The Land & Climate Podcast
The Land & Climate Podcast
Should we radically change the way we farm?
Liz Carlisle talks to Bertie about her new book, soon to be published by Island Press: 'Healing Grounds - Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming'.
The agroecologist, Environmental Studies Professor and award-winning author has spent the last year talking to Indigenous communities & farmers of colour across North America about their approaches to land, crop cultivation and livestock. Originally looking to learn more about soil sequestration, she was confronted with bigger picture issues about the relationships between climate policy, social justice, and agriculture.
Liz's further reading:
· HEAL Platform for Real Food
· Soul Fire Farm
· Vox’s coverage of Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren’s farming legislation
· IPES Food reports
· Adam Calo’s work on Scottish low carbon farming
· You can order Liz Carlisle’s previous books on agroecology on her website
Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.
Hello and welcome to the Economy, Land and Climate Insight podcast. My name is Bertie Harrison-Broninski, and today I'm talking to author and Environmental Studies Professor Liz Carlisle about her new book,
'Healing Gounds:Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming', which is due to be published next month by Island Press. We'll also have a review up of the book which you can find on our website, elc-insight.org. We'll link it below.
Liz:Now is a time when more so than ever in my lifetime, there is an opportunity to make a huge step forward towards both justice and sustainability in a way that's synergistic.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:I began by asking Professor Carlisle what regenerative farming means and what forms of agriculture did she look at in her book?
Liz:Yeah, so I think regenerative agriculture at its most foundational sense kind of follows from the word. It's farming that's also ecological restoration. And so some of the forms that a lot of conventional farmers in the United States have been exploring more recently, and conventional farmers in Europe as well, are things like adding in a soil building cover crops. So maybe at the end of the season, you grow a mix of plants that are specifically designed to feed the soil, so it's not a crop you're going to harvest eat, or perhaps applying compost, or mulch, which can work really well, especially on smaller scale farms. Using less tillage, ploughing less often to allow the soil microbial community to develop. So those are all some approaches that have kind of been added to conventional farms in Europe and the United States which tend to be, you know, a couple of crops specialising in commodity crops like corn and soy and wheat in the United States, in particular, typically for an export market. And because it's just one crop, and it's not this diverse ecosystem that looks like the natural world, to support that kind of artificial ecosystem those farmers have to use synthetic fertilisers, synthetic herbicides, sometimes other kinds of synthetic pesticides, oftentimes a lot of irrigation. And the crop's sort of out of its ecological context. So these kinds of regenerative agricultural practices like planting a soil building cover crop, or adding compost, those are a good start. But the forms of regenerative agriculture that I was really excited to feature in the book go a lot deeper in the sense of actually designing the whole agroecosystem to mimic the natural ecosystem in the area where the person is growing food. So agroforestry is featured in the book and you know, regions where the natural ecosystems are forests, Olivia Watkins in North Carolina is farming within a forest raising mushrooms exploring, you know, also raising bees and honey, planting shade loving plants, so that she doesn't have to clear the forest and eliminate all those ecosystem services that come from the forest. But she's actually farming within the forest. Another form of agriculture featured within the book and is raising bison, both rewilding bison on the prairie, and also folks who are you know, exploring the idea of bison on ranches. And so that's just mimicking a prairie ecosystem. You know, literally the way the prairie ecosystem was managed by Indigenous people prior to European farming on the North American continent. So I'm really excited about those kinds of forms of regenerative agriculture that sort of flow from the idea of people being part of the environment, rather than extracting from the environment.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:This is a book that I guess is more about other people's stories than your own. But you do begin and end it with a discussion of your objectives when you initially started the project, and then how you ended up writing something a bit different. So I wondered if you could start us off by discussing that journey a little bit?
