EPISODE 3
Hey, you’re listening to Buzzkill. I’m Teresa Cotsirilos. So if you’ve been listening
to the past few episodes, you might be wondering how we wound up with an
agricultural system that is so unsustainable. A system that is killing the very
pollinators that it relies on. It’s poisoning
them with millions of tons of pesticides every year, and
starving them through habitat loss.
I mean, whose
idea was this? Well, industrial ag has a complicated history. But some of its
strategies can be traced back hundreds of years to a single global phenomenon:
Western colonization.
For
aggressive empires like England and Spain and, later on,
the United States, the whole point of their colonies was to extract as much
wealth from them as possible. They did that by exploiting the land. Not to
mention the people who lived there. And agriculture was one of their main
tools. Colonizers destroyed forests, wetlands, and other habitats, then planted
cash crops like rice and sugar.
Crops that
often weren’t
even native to those colonies. These crops made bank, but they also wreaked
havoc on the environment. This exploitative approach to farming is what razed forests to plant tobacco fields and paved over prairies to
create soybean row crops. And today’s
agribusiness giants are using modern versions of this strategy.
Communities
across the country are rising to the task. Last episode, we told you the story
of how a mysterious honeybee die-off revealed that tons of pesticide-laced waste was streaming
into a community. In this episode, FERN
reporter Bridget Huber travels to White Cloud, Kansas, where tribal leaders are
learning to embrace their traditional ways of agriculture and save native
pollinators along the way.
From the Food
&
Environment Reporting Network, this is Buzzkill, Episode 3, Colonialism and the
Land.
Bridget: I’m
in a pickup truck driving down a dirt road outside White Cloud, Kansas. I’m on the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska’s reservation. It’s about
12,000 acres, and the reservation straddles the eastern borders of Kansas and
Nebraska. The tribe has a little more than 4,000 enrolled members. About 600 of
them live on the reservation or in its service area.
On either
side of us are fields, mostly corn and soy. The fields owned by the tribe are
green, full of life. The others, not so much.
Philip Simmons:
It’s dead, devoid
of, devoid of any life, um, really, really,
really kind of a waste. Um, and it’s going
backwards. Um, but it’s dirt. It’s …
Bridget: Philip Simmons is part of the tribe’s farming operation, Ioway Farms. Dusty. And
actually, we took a video yesterday at the neighborhood. The field we’re looking at is growing one crop, corn. And it looks like
a lot of the crop fields around here in the late spring.
Bare dirt,
except for a few tiny corn seedlings. The plot of land is neither farmed nor
owned by the tribe. In fact, Phil’s showing it to me as an example of what they’re trying not to do these days. When the corn isn’t high, these fields look dead. But that wasn’t always the case. Up until about 200 years ago, this
stretch of land, and almost a third of the U.S., was prairie. An ocean of grass
and wildflowers stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains,
and from Texas to Canada and beyond. The Ioway people once lived on the
prairie. The state of Iowa is actually named after the
tribe. But around the 1800s, white settlers began moving west into these areas,
displacing Indigenous communities and setting up
farms. Their children and grandchildren used federal policies and violence to
get more and more land. And in the process, at least 80 percent of that
prairie, with all of its grasses and wildflowers, was
destroyed. Much of it is now commodity crops, corn, wheat, and soybean fields.
And here at
Iowa Farms, they grow corn and soybeans, too. But in recent years, the tribe
has tried a new approach to farming and caring for their land.
Phil: This is where our native prairie is going back in …
Bridget: Earlier in the spring, the farm planted native wildflowers
and grasses on what was once a crop field. Now
the plants are two or three inches tall and vivid green.
Phil: … but there is very little bare soil out there. It’s, it’s pretty, pretty well covered.
Bridget: Phil’s pointing out the
driver’s side window. He’s tall and wears a big white cowboy hat. He’s only 25, but he’s
running the tribe’s cattle operation.
Phil: I grew up actually a couple of
hills over from where we are now …
Phil’s a member of the tribe. He
lived on the reservation until he was 12 years old. After that, he moved to a
family ranch nearby. He says he grew up helping his dad farm.
Phil: Any chance I’d get, I’d stay home from school. Any opportunity he’d let me, um, to come out. My brother and I, we’d ride in the tractors and combines and stuff until we’d fall asleep, and Mom would come pick us up at 9 o’clock at night, and take
us home and we go to, well, we might go to school the next morning.
Bridget: Phil’s dad has worked on
the tribe’s farm for more than 40 years. And
for most of that time, they grew commodity crops and raised cattle. All in a
pretty standard way. Monocultures, herbicides, fertilizers. But now, the tribe’s moving away from that kind of industrial agriculture to a
method of farming that supports the whole ecosystem — soil, water, animals, and insects. But it’s not like everyone’s on
board. Phil sees the tensions in his own family, even with his brother.
Phil: He actually works for an ag
chemical company, and he’s like, okay, well,
this actually makes sense, I need to learn a
little bit more about this …
Bridget: His father, Keith, was skeptical, too. Back when this began, they
started with cover crops to protect and feed the soil. Instead of planting seeds
in fields that had been plowed bare …
Keith: And we were planting in rye, six foot high. You couldn’t even see where, you couldn’t see where nothing was. No ditches, no nothing.
Bridget: It was way more difficult than planting in an empty field.
Keith: And I’m like, this ain’t gonna work, this is nuts.
Bridget: But since then, Keith says he’s come around.
Keith: And it did work. It just, it was very stressful. Very.
Bridget: At Ioway Farms, Phil, Keith, and a number
of others are trying to balance sustainability and production. But for
them, it’s not just about farming. They’re also revitalizing some of their traditional practices
and values, things that were lost or discarded over time.
Lance Foster: Well I fully subscribe to the idea of two-eyed seeing, which is
combining Western science and history with, um, traditional sources.
Bridget: That’s Lance Foster.
Lance: I am the tribal historic preservation officer and generally
handle any kind of questions about history, language, culture, archaeology, all
kind of things.
Bridget: He’s a member of the Iowa
tribe as well.
Lance: Take the best of Western science and you take the best of
Indigenous science to try to understand your world.
Bridget:
Two-eyed seeing is sometimes referred to as
walking on two legs, and increasingly this concept is
being held up as a way to try to address modern
challenges like producing food or providing for human needs while not ruining
the environment.
Lance: We can’t undo what was
done. I can’t all of a
sudden, speaking only Ioway, I can’t
have nice black hair with my braid going down the back, going out and killing
enemies and putting their scalps in my back.
Bridget: But Lance says that doesn’t
mean you throw away what you learned in the past.
Lance: You have to take the parts that
you can still connect to. Yeah, you can’t go
back. But in the process of going forward, do we continue to destroy the world
as we are doing?
