9 minute read
Conservation
CONSERVATION: REGENERATING AGRI-CULTURE
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ARTICLE BY JOEL JOHNSON
Conflict is often the result of a lack of creativity. Nobel Peace Laureates have educated the world not only in diplomacy and leadership, but also imagination. Faced with the simple paths of indifference and war, the ability of peacemakers to envision a “third way” forward—an effective path of creative action—has led to some of the most transformational revolutions in human history.
Tumamoc
© Joel Johnson
Agriculture has been in need of just such a revolution for some time now. Headlines seem to draw a line of division among land stewards—conservationists fighting to protect land from development, and therefore degradation, and agriculturalists trying to protect their livelihoods and rural economies in the face of overwhelming data connecting industrial food production to global emissions and climate change.
This dualism, while attractive in the simplicity of its explanation, is fatally flawed. At its root it suggests that food production can only ever be destructive to the ecosystems we call home. What’s more, it villanizes the individuals most tangibly invested in the soil beneath their feet.
The uninspired logic of conflict takes our food system—the symbiosis of cultivating ecological communities in order to ensure human flourishing—and shatters it into many conflicts. The effect of this single story, ethnobiologist Gary Nabhan notes in Food from the Radical Center, is “Americans appear to be at war with one another rather than at work with one another. This trend,” Nabhan elaborates, “has dire consequences for the health of both our communities and our landscapes.”
However, in the borderlands of the American Southwest, a host of grassroots movements is reshaping the way we think about agriculture. While the projects are distinctive, the movement is consistent: Rather than addressing issues individually—biodiversity loss, agricultural emissions, faltering rural economies, political divide, cultural conflict—reimagine the system itself. Imagine foodscapes that support local jobs and produce high-value products for local communities. Imagine cultivation that builds soil rather than eroding it. Imagine stories and culture preserved from plant to plate. Imagine regenerative agriculture.
In the context of agriculture, the qualifier “regenerative” is typically credited to Robert Rodale, son of organic pioneer J.I. Rodale. In 1987, the UN Bruntland Commission defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Rodale pushed back against this definition, which was still ultimately extractive. He argued for an agriculture that was “beyond sustainable”—one that “takes advantage of the natural tendencies of ecosystems to regenerate when disturbed” in order to heal land while also providing for people.
Dr. Gary Nabhan, who has had a hand in the founding of many of these community collaborations (Borderlands Restoration Network, Native Seeds/SEARCH, etc.), says that in practice, “There is no single recipe for a regenerative agriculture. You could say it should be looking at perennials. You can say that it should use integrated pest management that minimizes or eliminates pesticides and herbicides. But there is not a single recipe. It has to be place-specific and you get that by talking to your neighbors.”
That discussion and collaboration among neighbors has been the foundation of the ecological restoration work taking place at Deep Dirt Institute and Farm in Patagonia, AZ. Through the building of check dams, brush weirs, and gabions to slow down water flow, especially in areas of high erosion, Deep Dirt and a partner project in the Chiricahua Mountains has seen rainwater infiltration increase, eroded gullies restored, an increased diversity of wildlife presence, and substantially lower rates of wildfires as a result of higher soil moisture levels.
“[The building of infiltration structures is] really the foundation of everything that we’re doing...and almost all of it has been done by youth,” explains Deep Dirt’s permaculturalist Kate Tirion. “Which to me is the most exciting thing, because these are our future leaders.”
Deep Dirt has involved nearly 4,000 youth in community-based restoration efforts of the surrounding landscape, repurposing waste products in the process.
“Have you heard the term, urbanite?” Kate asks me when we speak over the phone. It is the permaculture descriptor for “broken-up lumps of cement usually found in urban centers.” In 2006, a local school had to tear out and replace a recently built sidewalk. “Fortunately the contractor who was doing the removal work knew that I was looking for material,” Tirion recalls. “I didn’t know what I was going to use it for; I just saw it as a resource.”
Deep Dirt Institute Program
© Kate Tirion
Under Kate’s direction, youth partners turned that urbanite—thirteen dump truck loads—into check dams and gabions that are slowing water, catching soil, and ultimately healing land in one of the most biodiverse regions of the country. Transforming the waste into a resource also meant the school saved $8,000 in landfill and transport costs.
In addition to ecosystem-scale conservation work, Deep Dirt Farm, the area of Deep Dirt dedicated to food production, is “a space where we build community resilience,” Tirion explains. “One of the first things I noticed about the town of Patagonia is that I’ve never seen a place in the United States that had as much talent per capita as we have here. What we didn’t have here was food security.”
So, in 1998, Tirion petitioned the town of Patagonia to initiate a community garden. When it was approved, her first step was planting 30-some heirloom fruit trees to shelter the space as part of a community workshop. The area is still worked by people from the surrounding community—an inclusion of neighbors and, by extension, an infusion of local culture into the food system that Tirion describes as “critical.”
Tucson Basin
© Joel Johnson
Desert Laboratory at Tumamoc
© Joel Johnson
“There’s so much knowledge here,” she says. “Looking at just our small region, we’ve got people like Gary Nabhan, but [also] indigenous peoples such as the Tohono O’odham, the Pascua Yaqui. These are people who have lived here for millennia—long before Europeans surfaced or had a clue that this part of the world existed—who were growing food here. Not growing food in the European model, but enhancing particular environments where their food plants grow...There’s a lot to learn historically from the indigenous community that has been here for a very, very long time and understands what it takes to live in a landscape like this.”