Liz:Yeah, well, I've always been interested in agriculture. My grandmother lost our family farm in the Dust Bowl, you know, which was this social and ecological tragedy in the United States in the late 20s and 30s that resulted from really poor care of farmland by settler colonists who didn't know anything about the lands they were coming to, or how to take care of them. And then were sort of told by the government to do this really heavy ploughing and that's what my grandmother sort of experienced as farming. And so the story she told me were both about this incredible land connection that she had from growing up with his agrarian childhood, which was something I deeply wanted to regain, but also this tragedy of the dustbowl, and her understanding that it really was because they hadn't farmed correctly. And so she really inspired me to try to understand soil health, you know, and how agriculture could be healthy for the land and the environment. And I think over time, I've also come to reflect on, you know, I come from a settler colonial lineage, how do you heal that kind of lineage, not being indigenous to a place? How can I find a way into living on this continent that has a lot more humility, you know, then that first wave of settlers that my people come from? So anyway, I mean, that's kind of been with me all along. And I found my way into a research career in my mid 20s. And immediately started looking into how agriculture can be part of climate change solutions, and how sustainable agriculture can both help farmers be more resilient to the impacts of climate change, which are very much seen in my home state of Montana. And at the same time, you know, could farmers possibly store carbon in the soil? That has really intrigued me. So I sort of started this book with that question, because I was hearing very different things from colleagues, some people were saying, oh, yeah, we can draw down a lot of greenhouse gas emissions with regenerative agriculture with these kinds of techniques of soil building cover crops, and no till and compost. And other people were saying, uh-uh, this is a distraction. Really, what we need to focus on is shifting our energy economy away from fossil fuels, and just paying farmers to, you know, cover crop isn't as powerful a solution as is being promoted. So I started this book wondering like, okay, which of these two things is right? You know, is this a really important climate solution, regenerative agriculture? Or is it being overhyped? And I think what I found out was that, you know, people mean more than one thing by regenerative agriculture. And if you are talking about keeping agricultural business as usual, in places like the North American continent, but just sort of grafting on a few individual practices, like a little bit of no till a little bit of cover cropping, that is, in fact, just total smoke and mirrors that's gonna solve climate change. But there's another group of people, and particularly Indigenous communities and communities of colour, who have a different relationship to the history of agriculture on this continent over the last few 100 years, who have no interest in business as usual, who are talking about a form of regenerative agriculture that's much more about true healing of land and of these processes that have happened over the past couple of hundred years. So that is now what I'm most interested in learning about is that vision of regenerative agriculture, and how do we make that a reality?
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:Yeah, and I was going to ask you about this in a bit. But it's interesting to hear you talk about your own family history, because family history in general, and the history of land two is a hugely important part of the book, right? And specifically, even talking about the Dust Bowl, when I was reading a part of your book that covered that, it struck me that it was challenging the idea in some ways that environmental breakdown is a very recent thing. That actually it's been this much longer, slower process, and even maybe challenged ideas that industrialisation is the key aspect of climate breakdown. I mean, I suppose you could put Western models of farming into a bracket of industrialisation, but it probably predates that. Do you think that proper understandings of history are necessary for people working on these issues, engaging with these issues? How can we increase people's understanding of history of this kind of area?
Liz:That's a great question, Bertie. And I think you're absolutely right, that history is deeply, deeply important. When you're thinking about, you know, how do we mitigate or solve or respond to climate change? And I think oftentimes, climate change does get presented as this new challenge. But it arises from a set of challenges that have been with us for a very long time. You're absolutely right, Bertie, I think history is critical to this conversation about responding to climate change, because even if, you know, scientists only started looking at the Keeling Curve, sometime of the second half of the 20th century, the processes that have given us climate change this process of extracting what used to be underground, and now volatilising it into the atmosphere, and even creating an economy that is set up to be extractive, those are at least 400 or 500 years old. And if you want to reverse them, I think you really have to understand their root causes. You know, you don't want to put a lot of time and energy into some kind of a climate solution that sort of changes the technology but doesn't change the underlying logic because then as we've seen so many times over the course of the last few decades, you just have a new resource problem. You've just shifted the burden, you haven't actually changed the fundamental dynamic that's leading to, you know, just an ecologically unsustainable situation. So I bring a lot of history into my classes. I think it's helpful for students to know that they are not the first generation to face some of these questions that they, you know, they stand on big shoulders of really powerful ancestors in many cases who have a lot to offer in terms of insights from earlier versions of this crisis. And I do think it's important to go beyond just thinking about the Industrial Revolution and technological causes of this crisis, to think about deeper political, economic structures that then brought forth the technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Those technologies were interesting to an economy that had already decided it was going to have this extractive model.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:I guess we should kind of go over what are the climate advantages of different models of farming? And what are the issues with our current models? So I mean, you talk about quite a lot of different traditions of agriculture and humans interactions with nature that some of the kind of recurring things are polycultural not monocultural approaches to growing things. So having a wide biodiversity of crops, that kind of thing, maybe perennial plants or trying to always have roots in the ground in the area that we're cultivating, right? Rotation of livestock. And this idea of the Law of Return in that, you know, everything that leaves the soil must somehow be put back. Could you briefly I know, it's a lot to cover, but kind of summarise some of the advantages in climate terms, in environmental terms to some of these methods?
