessary. To accommodate the needs of their cows, these ranchers began modifying the landscape. They manipulated water. They grew feed. But most consequentially, they built ...