Bridget: Industrial agriculture comes from a mindset that’s fundamentally extractive. The
land is there to be used. But there’s another
way of looking at our relationship with nature, focusing on reciprocity over
extraction. And that’s the way the Ioway and
their ancestors farmed for centuries, before Europeans came to what is now the
United States.
The Ioway
homeland stretched across a large swath of the Midwest, including what is now
the state of Iowa, and parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, and
Illinois.
Lance: So
from the first contact of our people with the French, they noticed how good we
grew corn. Beans and squash, but especially
the corn is what they were looking for.
Bridget: Corn, beans, and squash. They’re often called the Three Sisters. These three crops grown together form the backbone
of a system of agriculture that was practiced by many Indigenous peoples across
what is now North America.
Christina Gish Hill: The beans nurtured the corn through helping
nitrogen return to the soil …
Bridget: That’s Christina Gish
Hill. She’s an associate professor of anthropology and
American Indian studies at Iowa State University.
Christina: …
the corn nurtured the system by bringing water to the
system. The squash prevented weeds and pests.
Bridget: Those varieties of squash also had especially sharp
stickers on their vines to keep unwanted animals out.
Christina: Raccoons and other small folks who love those vegetables
did not love squash.
Bridget: Typically, the Ioway and other Indigenous farmers in the
Midwest planted crops in the fertile bottomlands near rivers. They improved the
soil using things like muck from river bottoms and fish carcasses.
They planted
sunflower fences and rotated crops. They let fields go fallow so they could
become fertile again after harvest. They hunted the buffalo that lived on the
prairie. And the buffalo, in turn, fertilized the prairies and created habitat
for pollinators by scuffing up the ground and making wallows where flowering
plants grew.
This system,
which fed people across the continent, stood for centuries.
Lance: Because Lewis and Clark, on their trip upstream, up the
Missouri River in 1804, stopped and described the land. The parts that are no
longer really there are the bottomlands of the Nemaha River, which had a lot of
rank prairie cordgrass and, uh, beautiful clear waters. Prairie grasses that just kept sweeping off to the horizon
like an ocean.
Bridget: By the 1830s and 1840s, non-native settlers were moving into the
Midwest in large numbers. Native peoples saw their territories vastly reduced
through government treaties. Many, if not most, were pushed off their homelands
altogether and resettled onto new landscapes.
Christina: Which made growing seeds difficult and sometimes impossible
because the ecosystem was just too different.
Lance: We’ve been here since at
least 11 or 1200 AD. And if you want to use, um, white man’s time. If you want to use Indian time, we’ve been here since time out of memory, time immemorial.
Bridget: The Ioway were pushed out of Iowa and into Missouri. The
treaty that brought them to their current location in Kansas and Nebraska was
signed in 1836. It’s known as the Platte Purchase. The land set aside for the Ioway people was about 128,000
acres.
Not long
after, Presbyterian missionaries came and set up a school to force the Ioway
people to adopt European culture, including farming techniques.
Christina: U.S. governments actually hired
Euro-American farmers to work on reservations.
To quote-unquote “teach
native people how to farm.”
Lance: It was women who decided everything about agriculture.
Sometimes men might help clear the land, but it was women who were in control
of all the agriculture. The land, who got what land, assigned what land to farm
on, what was going to be grown, all that …
Bridget: But settlers and missionaries tried to convince native
people that farming was men’s work. The settlers brought a whole different system of working
the land. While Indigenous farmers had basically been practicing no-till
agriculture, the settlers introduced draft animals and plows. They pushed
native farmers to plant monocultures, and often unfamiliar crops like potatoes
and onions.
Meanwhile,
the Ioway and the government were in constant negotiations, signing treaty
after treaty. Thousands
of acres of Ioway land was ceded to the government.
For some of these treaties, there were no interpreters, and the Ioway claimed
that all of the treaties were signed under duress.
Lance: By 1861, we’ve lost
progressively different chunks of the reservation.
Bridget: By 1861, the tribe had lost nearly all of
its reservation. And then, in 1887, came
another blow. The U.S. government passed the Dawes Act. It basically took what
were communal lands that tribes had held collectively and broke them up. Tribal
members got anywhere from 40 to 300 or so acres, and they could do what they
wanted with that land. Some people kept it, some sold it, but others lost it to
swindlers or because they couldn’t pay their
taxes.
But for the
Ioway specifically …
Lance: We lost almost 90-something percent of it as of 1934.
Bridget: The law caused Native Americans to lose an estimated 90
million acres of land altogether. And today, when you visit the Iowa
Reservation, you see that parts of it are owned by the tribe and its members. And
other parts are not, resulting in what’s called “checkerboarding.”
The
combination of land loss and assimilationist policies paved the way for
European-style
agriculture to take hold. And as agricultural production intensified, as it has
all across the country in the last century, it went
that way on the Iowa reservation, too.
Lance: Business and industrial agriculture kicked in, and we had
to follow the same program here.
Bridget: Over time, the reservation’s
prairies were tilled up and turned into farmland. People grew cash crops to be
sold as commodities. Farming became a big part of the tribe’s economy, along with the casino they opened in 1998.
The farm’s revenue helped keep
services like the clinic and elder programs running. It also funded new businesses on the reservation. Then,
things started to take a turn for the worse. And it was time to come up with a
solution. And that meant looking to the past.
[midroll]
Bridget: For most farms in this country, the rule has been get big or get out. Maximize productivity and use the tools
of modern agriculture, like pesticides, herbicides, and tilling. It’s been that way for Ioway
farms, and it’s
actually how Phil learned to farm growing up, too. You heard from Phil at the
beginning of the story.
Phil: ….and actually these black cows are descended from, I believe
they…
Bridget: Phil had a flock of sheep when he was a kid and thought he’d be a vet. He’s always
been into livestock.
Phil:
Calving season was my favorite time. You know, I, I
knew how this, this whole tribe operation operated the farming and everything.
Bridget: He left the reservation to go to college, and it was there
that he learned about the environmental effects of farming and ranching.
He realized that what he really wanted to do was to
raise cattle in a sustainable way. He went down what he calls the regenerative
rabbit hole. Podcasts, books, YouTube. After he graduated, in 2022, he got a
job as a grazing assistant on a regenerative ranch in Texas.
Phil: I kind of like to think of that as working on the front
lines of regenerative ag, because, I mean, Texas is desertifying
at a crazy rate.
Bridget: After a little less than a year on the job, Phil learned of
an opportunity that would bring him closer to home.
Phil: I heard that the tribe was, was wanting to, uh, find a
caretaker for their livestock. And I was like, oh,
this is the opportunity that I’ve been waiting for. I mean, I get to go home, I get to
work on an operation that I’ve known my whole
life. And it’s
doing what I love to do, working with the livestock, regenerating the land.