Liz:Yeah, I mean, I think it's great to start with just recognising that natural ecosystems do a brilliant job of the carbon cycle. So I think the farming systems that do a brilliant job of managing a healthy carbon cycle and a healthy nitrogen cycle, which is also critical to climate change, they mimic the design of those natural ecosystems. And so you know, for this book, I learned from Latrice Tatsey, who's working on buffalo restoration Blackfeet Nation in northwestern Montana, I learned from Olivia Watkins, who's forest farming, which an agroforestry practice in North Carolina, Aidee Guzman, who studied these polycultural traditions, that a lot of immigrant farmers using in the Central Valley of California, and Nikiko Masumoto, who's also in the Central Valley, and comes from this deep tradition of cycling these nutrients, these Law of Return type of practices, which is, you know, cover cropping, composting, these are all these kinds of ways of putting back, you know, more than you take from the land. And these are all essentially practices that deeply mimic a particular natural ecosystem. So a food system based on buffalo grazing, or even, you know, cattle who are rotated in ways that mimic the patterns of buffalo, that is a mimic of a prairie ecosystem. You know, I mean, it is a prairie ecosystem, if you're talking about the ultimate model of ecological restoration that Latrice is pursuing, which is, you know, buffalo without fences across their entire historical range. And so the closer you can get to the way that prairie ecosystem actually functions, the more you've got the benefits of how that prairie ecosystem cycles carbon, so prairie plants, compared to wheat, you know, and the way it's been bred over the last 10,000 years, apportion a lot more of their energy and their carbon into their roots, you know, there's this constant process of these root exudates going into the ground feeding this whole microbial ecology. And that's where the magic is happening in terms of carbon sequestration. And also, you know, having those roots in the ground all year round, and having plants there is preventing soil erosion, you know, what my grandmother experienced in the dustbowl. Volatilisation of nitrous oxide, which is a very, very potent greenhouse gas that we definitely want to stop emitting from farmlands. So it's a mimic, basically, of a natural ecosystem that involves people, you know, in order to have those kinds of farm systems that over the long run, sequester carbon, because it means nothing to just put some carbon in the ground and then sell the land five years later and plough it all up. So if you want the carbon to really stay there, that involves, you know, societies and cultures that have developed around living with these natural ecosystems in ways that involve a food resource for people and also involve people sort of tending those natural ecosystems.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:I think often this kind of change feels just too big to lots of people working on climate to do in the timespan that we have, and you do generally get this sense, or I often do, that people working on climate issues recognise the need for social justice and racial justice to accompany climate mitigation, but kind of see them as the least priority because we got to do the mitigation stuff first. Whereas your book reframes that as actually no, these things would make mitigation easier. And similarly, another myth I kind of come into quite often is this idea that with mitigation and agriculture, we've just got to minimise the damage, whereas your book kind of suggests actually, agriculture could be an asset to mitigation. How do we influence people working on climate issues within the climate sphere to kind of reconceptualise some of these things?