In her work with Borderlands Restoration Network, “we’re focusing on restoration economies,” Tirion explains. “But I think [we must] tie in the idea of provisioning economies. We need to draw from our regions what we need as a species, because we’re just overwhelming the planet...The future will be local as we pull back [from] fossil fuels.”
While the success of the landscape restoration work at Deep Dirt Institute is hard to refute, critics of regenerative agriculture push back against the viability of agricultural ecosystems to sustain communities in terms of both profit and plate. But Nabhan argues that regenerative agriculture, particularly rediscovering native plants and food crops, makes immense sense in the Sonoran Desert region in particular.
Nabhan frequently works at the Desert Laboratory on Tucson’s Tumamoc Hill and he points out, “the state gave that land to be a research station because they knew conventional crops wouldn’t grow here, but that we had to provide food—we couldn’t import all our food in from outside.” The limits of the desert ecosystem, which some view as constraints to conventional agriculture, are what result in exceptional regional food products.
“The things that grow here are really unique, so they’re of higher value because people can’t get them anywhere else,” Nabhan argues. “If you’re going to just grow wheat, corn, or soy—I have nothing against those crops—but there are going to be people who can do it with lower input costs and get higher yields. So we’re better off when we grow the crops unique to this area.”
Nabhan contends that the unique products of the desert, which can be cultivated with substantially less input, will be a big part of the future of southwestern agriculture: “I’m doing a new study that suggests about one-third of all our crops in the future in Arizona, at least in the Sonoran Desert, are likely to be high value cactus and agave or century plant products that we can grow on onefifth to one-twentieth of the moisture that conventional crops need.”
If this comes to pass, it will require many desert farmers to re-imagine agriculture as we know it.
The practical knowledge of the uses and potential of these plants is rarely touted by university extensions. It resides in indigenious and immigrant communities whose agricultural acumen is all too often overlooked.
“There’s [indigenous and] immigrant farmers and people who have grown up on farms in Mexico that are fully documented that have to be part of our ag future,” Nabhan asserts. “If we get that diverse human resource base, and a diverse crop base, we’ll be a lot better off than if we’re just defending our turf as the world changes around us.”
In the saguaro-studded foothills of the Tucson Mountains, Barbara Rose of Bean Tree Farm is celebrating these diverse, rain-fed native crops, inspiring Sonoran Desert palates, and cooking up unique products in the process.
The Bean Tree Farm
© Barbara Rose
Rose is quick to recognize that Bean Tree Farm, a 20-acre Sonoran Desert food forest, does not fit what people would consider a “real” farm, “As we don’t grow conventional market vegetables, or irrigate.” Half of Bean Tree’s income is derived from value-added desert products such as chutneys, salsas, sauces, salves, and more, in addition to workshops, demonstrations and permaculture consultations.
“I don’t tell people that you can make a huge living planting, tending, and harvesting desert plants,” Rose says. “But mesquite flour sells for $20/lb, and thrives on seasonal rainwater, which is a better deal than any other agricultural crop I know of that’s legal,” she adds with a laugh. “And meanwhile, you’re helping regenerate Sonoran Desert lands which have been overdrafted and depleted since colonization.”
One of the challenges of producing Sonoran Desert food crops is educating people about the value of wild foods— think barrel cactus chutney, mesquite broths, and prickly pear reductions— and working them back into a food culture that prioritizes European vegetables (when consuming fresh food at all, that is).
“People have no idea that we live in a food forest, a literal food forest,” she exclaims. “That everything, if you walk in the Sonoran Desert or replant the wild Sonoran Desert in your backyard and neighborhood, just about everything is either edible and or medicinal—usually both.”
Rose echoes Nabhan’s viewpoint, that the drought-adaptation of these food plants is one of their greatest strengths. “Everyone who’s really thinking long term knows we need to include more of the kinds of food products that indigenous people have always lived on, taken care of, been improving and growing, and transition to a rainwater budget instead of a groundwater budget.”
Rose also agrees with Tirion’s call to re-wild our places, both farms and dwellings. “The work of Bean Tree Farm and many conservation organizations, leads us to say: rewild. Rewild your urban and suburban areas because where you live now...that used to be Sonoran Desert.”
While harvesting and teaching about desert foods is life-giving work, Rose also recognizes the shadow side of Anglo appropriation and cultural misuse that must be paid attention to. “We’re still dealing, like every other place in the whole nation with the fact that the very land that Bean Tree Farm is sitting on was stolen,” she says. “Heart-full communication, connection and work needs to be done to heal that rift...I am always trying to figure out how do I protect this place and how do I also make it right. Make the work that I do right for reparation and truth-telling. That’s crucial work.”
Rose also recognizes that for agriculture to be truly regenerative it must also be accessible to all.
Tucson’s UNESCO City of Gastronomy designation has been lauded for reviving the use of desert plants in restaurants and breweries, but high-end cuisine is not the focus of Bean Tree’s work. “My passion lies in empowering people in their own kitchens and neighborhoods, in a food desert and in a socially and food unjust system. There’s a lot of hungry people here. There’s a lot of nutritionally at-risk people here. And what better way to change that than to empower folks to grow your own food in whatever way you can and just rewilding your neighborhood with all these edible wild foods that don’t need irrigation once they’re established. What if,” she asks, “every community garden included wild foods, and every neighborhood had a little wild food farm?”
“In many ways, we’re not doing something new,” Rose reflects, “but we are incorporating maybe new knowledge into trying to make a life and a community based on living with the natural system in more harmony with it rather than pushing it to do something that it really can’t continue to do.”
Rose and her teaching partners offer multiple demonstrations each month to keep that knowledge alive and pass it on to others.