Bridget: This moment for Phil came as the tribe was seeking to
divorce itself from the get big or get out approach.
Chairman Rhodd: We only had corn, soy, and
cow-calf. You know, there was monocultures.
There was hardly any diversity out there within our agricultural acres.
Bridget: That’s the tribe’s chairman, Timothy Rhodd. He’s been in that role since 2010. And as chairman, he’s head of the tribe’s
government, and he’s played a central role in
developing its farming operation.
Around a
decade ago, he started noticing some troubling signs.
Chairman Rhodd: The creeks and the streams
that are spring-fed down in the bluffs, you know, I’ve never seen this, uh, stream ever dry up and it, it, uh
dried up …
Bridget: Nitrates, which come from
fertilizer runoff, were showing up in the tribe’s
drinking water.
Chairman Rhodd: It just, you know, it’s just eye-opening moments that you’ve always seen these things flowing or growing.
Bridget: There were fewer animals, fewer trees, and fewer
wildflowers.
Chairman Rhodd: And, you know, one day that
that stops.
Bridget: But it took a certain pollinator to really ring the alarm. So one day, a tribal elder named Pete Fee, who’s also a beekeeper, comes to Chairman Rhodd.
Chairman Rhodd: He didn’t have a place to, to put his bees, and he had seven or
eight hives at that time.
Bridget: I couldn’t talk to Pete
himself when I went to the reservation, but the story goes something like this.
Several years ago, he was moving back to the reservation and looking for a
place to put his beehives.
Chairman Rhodd: And you know, I said, yeah,
that’d be great, Pete, we can ...
Bridget: Chairman Rhodd found a spot for
the hives, an alfalfa field.
Chairman Rhodd: You know, I thought it would help with,
you know, pollination when the alfalfa was flowering and provide food back to
them, too.
Bridget: As the season progressed, the farm operators did what they
always did. Sprayed the field with neonicotinoids to control pests. If you’ve been listening to the previous episodes of Buzzkill, you
can probably guess where this is going.
Chairman Rhodd: His, uh, Pete’s bees taking that chemical
back to the hives, and they all died. And we
killed Pete’s bees.
It was
devastating. And it was an eye-opener for me. And that was a wake-up call of
like, what are we really doing here?
Bridget: This happened in 2016. And at that time, things hadn’t been going all that well for Ioway Farms. The tribe was spending a lot of money on inputs like
seeds, herbicides, and fertilizer, but prices for the commodity crops they grew
were low.
There were
years in which the farm operation didn’t turn a profit. At the same time, they were seeing
problems with the environment. The weather was becoming more volatile. Floods
uprooted trees and caused topsoil to run off. But other years, there were
droughts and streams went dry. Until then, Rhodd and
the farm operators had been focused on getting as much off the land as
possible.
But he
started to realize that it wasn’t working.
Chairman Rhodd: I always say in order
for us to progress ourselves forward, we have to revert back to some of
our old ways.
Bridget: And so Chairman Rhodd started learning from other ranchers who had brought
their farms back from failure using regenerative techniques. Rhodd realized that many of those practices had a lot in
common with the way Ioway people had cared for the land traditionally.
Chairman Rhodd: So, it is our ultimate responsibility to
fix some of these issues that we have been a part of creating.
Bridget: One of the first big changes? The tribe cut down on
chemical use and stopped using neonicotinoids altogether.
Chairman Rhodd: So, you know, we don’t go out and spray a whole
field with a fungicide just because we think there’s going to be a fungus that year. We monitor those crops.
Bridget: By limiting the use of chemicals like nitrogen fertilizer,
the tribe has saved around $90,000 per year. They also started taking a close
look at their soil.
Chairman Rhodd: There’s a lot of land being eroded away by rains, wind, and other
things.
Bridget: So
they started to rehab the soil with the kinds of cover crops I’d seen with Phil.
Chairman Rhodd: Well, in the winter months, you’ll, you’ll see green, green fields.
Bridget: Rhodd says this links back directly to the way his ancestors planted crops in diverse fields using the Three
Sisters system.
Chairman Rhodd: You won’t see bare dirt soil with some of the remnants of the cash
crop that was just targeted. Um, you know, so there’s …
Bridget: Not only does this interplanting help build the soil’s fertility, it also keeps it from
washing away in rainstorms. Ioway Farms uses a
rotating mix of rye, turnips, and buckwheat year-round. They even plant their
cash crops, like soybeans, into fields where cover crops are already growing.
Chairman Rhodd: And we were able to suppress the weeds and
not apply any chemicals to that soybean crop that year.
Bridget: A decade ago, Ioway Farms mostly raised cattle and grew
corn and soy. Now they’ve added sweet corn, a
greenhouse for vegetables, hemp, chickens, sunflowers for oil, and honey. They
grow non-GMO soybeans for a local tofu
company, and their profit has skyrocketed. Before, Ioway Farms got around $13
to $17 a bushel for its GMO soybeans.
Chairman Rhodd: And we’re getting $42 now, so, um, it just goes to show you that
how your, your food is grown and raised and, and the
quality of it can offset, you know, those commodity prices and bring more value
and more dollars to your farming operation.
Bridget: Phil takes me to see a herd of cows grazing out in a green
field. He’s trying to replicate the way that
bison, elk, and wild birds interacted with the landscape that his ancestors
knew.
Phil: When the bison were in those massive herds, they would come through and they would clean off swaths of
grass. That’s how the plains, that and the
Native Americans burning off the prairies, those are how the prairie ecosystems
evolved. That’s
what we’re trying to mimic here with 114 head.
Bridget: The cows graze in relatively small areas for short periods
of time. Phil moves them frequently across the farm’s fields and pastures. As the cows move, they eat the cover
crops and mash down the vegetation, which protects the soil. When they scruff
up the soil with their hooves, it gives the seeds a chance to sprout,
increasing biodiversity and welcoming pollinators.
They also
fertilize the ground, and after the cows come through, then the chickens
follow, eating bugs.
The farm does
what’s called
adaptive grazing, which has been shown to improve the health of the soil and
the diversity of plant species and pastures.
Chairman Rhodd: And it’s just taking us hundreds of years ago when the bison had
roamed these lands and they grazed across those, they weren’t held in a pen,
they weren’t held in a fence, and they weren’t fed during the winter months a bale by a truck.
Bridget: Phil and Chairman Rhodd are
making plans to bring buffalo back to the land, someday. Until then, they’re trying to graze their cattle in a way that makes up, at
least to some extent, for the buffalo’s long absence on this landscape.