Liz:That is super well stated, Bertie, and that is a really good question. It's one that I ask as a teacher, you know, so I get to meet these incredible climate activists, many of my students, I teach in an environmental studies program at UC Santa Barbara with over 1000 majors. It's a very popular major here. And so I encounter a lot of young people who already identify as climate activists, in some cases, climate scientists, they're deeply into climate policy. I mean this generation is really active on these issues. So people come to my classes already knowing a lot about climate change and climate policy and climate solutions. And in some cases, they come with, you know, some of these perspectives that you've just named about, you know, what we need to do right away, and what should be a priority? And so for me, I think the answer is experiential. I've just written a book, but it's very hard to describe what it feels like to be part of a land community in the kinds of ways that the people, mostly women, that I wrote about are. So the work that you know, Latrice is doing with bison, that Olivia is doing with agroforests, or that Aidee's doing with polycultures. It's, you know, obviously work that feeds people. It's work that you know, is rebalancing the carbon cycle on land. And also all these people speak about how it's central to their own sense of meaning, and their place in the world. And ultimately, I think that's what we're hungry for as humans. So when you say it makes the mitigation work easier? Of course a lot of climate problems stem from this kind of like economy of a lot of consumption. We think about like, why are we burning fossil fuels? What are we doing? And we have this kind of like overheated consumer economy. And that comes, I think, from trying to fulfil some of our most fundamental human needs, in this way that leaves us still feeling empty. And I hear that voiced by a lot of my students, and so this, even honestly, like, going on one field trip sometimes, students can feel the sense of like awe, you know, I am touching the earth, I can be a positive part of this earth community, rather than just like you said, mitigating my harm or trying to reduce my pollution. And that gives me a deep sense of belonging to something larger than myself. So, you know, for a lot of climate policy people, maybe it involves some moment of kind of stepping outside the calculations and the quantification, and that kind of connection to realise that there's a whole separate paradigm from the pie chart, where all of the little slices of pie get rearranged because you're looking at the whole thing in a different way.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:I mean, when we're talking about the whole thing, so I'll quote you, you say, 'we're going to have to question the very concept of agriculture and the bundle of assumptions that travel with the English word farm'. You also talk about, for example, how Indigenous Mesoamerican languages don't have a word for agriculture or one to describe kind of monocultural crop plantations. I was interested to kind of ask you, whether you think this is a shift that Western societies can make without radically changing in other ways, like, can we transition to this way of thinking about humans' relationship with nature within modern capitalism? And I know that, for example, of pretty much all of the case studies you go over involve some kind of collective ownership or management and things like that. Can we treat this area of life in isolation?
Liz:Yeah, that's a great question, Bertie. And I think you're right to point to the fact that this is a large scale transformation, if we're really going to imagine a food system that does not function in such a strict extractive way. I've worked on some research with other colleagues that's looked at, you know, how would we support new entry farmers. So there are a lot of young folks in particular, but not exclusively, young folks in the United States, and also in Europe, who don't have a family background in agriculture, but who very much want to be farmers, partly because they see it as a way to be environmental stewards. And also in many cases, because that work of feeding community healthy food is just very rewarding. But it's very difficult to get into farming. And so you know, with colleagues in a couple of papers, we were looking at, you know, what are the barriers and they are kind of obvious things like land access or access to markets as a small producer. And so then, you know, we sort of ended up talking about, well, what would the sort of structural policy changes need to be for people to be able to have land access, you probably need land reform, market access, you need market reforms. I'm quite excited about the idea of public procurement. You know, we feed so many people in our schools, we don't budget very much per student for those meals, but I think we should. And I think there's good public health reasons why we should. And then we should use that opportunity of public procurement to then support the kind of farming that we need. But then you also realise, you know, and I've heard these things, interviewing farmers, even in very conservative places that, you know, not having a national health insurance program, for example, is a huge barrier to people pursuing organic farming, or for that matter, a lot of other kinds of things that don't involve working for a major employer. So I do think you're right, that this transition has a lot of relationships to other social policies and other pieces of the economy. But it's a good place to start, because it's so personal and intimate. And, you know, we eat all of us every day, hopefully, you know, and I think I've seen it be a good kind of entry point for thinking about, well, these are the values that I hold around, what I would like to eat, and how I would like that to reflect my values around the land and environment. And also, you know, like cultural foods, and, you know, eating things that make me feel good. And then that can be sometimes a spur to like, what needs to change in the world, for that to happen.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:So you've discussed this and kind of broader policy implications. What are some more specific policies, like if there were to be a policy package pushed through in the US in the next year say? To enable the kind of farming methods you're talking about in the book?
