Again these are the early beginnings of a completely new dispensation
of the land. Agriculture was always about natural empirical science.
Yet historically the only capital that could be brought to the land
was a meager and rationed supply of human labor, later somewhat
augmented by draft animals.
Today I can groom a forest by the simple expedient of knocking down
excess wood and dragging it to a central pathway were my power
chipper is. All this in the off season as well. My point is that
everything we want to do is possible because we can power assist it..
Thus all land can be optimized for multiple crops and the
enhancement of natural biodiversity.
Yet real biodiversity and optimization requires the active
involvement human beings who understand this. It also needs a lot of
them. There is little point in growing an orchard row if you cannot
prune the trees as needed and spend a couple of days stripping out
the fruit.
We will soon have excellent assistance in the form of dexterous
robots but we will also be always be on deck.
Putting the Culture
Back in Agriculture: Reviving Native Food and Farming Traditions
June 24, 2013
Beverly Bell
Today, Native
communities throughout the US are reclaiming and reviving land,
water, seeds and traditional food and farming practices, thereby
putting the culture back in agriculture and agriculture back in local
hands.
“At one point
‘agriculture’ was about the culture of food. Losing that culture,
in favor of an American cultural monocrop, joined with an
agricultural monocrop, puts us in a perilous state…” says food
and Native activist Winona LaDuke.[i]
Her lament is an
agribusiness executive’s dream. The CEO of the H.J. Heinz Company
said, “Once television is there, people, whatever shade, culture,
or origin, want roughly the same things.”[ii] The same things are
based on the same technology, same media sources, same global
economy, and same food.
Together with the loss
of cultural diversity, the growth of industrial agriculture has led
to an enormous depletion in biodiversity. Throughout history, humans
have cultivated about 7,000 species of plants. In the last century,
three-quarters of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops have
been lost. Thirty crops now provide 95% of our food needs, with rice,
wheat, maize, and potato alone providing 60%. Eighty-five percent of
the apple varieties that once existed in the US have been lost. Vast
fields of genetically identical crops are much more susceptible to
pests, necessitating increased pesticide use. The lack of diversity
also endangers the food supply, as an influx of pests or disease can
wipe out enormous quantities of crops in one fell swoop.
Native peoples’
efforts to protect their crop varieties and agricultural heritage in
the US go back 500 years to when the Spanish conquistadors arrived.
Today, Native communities throughout the US are reclaiming and
reviving land, water, seeds, and traditional food and farming
practices, thereby putting the culture back in agriculture and
agriculture back in local hands.
One such initiative is
the White Earth Land Recovery Project in Minnesota, which is
recovering healthy stewardship of local tribes’ original land base.
They are harvesting and selling traditional foods such as wild rice,
planting gardens and raising greenhouses, and growing food for
farm-to-school and feeding-our-elders programs. They are
reintroducing native sturgeon to local waters as well as working to
stop pesticide spraying at nearby industrial farms. They are also
strengthening relationships with food sovereignty projects around the
country. Winona LaDuke, the founding director of the project,
told us, “My father used to say, ‘I don’t want to hear your
philosophy if you can’t grow corn’… I now grow corn.”
Another revival effort involves buffalo herds. In the 1800s,
European-American settlers drove wild buffalo close to extinction,
decimating a source of survival for many Native communities. Just one
example of the resurgence is the Lakota Buffalo Caretakers
Cooperative, a cooperative of small-family buffalo caretakers, on
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The cooperative sees its work
as threefold, to “restore the buffalo, restore the native ecology
on Pine Ridge, and help renew the sacred connection between the
Lakota people and the buffalo nation.” At the national level,
the Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative is a network of 56 tribal
bison programs from around the country with a collective herd of over
15,000.
In New Mexico, Native
communities are organizing a wealth of initiatives. Around the
state, they have started educational and production farms,
youth-elder farming exchanges, buffalo revitalization programs,
seed-saving initiatives, herb-based diabetes treatment programs, a
credit union that invests in green and sustainable projects, and
more. Schools like the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, the
Institute of American Indian Arts, and the Santa Fe Indian School –
along with grammar schools, high schools, and non-profit programs –
have developed agricultural education programs. The Traditional
Native American Farmers’ Association helps farmers get back onto
the land, hosts workshops on seed saving and agricultural techniques,
and has a youth program.
The annual Sustainable
Food and Seed Sovereignty Symposium at the Tesuque [Indian] Pueblo in
northern New Mexico brings together farmers, herbalists, natural
dyers, healers, cooks, seed savers, educators, water protectors, and
community organizers. From the 2006 symposium came the Declaration
of Seed Sovereignty, which denounced genetically engineered seeds and
corporate ownership of Native seeds and crops as “a continuation of
genocide upon indigenous people and as malicious and sacrilegious
acts toward our ancestry, culture, and future generations.”
In addition to the
symposium, the Tesuque Pueblo also hosts Tesuque Natural Farms, which
grows vegetables, herbs, grains, fruit trees, and cover crops,
including varieties long lost to the region. The project is building
a Native seed library. The overarching goal is to make the Pueblo
autonomous in both food and seeds. Emigdio Ballon, Quechua farmer and
geneticist at Tesuque Natural Farm, said, “The only way we can get
our autonomy is when we have the resources in our own hands, when we
don’t have to buy from seed companies.”
The farm provides
fresh foods to the senior center, sells at the farmers’ markets,
and trains residents to begin farming themselves. The farm also grows
medicinal herbs to treat HIV, diabetes, and cancer, and makes
biofertilizer from plants. The preschoolers at the Head Start program
garden; grammar school students are beginning to, as well.
People from across the
nation come to Tesuque Natural Farms to study agricultural production
and to take workshops on pruning, beekeeping, poultry, soil
fertility, composting, and other topics. Soon the farm hopes to
create a research and education center, where people can come for
three to six months.
Nayeli Guzman, a
Mexica woman who worked at the farm, said, “What we’re doing is
very simple. These ideas are not an alternative for us, they’re
just a way of life… We need to all work together as land-based
people.
“Creator is not
exclusive, so there’s no reason we should be,” she said. “They
tell us, ‘The more biodiversity you have, the richer your soil is
going to be.’ It’s like that with people. The more different
kinds of people you have, the more able we’re going to be to
survive. We can’t compartmentalize ourselves. That’s what
industrial agriculture does.”
[i] Winona LaDuke in
“One Thing to Do About Food: A Forum,” Alice Waters, ed., The
Nation, September 11, 2006, 18.
[ii] Sharon
Beder, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on
Environmentalism (Devon: Green Books, 2002), 184.
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