Phil: Okay, I got a planting question. Do we know if this zone
has bee balm planted in it yet? And if not, even if it does, I think it could
use …
Bridget: At the heart of all these changes on Ioway Farms is an effort to restore balance so that the
reservation’s land can meet both human needs
and those of the rest of nature.
And sometimes
that has meant taking land that’s being used by humans and inviting nature back in.
Brett Ramey:
Yeah, I think that would be a great place for some of
the bee balm since you already have sage right there.
Bridget: And that job lies with Brett Ramey. He leads the tribe’s work to adapt to climate change. He’s standing on a plowed-up patch of ground.
Up until a
few weeks ago, it was a grassy lawn with a walking trail around it.
Brett: And before it was mostly, um, fescue and, uh, I think there
was some bluegrass and then some other kind of, pretty
competitive, uh, but often are called invasive species or displaced
relatives, depending on which terminology you’re
using …
Bridget: Those displaced relatives were introduced by European
settlers all across the country, mostly to feed
livestock. But they crowded out the species that had evolved to live in this particular climate and environment. Specific species that
have been part of this ecosystem for millennia, sustaining humans and animals,
including many pollinators.
Brett: We have a few plants out here that, that have been pretty
important, I know for me, but also I think our tribe,
many tribes. And so, uh …
Bridget: Brett is running a prairie restoration workshop. A group of
volunteers, including tribal members and academics from nearby colleges, are
going to plant native plants in the ground.
Brett: And so for us, you know, like
sage, we call that háxóje. So it’s like basically like gray
grass, um, bee balm. We call it pyúbraⁿ, which is kind of like …
Bridget: Then, as small groups of volunteers fan out across the
field to get started, Brett tells me a little more about the project.
Brett: So
the name of the overall prairie restoration project is called Tánji Gri. And “tanji” is prairie and “gri” is like coming
home. And so that has a dual meaning of both, doing prairie restoration on a
reservation.
Bridget: The project aims to bring prairie back to the reservation.
But it’s also about bringing prairie and the
role of prairie stewards back to the Iowa people.
Brett: And so now we have this kind of opportunity to not only
help peel the current reservation lands that we’re
on, but also, like, reclaim that role as prairie stewards. So that’s kind of what’s all encompassed within Tánji Gri, like
prairie returning home or prairie coming home.
Bridget: A lot of the farming techniques the tribe is using are well
known. And they’re called a lot of different
things. Agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, agroecology. One thing that
often goes unacknowledged is that many of the techniques are based on
Indigenous knowledge. The Iowa Tribe is well aware of this.
So all of
the things that are happening here on the reservation are not just a way to
reclaim sustainable agriculture practices that were lost and discarded, but to
teach them to others. In 2022, the tribe got a $5 million grant from the USDA
to start a training program in regenerative agriculture.
Indigenous
farmers, or those who farm on reservations, can come here to learn from what
the tribes have been doing and why they’re doing it.
Chairman Rhodd: You know, right now I’m standing on my ancestors’
shoulders right now, working to set up this next generations, and that’s what we have to continue on, you
know, so it’s, it’s all back to training education.
Bridget: This whole process — bringing back the prairie, changing
grazing practices, reducing the amount of chemicals in the fields — it’s been a big change, and not all of
the tribe’s members are on board.
Keith: They all say we’re a bunch
of idiots.
Bridget: Keith Simmons, Phil’s dad,
says skepticism runs deep on the reservation.
Keith: You guys are doing that, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve
ever heard of.
Bridget: After Phil moved the cows, I took a trip to the gas
station, where everyone in the community gathers to get gas, meet with friends,
and buy food. I wanted to hear what people thought of what the farm was doing,
and that’s where I met a tribal member who
took me to meet her daughter,
Veronica Barber: Veronica Barber.
Bridget: Veronica has a big piece of property with a very tidy
veggie garden and flower beds. Behind her house is a big field that’s bare dirt. Ready for corn to be planted. There’s no grassy
cover crops. She’s a crop insurance agent,
which means that she sells farmers policies that protect them against losses in
case of problems like floods or droughts.
So
Veronica is out in the field talking with farmers all the time.
Veronica: I’m frustrated with, in my
personal opinion as a tribal member, the lack of
attentiveness to the farming operation. That’s
my biggest issue.
Bridget: Any changes that Ioway Farms makes could affect the tribe’s revenue, and that makes Veronica nervous.
Veronica: With the regenerative farming, I don’t disagree with it. Um, I do think that we are consuming a
lot of additives, preservatives, hormones, and
other things in our food that’s purchased at
the stores, and I think it’s affecting us.
Bridget: But she doesn’t think the
tribe is doing enough to make sure the farm is as productive as it could be.
Veronica: My philosophy is, it’s not
just putting the seed in the ground and walking away. Um, I do not agree with
how the Iowa Tribe is doing their regenerative
farming.
Bridget: Where Chairman Rhodd sees fields
that are supporting pollinators that are full of life, she sees wasted
potential.
Veronica: If you should have 40 to 60 bushel-acre beans, and you’re
only producing 20, you do the math. And you’re selling them at $40 a bushel. That’s still a loss in revenue in the end. When you get to the
bottom line.
Bridget: Because you’re still not
producing as much.
Veronica: Correct. So if you, I mean, it
doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
Bridget: And Lance Foster says that’s
a pretty common reaction. This type of conflict over how a farm should look,
how big it should be, and how it should operate is playing out in communities
across the country.
Lance: I think there’s probably
even some of our neighbors, farming neighbors, who think it’s ridiculous. If it’s not
a big fancy pickup and a million-dollar combine with corn and soybeans, they
dismiss it. It’s not part of what they understand or think is valuable.
Bridget: But Ioway Farms’
transformation is still in its early days. No
one really knows how successful it can be, or whether Veronica’s version of the math will win out. Chairman Rhodd is optimistic. He
says they’ve been able to use farm revenue to
buy back 2,000 acres of land that was lost because of checkerboarding. And, as
Lance tells me, the tribe is taking the long view.
Lance: We don’t live only for
ourselves. We live for future generations, and that’s just not the typical American way of thinking for a lot
of people. It’s about those future generations
and traditional Indian thoughts, those seven generations from now.
Shortly after we finished
producing this episode, we received word that Lance Foster sadly passed away.
He was 64.
This episode
was reported by Bridget Huber and produced by Buzzkill’s senior producer Alyssa
Jeong Perry. Special thanks to Olivia Brinn and Brittany Beck from the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. And another big thanks to Sequoia Carrillo from NPR. Buzzkill is a production of
the Food & Environment Reporting Network
and is distributed by PRX.