Liz:Yeah, well, I definitely encourage your listeners to get into the nitty gritty. And I know you have a bunch of listeners who love the nitty gritty. So you are my people. And I recommend a couple of things to read, I recommend the Heal Food Alliance platform. So heal. It's an acronym, H E, A L, and it's a coalition of groups in the United States who are working on these issues around a more just and sustainable food system. And they've articulated a very clear platform for federal policy, but also state level policy. And in some cases, states and even cities are advancing these things faster than the federal government in the United States. And then Soulfire Farm also has a policy platform that intersects in many ways with the Heal Food Alliance, they collaborate and Soulfire Farm is a Black led farm in upstate New York. It's been around for over a decade now, they do a lot of training of new entry farmers, but also folks who are interested, they want to, you know, work in a community garden or that sort of thing. They also do a lot of racial justice training. They even do like workplace training for organisations working on food system issues to uproot racism, they do a lot. And they do a lot of policy advocacy. And they actually got Elizabeth Warren's ear during the last presidential election, and in many ways, I think helped to move some of these issues into really serious discussion in Congress. And they sort of started showing up on people's platforms in that race. So there is a bill that was co authored by Cory Booker, Senator Cory Booker, who was himself a presidential candidate and a number of others. That does spell out some of these policies. And something that was new in that bill that had not been seen in Congress for a really long time, was actually land grants of up to I think it was 160 acres for black farmers, and sort of articulating a process by which governments would buy out retiring farmers, we have, you know, an aging farmer population, and there's a lot of concern about, you know, where will that land go? If we do nothing, it'll probably end up in the hands of institutional investors. And, you know, who knows how they'll manage it. So how about, you know, we have a public buyout for those folks who want to retire, and then that land is made available, affordably, to farmers of colour, you know, maybe other beginning farmers as well, I think there's a lot to be worked out in terms of how that policy would work. But I think a sort of facilitated land transition with public investment makes a ton of sense and ultimately saves us as taxpayers a lot of money over the long haul, rather than having to, on the back end, clean up whatever those institutional investors do on that land over the next few decades.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:I wanted to ask you too about more broadly internationally, I could imagine that some listeners might hear this podcast in Western Europe or elsewhere in the world and think that sounds really interesting, but not really relevant to us. How do the forms of farming that you talked about in the book, how could those relate to say Western Europe? What policy packages can be put in place in other countries to improve agriculture?
Liz:Yeah, well, I know there is actually a lot of cross Atlantic conversation about these policies and also about these forms of farming. A group that's doing a lot of work on both EU policy and US policy and trying to influence the FAO is called IPES Food, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable food systems, and they too, have some great white papers out there on the internet. So definitely check them out. But I think in many ways, actually, US policy has a lot to learn from things that have already been done in European countries, in particular support for farmer cooperatives, which I think is essential. Because, you know, again, like my colleagues and I heard so much about the challenges of market access, and you know, the cost of equipment and things like that. And it's clear, and a lot of the people I talked to, for this book expressed it, that cooperative business models are going to be necessary for the kind of vision of relating to land that they have. So I think that's really important. Scotland has, of course, taken some really big steps toward land reform. I have a colleague, Adam Kalo, who went to Berkeley with me who's been studying that. And he's a sort of conduit, I think, between the US conversations around land reform and the experience in Scotland. And I think it is really important that we learn from one another on those things. And then there's also sort of conservation of agricultural land, which I think has been important to many countries in Western Europe who see the green belts around their cities as key to quality of life. And also, I think, even in some cases, sort of like national identity. And I think, you know, there again, we're sort of catching up in the United States. But when conservation easements were first rolled out as a legal tool in this country, it was all for wilderness conservation. And it's only very recently that conservation easements are used for agriculture, because the original thought was like, if it's a conservation easement, that means people aren't going to touch it. And then there was this realisation that wow, you know, some lands actually maybe need to be managed. And there's also, you know, ecological value as well as social value in agricultural land. So there might be a reason to write it into the title or, you know, the actual legal arrangement around that land that it has to stay in agriculture. And that's important because we have the soaring property values in and around our cities in the United States, and I know in Europe as well. And so if you do not have a mechanism to remove the development value of that property, it just won't stay in agriculture any longer unless it's sort of like, you know, some sort of an estate that wealthy people like where they hire a gardener or something like that. So I think there is a lot of value in folks, you know, sort of talking across the Atlantic about these policy models, and also the farming models, all kinds of agroforestry happening in Europe, definitely these kinds of Law of Return practices, right biodynamics and hugelkultur and, and some really beautiful polycultural farms in Europe as well.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:My third kind of policy question was, how can regenerative farming kind of fit into carbon accounting type frameworks like net zero or emission trading schemes, this kind of COP type style planning around climate? Is there a place for it there? Would it be difficult?