Adizah Eghan, Theodore Ross, Brent Cunningham, and Tom Laskawy are
Buzzkill’s
executive producers. The music arrangement and audio engineering were done by
Sound Sanctuary. Our theme song is by Sandra Lawson Ndu. Naomi Barr is our fact
checker. Funding for this podcast is provided in part by the BAND Foundation.
And I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Thanks for listening.
Hey, you’re listening to Buzzkill. I’m Teresa Cotsirilos. So if you’ve been listening
to the past few episodes, you might be wondering how we wound up with an
agricultural system that is so unsustainable. A system that is killing the very
pollinators that it relies on. It’s poisoning
them with millions of tons of pesticides every year, and
starving them through habitat loss.
I mean, whose
idea was this? Well, industrial ag has a complicated history. But some of its
strategies can be traced back hundreds of years to a single global phenomenon:
Western colonization.
For
aggressive empires like England and Spain and, later on,
the United States, the whole point of their colonies was to extract as much
wealth from them as possible. They did that by exploiting the land. Not to
mention the people who lived there. And agriculture was one of their main
tools. Colonizers destroyed forests, wetlands, and other habitats, then planted
cash crops like rice and sugar.
Crops that
often weren’t
even native to those colonies. These crops made bank, but they also wreaked
havoc on the environment. This exploitative approach to farming is what razed forests to plant tobacco fields and paved over prairies to
create soybean row crops. And today’s
agribusiness giants are using modern versions of this strategy.
Communities
across the country are rising to the task. Last episode, we told you the story
of how a mysterious honeybee die-off revealed that tons of pesticide-laced waste was streaming
into a community. In this episode, FERN
reporter Bridget Huber travels to White Cloud, Kansas, where tribal leaders are
learning to embrace their traditional ways of agriculture and save native
pollinators along the way.
From the Food
&
Environment Reporting Network, this is Buzzkill, Episode 3, Colonialism and the
Land.
Bridget: I’m
in a pickup truck driving down a dirt road outside White Cloud, Kansas. I’m on the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska’s reservation. It’s about
12,000 acres, and the reservation straddles the eastern borders of Kansas and
Nebraska. The tribe has a little more than 4,000 enrolled members. About 600 of
them live on the reservation or in its service area.
On either
side of us are fields, mostly corn and soy. The fields owned by the tribe are
green, full of life. The others, not so much.
Philip Simmons:
It’s dead, devoid
of, devoid of any life, um, really, really,
really kind of a waste. Um, and it’s going
backwards. Um, but it’s dirt. It’s …
Bridget: Philip Simmons is part of the tribe’s farming operation, Ioway Farms. Dusty. And
actually, we took a video yesterday at the neighborhood. The field we’re looking at is growing one crop, corn. And it looks like
a lot of the crop fields around here in the late spring.
Bare dirt,
except for a few tiny corn seedlings. The plot of land is neither farmed nor
owned by the tribe. In fact, Phil’s showing it to me as an example of what they’re trying not to do these days. When the corn isn’t high, these fields look dead. But that wasn’t always the case. Up until about 200 years ago, this
stretch of land, and almost a third of the U.S., was prairie. An ocean of grass
and wildflowers stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains,
and from Texas to Canada and beyond. The Ioway people once lived on the
prairie. The state of Iowa is actually named after the
tribe. But around the 1800s, white settlers began moving west into these areas,
displacing Indigenous communities and setting up
farms. Their children and grandchildren used federal policies and violence to
get more and more land. And in the process, at least 80 percent of that
prairie, with all of its grasses and wildflowers, was
destroyed. Much of it is now commodity crops, corn, wheat, and soybean fields.
And here at
Iowa Farms, they grow corn and soybeans, too. But in recent years, the tribe
has tried a new approach to farming and caring for their land.
Phil: This is where our native prairie is going back in …
Bridget: Earlier in the spring, the farm planted native wildflowers
and grasses on what was once a crop field. Now
the plants are two or three inches tall and vivid green.
Phil: … but there is very little bare soil out there. It’s, it’s pretty, pretty well covered.
Bridget: Phil’s pointing out the
driver’s side window. He’s tall and wears a big white cowboy hat. He’s only 25, but he’s
running the tribe’s cattle operation.
Phil: I grew up actually a couple of
hills over from where we are now …
Phil’s a member of the tribe. He
lived on the reservation until he was 12 years old. After that, he moved to a
family ranch nearby. He says he grew up helping his dad farm.
Phil: Any chance I’d get, I’d stay home from school. Any opportunity he’d let me, um, to come out. My brother and I, we’d ride in the tractors and combines and stuff until we’d fall asleep, and Mom would come pick us up at 9 o’clock at night, and take
us home and we go to, well, we might go to school the next morning.
Bridget: Phil’s dad has worked on
the tribe’s farm for more than 40 years. And
for most of that time, they grew commodity crops and raised cattle. All in a
pretty standard way. Monocultures, herbicides, fertilizers. But now, the tribe’s moving away from that kind of industrial agriculture to a
method of farming that supports the whole ecosystem — soil, water, animals, and insects. But it’s not like everyone’s on
board. Phil sees the tensions in his own family, even with his brother.
Phil: He actually works for an ag
chemical company, and he’s like, okay, well,
this actually makes sense, I need to learn a
little bit more about this …
Bridget: His father, Keith, was skeptical, too. Back when this began, they
started with cover crops to protect and feed the soil. Instead of planting seeds
in fields that had been plowed bare …
Keith: And we were planting in rye, six foot high. You couldn’t even see where, you couldn’t see where nothing was. No ditches, no nothing.
Bridget: It was way more difficult than planting in an empty field.
Keith: And I’m like, this ain’t gonna work, this is nuts.
Bridget: But since then, Keith says he’s come around.
Keith: And it did work. It just, it was very stressful. Very.
Bridget: At Ioway Farms, Phil, Keith, and a number
of others are trying to balance sustainability and production. But for
them, it’s not just about farming. They’re also revitalizing some of their traditional practices
and values, things that were lost or discarded over time.
Lance Foster: Well I fully subscribe to the idea of two-eyed seeing, which is
combining Western science and history with, um, traditional sources.
Bridget: That’s Lance Foster.
Lance: I am the tribal historic preservation officer and generally
handle any kind of questions about history, language, culture, archaeology, all
kind of things.
Bridget: He’s a member of the Iowa
tribe as well.
Lance: Take the best of Western science and you take the best of
Indigenous science to try to understand your world.
Bridget:
Two-eyed seeing is sometimes referred to as
walking on two legs, and increasingly this concept is
being held up as a way to try to address modern
challenges like producing food or providing for human needs while not ruining
the environment.
Lance: We can’t undo what was
done. I can’t all of a
sudden, speaking only Ioway, I can’t
have nice black hair with my braid going down the back, going out and killing
enemies and putting their scalps in my back.
Bridget: But Lance says that doesn’t
mean you throw away what you learned in the past.
Lance: You have to take the parts that
you can still connect to. Yeah, you can’t go
back. But in the process of going forward, do we continue to destroy the world
as we are doing?
Bridget: Industrial agriculture comes from a mindset that’s fundamentally extractive. The
land is there to be used. But there’s another
way of looking at our relationship with nature, focusing on reciprocity over
extraction. And that’s the way the Ioway and
their ancestors farmed for centuries, before Europeans came to what is now the
United States.
The Ioway
homeland stretched across a large swath of the Midwest, including what is now
the state of Iowa, and parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, and
Illinois.
Lance: So
from the first contact of our people with the French, they noticed how good we
grew corn. Beans and squash, but especially
the corn is what they were looking for.
Bridget: Corn, beans, and squash. They’re often called the Three Sisters. These three crops grown together form the backbone
of a system of agriculture that was practiced by many Indigenous peoples across
what is now North America.
Christina Gish Hill: The beans nurtured the corn through helping
nitrogen return to the soil …
Bridget: That’s Christina Gish
Hill. She’s an associate professor of anthropology and
American Indian studies at Iowa State University.
Christina: …
the corn nurtured the system by bringing water to the
system. The squash prevented weeds and pests.
Bridget: Those varieties of squash also had especially sharp
stickers on their vines to keep unwanted animals out.
Christina: Raccoons and other small folks who love those vegetables
did not love squash.
Bridget: Typically, the Ioway and other Indigenous farmers in the
Midwest planted crops in the fertile bottomlands near rivers. They improved the
soil using things like muck from river bottoms and fish carcasses.
They planted
sunflower fences and rotated crops. They let fields go fallow so they could
become fertile again after harvest. They hunted the buffalo that lived on the
prairie. And the buffalo, in turn, fertilized the prairies and created habitat
for pollinators by scuffing up the ground and making wallows where flowering
plants grew.
This system,
which fed people across the continent, stood for centuries.
Lance: Because Lewis and Clark, on their trip upstream, up the
Missouri River in 1804, stopped and described the land. The parts that are no
longer really there are the bottomlands of the Nemaha River, which had a lot of
rank prairie cordgrass and, uh, beautiful clear waters. Prairie grasses that just kept sweeping off to the horizon
like an ocean.
Bridget: By the 1830s and 1840s, non-native settlers were moving into the
Midwest in large numbers. Native peoples saw their territories vastly reduced
through government treaties. Many, if not most, were pushed off their homelands
altogether and resettled onto new landscapes.
Christina: Which made growing seeds difficult and sometimes impossible
because the ecosystem was just too different.
Lance: We’ve been here since at
least 11 or 1200 AD. And if you want to use, um, white man’s time. If you want to use Indian time, we’ve been here since time out of memory, time immemorial.
Bridget: The Ioway were pushed out of Iowa and into Missouri. The
treaty that brought them to their current location in Kansas and Nebraska was
signed in 1836. It’s known as the Platte Purchase. The land set aside for the Ioway people was about 128,000
acres.
Not long
after, Presbyterian missionaries came and set up a school to force the Ioway
people to adopt European culture, including farming techniques.
Christina: U.S. governments actually hired
Euro-American farmers to work on reservations.
To quote-unquote “teach
native people how to farm.”
Lance: It was women who decided everything about agriculture.
Sometimes men might help clear the land, but it was women who were in control
of all the agriculture. The land, who got what land, assigned what land to farm
on, what was going to be grown, all that …
Bridget: But settlers and missionaries tried to convince native
people that farming was men’s work. The settlers brought a whole different system of working
the land. While Indigenous farmers had basically been practicing no-till
agriculture, the settlers introduced draft animals and plows. They pushed
native farmers to plant monocultures, and often unfamiliar crops like potatoes
and onions.
Meanwhile,
the Ioway and the government were in constant negotiations, signing treaty
after treaty. Thousands
of acres of Ioway land was ceded to the government.
For some of these treaties, there were no interpreters, and the Ioway claimed
that all of the treaties were signed under duress.
Lance: By 1861, we’ve lost
progressively different chunks of the reservation.
Bridget: By 1861, the tribe had lost nearly all of
its reservation. And then, in 1887, came
another blow. The U.S. government passed the Dawes Act. It basically took what
were communal lands that tribes had held collectively and broke them up. Tribal
members got anywhere from 40 to 300 or so acres, and they could do what they
wanted with that land. Some people kept it, some sold it, but others lost it to
swindlers or because they couldn’t pay their
taxes.
But for the
Ioway specifically …
Lance: We lost almost 90-something percent of it as of 1934.
Bridget: The law caused Native Americans to lose an estimated 90
million acres of land altogether. And today, when you visit the Iowa
Reservation, you see that parts of it are owned by the tribe and its members. And
other parts are not, resulting in what’s called “checkerboarding.”
The
combination of land loss and assimilationist policies paved the way for
European-style
agriculture to take hold. And as agricultural production intensified, as it has
all across the country in the last century, it went
that way on the Iowa reservation, too.
Lance: Business and industrial agriculture kicked in, and we had
to follow the same program here.
Bridget: Over time, the reservation’s
prairies were tilled up and turned into farmland. People grew cash crops to be
sold as commodities. Farming became a big part of the tribe’s economy, along with the casino they opened in 1998.
The farm’s revenue helped keep
services like the clinic and elder programs running. It also funded new businesses on the reservation. Then,
things started to take a turn for the worse. And it was time to come up with a
solution. And that meant looking to the past.
[midroll]
Bridget: For most farms in this country, the rule has been get big or get out. Maximize productivity and use the tools
of modern agriculture, like pesticides, herbicides, and tilling. It’s been that way for Ioway
farms, and it’s
actually how Phil learned to farm growing up, too. You heard from Phil at the
beginning of the story.
Phil: ….and actually these black cows are descended from, I believe
they…
Bridget: Phil had a flock of sheep when he was a kid and thought he’d be a vet. He’s always
been into livestock.
Phil:
Calving season was my favorite time. You know, I, I
knew how this, this whole tribe operation operated the farming and everything.
Bridget: He left the reservation to go to college, and it was there
that he learned about the environmental effects of farming and ranching.
He realized that what he really wanted to do was to
raise cattle in a sustainable way. He went down what he calls the regenerative
rabbit hole. Podcasts, books, YouTube. After he graduated, in 2022, he got a
job as a grazing assistant on a regenerative ranch in Texas.
Phil: I kind of like to think of that as working on the front
lines of regenerative ag, because, I mean, Texas is desertifying
at a crazy rate.