Liz:Yeah, I'm interested in your thoughts about that Bertie?
Bertie Harrison-Broninski:I mean, one thing that I was thinking through counter arguments, and one thing that did occur to me is that might be interesting to ask you is this idea of permanence. So if you're looking at the carbon accounting of soil, how can you guarantee that over 1020 30 years, that seemed like one possible thing that might be an issue for some people working on this kind of policy? I don't know what you think
Liz:that's a definite issue. And I hear that, and I see an opportunity for land trusts, you know, because I think it is exactly the right question. And, you know, again, also, you know, sort of like talking to the folks I learned from in this book, they all come from societies and cultures and histories, where their ancestors did have mechanisms for working out long standing guarantees, multi generational management, and we do need to do that, you know, the mechanism that I see legally, you know, right now, that's sort of best suited to that is a land trust. I think that does have to be then overlaying with cultural commitment. I think that's been a part of all successful historical, you know, long term, multi generational management of land is not just a legal agreement, but also a deep community valuing and understanding of what this, you know, collective goal is, and a sense that everybody is benefiting from managing things this way. I think about like Elinor Ostrom 's work, for example, on managing common pool resources and how people have done that in fisheries or, you know, areas where people are grazing. And so I think there needs to be a lot of attention to the legal social and cultural institutions that are going to safeguard the long term maintenance of something like an agroforest or bison prairie so that that carbon does stay in the ground. So I don't think we should sort of kick that question down the road. I think we should just like face up to that hard question for what it is. But I do also think that in terms of how this enters into those conversations, we need to be careful not to get too laser focused on just the carbon atom. And I hear that sometimes it's kind of like carbon credits, pay people for carbon farming, that sort of thing. Because I think we need to focus much more on the ecosystem. And we need to think about all of the ecosystem services and all of the players in that ecosystem large and small. And it may be that some of the benefits that are easier to account for or measure are not the carbon atoms themselves, I think we need to look at regenerative agriculture in the more macro sense of an ecosystem restoration project. And so when we think about how to measure and account for how it's contributing to climate mitigation, we need to think more broadly than just how can we measure the carbon atoms. And also, you know, again, kind of thinking about the conversations I had for this book, and some of these historical management systems that have worked really well. People didn't necessarily have the technologies to look microscopically at these elements traveling around, but they did know how to look at plants and animals in some cases, and sort of determine where the health of the land was at. And so I think we need to think about regenerative agriculture more like that. And we need to think about the full suite of how it contributes to climate policy. So that includes mitigation we can't get so focused on drive down carbon that we forget about, well, we need to mitigate nitrous oxide emissions, regenerative agriculture, the deep sense can help us with that, we need to mitigate methane emissions. regenerative agriculture, in the deep sense can help us with that, we need to haul deforestation, that's leading to a lot of carbon emissions. regenerative agriculture, in the deep sense can help us with that, and particularly, if it helps with food sovereignty for people who live in places, you know, in and around rain forests of concern. So I think we just need to make sure that the scale of analysis is at this kind of ecosystem level and that we're thinking about all of the potential ways in which you know agriculture interacts with climate, and not getting too hung up on these very, very new technologies for trying to trace where the carbon is in the soil.
Bertie Harrison-Broninski: Thanks to Lis Carlisle for coming on the show. 'Healing Grounds:Climate, Justice and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming' will be published next month by Island Press. You can also find a review of the book along with various other articles and podcasts on climate topics on our website, elc-Insight.org. We will link it in the description. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe or follow us on whatever platform you choose to listen on. We'll have more episodes up shortly interviewing various climate experts. Thanks for listening