Bridget: After a little less than a year on the job, Phil learned of
an opportunity that would bring him closer to home.
Phil: I heard that the tribe was, was wanting to, uh, find a
caretaker for their livestock. And I was like, oh,
this is the opportunity that I’ve been waiting for. I mean, I get to go home, I get to
work on an operation that I’ve known my whole
life. And it’s
doing what I love to do, working with the livestock, regenerating the land.
Bridget: This moment for Phil came as the tribe was seeking to
divorce itself from the get big or get out approach.
Chairman Rhodd: We only had corn, soy, and
cow-calf. You know, there was monocultures.
There was hardly any diversity out there within our agricultural acres.
Bridget: That’s the tribe’s chairman, Timothy Rhodd. He’s been in that role since 2010. And as chairman, he’s head of the tribe’s
government, and he’s played a central role in
developing its farming operation.
Around a
decade ago, he started noticing some troubling signs.
Chairman Rhodd: The creeks and the streams
that are spring-fed down in the bluffs, you know, I’ve never seen this, uh, stream ever dry up and it, it, uh
dried up …
Bridget: Nitrates, which come from
fertilizer runoff, were showing up in the tribe’s
drinking water.
Chairman Rhodd: It just, you know, it’s just eye-opening moments that you’ve always seen these things flowing or growing.
Bridget: There were fewer animals, fewer trees, and fewer
wildflowers.
Chairman Rhodd: And, you know, one day that
that stops.
Bridget: But it took a certain pollinator to really ring the alarm. So one day, a tribal elder named Pete Fee, who’s also a beekeeper, comes to Chairman Rhodd.
Chairman Rhodd: He didn’t have a place to, to put his bees, and he had seven or
eight hives at that time.
Bridget: I couldn’t talk to Pete
himself when I went to the reservation, but the story goes something like this.
Several years ago, he was moving back to the reservation and looking for a
place to put his beehives.
Chairman Rhodd: And you know, I said, yeah,
that’d be great, Pete, we can ...
Bridget: Chairman Rhodd found a spot for
the hives, an alfalfa field.
Chairman Rhodd: You know, I thought it would help with,
you know, pollination when the alfalfa was flowering and provide food back to
them, too.
Bridget: As the season progressed, the farm operators did what they
always did. Sprayed the field with neonicotinoids to control pests. If you’ve been listening to the previous episodes of Buzzkill, you
can probably guess where this is going.
Chairman Rhodd: His, uh, Pete’s bees taking that chemical
back to the hives, and they all died. And we
killed Pete’s bees.
It was
devastating. And it was an eye-opener for me. And that was a wake-up call of
like, what are we really doing here?
Bridget: This happened in 2016. And at that time, things hadn’t been going all that well for Ioway Farms. The tribe was spending a lot of money on inputs like
seeds, herbicides, and fertilizer, but prices for the commodity crops they grew
were low.
There were
years in which the farm operation didn’t turn a profit. At the same time, they were seeing
problems with the environment. The weather was becoming more volatile. Floods
uprooted trees and caused topsoil to run off. But other years, there were
droughts and streams went dry. Until then, Rhodd and
the farm operators had been focused on getting as much off the land as
possible.
But he
started to realize that it wasn’t working.
Chairman Rhodd: I always say in order
for us to progress ourselves forward, we have to revert back to some of
our old ways.
Bridget: And so Chairman Rhodd started learning from other ranchers who had brought
their farms back from failure using regenerative techniques. Rhodd realized that many of those practices had a lot in
common with the way Ioway people had cared for the land traditionally.
Chairman Rhodd: So, it is our ultimate responsibility to
fix some of these issues that we have been a part of creating.
Bridget: One of the first big changes? The tribe cut down on
chemical use and stopped using neonicotinoids altogether.
Chairman Rhodd: So, you know, we don’t go out and spray a whole
field with a fungicide just because we think there’s going to be a fungus that year. We monitor those crops.
Bridget: By limiting the use of chemicals like nitrogen fertilizer,
the tribe has saved around $90,000 per year. They also started taking a close
look at their soil.
Chairman Rhodd: There’s a lot of land being eroded away by rains, wind, and other
things.
Bridget: So
they started to rehab the soil with the kinds of cover crops I’d seen with Phil.
Chairman Rhodd: Well, in the winter months, you’ll, you’ll see green, green fields.
Bridget: Rhodd says this links back directly to the way his ancestors planted crops in diverse fields using the Three
Sisters system.
Chairman Rhodd: You won’t see bare dirt soil with some of the remnants of the cash
crop that was just targeted. Um, you know, so there’s …
Bridget: Not only does this interplanting help build the soil’s fertility, it also keeps it from
washing away in rainstorms. Ioway Farms uses a
rotating mix of rye, turnips, and buckwheat year-round. They even plant their
cash crops, like soybeans, into fields where cover crops are already growing.
Chairman Rhodd: And we were able to suppress the weeds and
not apply any chemicals to that soybean crop that year.
Bridget: A decade ago, Ioway Farms mostly raised cattle and grew
corn and soy. Now they’ve added sweet corn, a
greenhouse for vegetables, hemp, chickens, sunflowers for oil, and honey. They
grow non-GMO soybeans for a local tofu
company, and their profit has skyrocketed. Before, Ioway Farms got around $13
to $17 a bushel for its GMO soybeans.
Chairman Rhodd: And we’re getting $42 now, so, um, it just goes to show you that
how your, your food is grown and raised and, and the
quality of it can offset, you know, those commodity prices and bring more value
and more dollars to your farming operation.
Bridget: Phil takes me to see a herd of cows grazing out in a green
field. He’s trying to replicate the way that
bison, elk, and wild birds interacted with the landscape that his ancestors
knew.
Phil: When the bison were in those massive herds, they would come through and they would clean off swaths of
grass. That’s how the plains, that and the
Native Americans burning off the prairies, those are how the prairie ecosystems
evolved. That’s
what we’re trying to mimic here with 114 head.
Bridget: The cows graze in relatively small areas for short periods
of time. Phil moves them frequently across the farm’s fields and pastures. As the cows move, they eat the cover
crops and mash down the vegetation, which protects the soil. When they scruff
up the soil with their hooves, it gives the seeds a chance to sprout,
increasing biodiversity and welcoming pollinators.
They also
fertilize the ground, and after the cows come through, then the chickens
follow, eating bugs.
The farm does
what’s called
adaptive grazing, which has been shown to improve the health of the soil and
the diversity of plant species and pastures.
Chairman Rhodd: And it’s just taking us hundreds of years ago when the bison had
roamed these lands and they grazed across those, they weren’t held in a pen,
they weren’t held in a fence, and they weren’t fed during the winter months a bale by a truck.
Bridget: Phil and Chairman Rhodd are
making plans to bring buffalo back to the land, someday. Until then, they’re trying to graze their cattle in a way that makes up, at
least to some extent, for the buffalo’s long absence on this landscape.
Phil: Okay, I got a planting question. Do we know if this zone
has bee balm planted in it yet? And if not, even if it does, I think it could
use …
Bridget: At the heart of all these changes on Ioway Farms is an effort to restore balance so that the
reservation’s land can meet both human needs
and those of the rest of nature.
And sometimes
that has meant taking land that’s being used by humans and inviting nature back in.
Brett Ramey:
Yeah, I think that would be a great place for some of
the bee balm since you already have sage right there.
Bridget: And that job lies with Brett Ramey. He leads the tribe’s work to adapt to climate change. He’s standing on a plowed-up patch of ground.
Up until a
few weeks ago, it was a grassy lawn with a walking trail around it.
Brett: And before it was mostly, um, fescue and, uh, I think there
was some bluegrass and then some other kind of, pretty
competitive, uh, but often are called invasive species or displaced
relatives, depending on which terminology you’re
using …
Bridget: Those displaced relatives were introduced by European
settlers all across the country, mostly to feed
livestock. But they crowded out the species that had evolved to live in this particular climate and environment. Specific species that
have been part of this ecosystem for millennia, sustaining humans and animals,
including many pollinators.
Brett: We have a few plants out here that, that have been pretty
important, I know for me, but also I think our tribe,
many tribes. And so, uh …
Bridget: Brett is running a prairie restoration workshop. A group of
volunteers, including tribal members and academics from nearby colleges, are
going to plant native plants in the ground.
Brett: And so for us, you know, like
sage, we call that háxóje. So it’s like basically like gray
grass, um, bee balm. We call it pyúbraⁿ, which is kind of like …
Bridget: Then, as small groups of volunteers fan out across the
field to get started, Brett tells me a little more about the project.
Brett: So
the name of the overall prairie restoration project is called Tánji Gri. And “tanji” is prairie and “gri” is like coming
home. And so that has a dual meaning of both, doing prairie restoration on a
reservation.
Bridget: The project aims to bring prairie back to the reservation.
But it’s also about bringing prairie and the
role of prairie stewards back to the Iowa people.
Brett: And so now we have this kind of opportunity to not only
help peel the current reservation lands that we’re
on, but also, like, reclaim that role as prairie stewards. So that’s kind of what’s all encompassed within Tánji Gri, like
prairie returning home or prairie coming home.
Bridget: A lot of the farming techniques the tribe is using are well
known. And they’re called a lot of different
things. Agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, agroecology. One thing that
often goes unacknowledged is that many of the techniques are based on
Indigenous knowledge. The Iowa Tribe is well aware of this.
So all of
the things that are happening here on the reservation are not just a way to
reclaim sustainable agriculture practices that were lost and discarded, but to
teach them to others. In 2022, the tribe got a $5 million grant from the USDA
to start a training program in regenerative agriculture.
Indigenous
farmers, or those who farm on reservations, can come here to learn from what
the tribes have been doing and why they’re doing it.
Chairman Rhodd: You know, right now I’m standing on my ancestors’
shoulders right now, working to set up this next generations, and that’s what we have to continue on, you
know, so it’s, it’s all back to training education.
Bridget: This whole process — bringing back the prairie, changing
grazing practices, reducing the amount of chemicals in the fields — it’s been a big change, and not all of
the tribe’s members are on board.
Keith: They all say we’re a bunch
of idiots.
Bridget: Keith Simmons, Phil’s dad,
says skepticism runs deep on the reservation.
Keith: You guys are doing that, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve
ever heard of.
Bridget: After Phil moved the cows, I took a trip to the gas
station, where everyone in the community gathers to get gas, meet with friends,
and buy food. I wanted to hear what people thought of what the farm was doing,
and that’s where I met a tribal member who
took me to meet her daughter,
Veronica Barber: Veronica Barber.
Bridget: Veronica has a big piece of property with a very tidy
veggie garden and flower beds. Behind her house is a big field that’s bare dirt. Ready for corn to be planted. There’s no grassy
cover crops. She’s a crop insurance agent,
which means that she sells farmers policies that protect them against losses in
case of problems like floods or droughts.
So
Veronica is out in the field talking with farmers all the time.
Veronica: I’m frustrated with, in my
personal opinion as a tribal member, the lack of
attentiveness to the farming operation. That’s
my biggest issue.
Bridget: Any changes that Ioway Farms makes could affect the tribe’s revenue, and that makes Veronica nervous.
Veronica: With the regenerative farming, I don’t disagree with it. Um, I do think that we are consuming a
lot of additives, preservatives, hormones, and
other things in our food that’s purchased at
the stores, and I think it’s affecting us.
Bridget: But she doesn’t think the
tribe is doing enough to make sure the farm is as productive as it could be.
Veronica: My philosophy is, it’s not
just putting the seed in the ground and walking away. Um, I do not agree with
how the Iowa Tribe is doing their regenerative
farming.
Bridget: Where Chairman Rhodd sees fields
that are supporting pollinators that are full of life, she sees wasted
potential.
Veronica: If you should have 40 to 60 bushel-acre beans, and you’re
only producing 20, you do the math. And you’re selling them at $40 a bushel. That’s still a loss in revenue in the end. When you get to the
bottom line.
Bridget: Because you’re still not
producing as much.
Veronica: Correct. So if you, I mean, it
doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
Bridget: And Lance Foster says that’s
a pretty common reaction. This type of conflict over how a farm should look,
how big it should be, and how it should operate is playing out in communities
across the country.
Lance: I think there’s probably
even some of our neighbors, farming neighbors, who think it’s ridiculous. If it’s not
a big fancy pickup and a million-dollar combine with corn and soybeans, they
dismiss it. It’s not part of what they understand or think is valuable.
Bridget: But Ioway Farms’
transformation is still in its early days. No
one really knows how successful it can be, or whether Veronica’s version of the math will win out. Chairman Rhodd is optimistic. He
says they’ve been able to use farm revenue to
buy back 2,000 acres of land that was lost because of checkerboarding. And, as
Lance tells me, the tribe is taking the long view.
Lance: We don’t live only for
ourselves. We live for future generations, and that’s just not the typical American way of thinking for a lot
of people. It’s about those future generations
and traditional Indian thoughts, those seven generations from now.
Shortly after we finished
producing this episode, we received word that Lance Foster sadly passed away.
He was 64.
This episode
was reported by Bridget Huber and produced by Buzzkill’s senior producer Alyssa
Jeong Perry. Special thanks to Olivia Brinn and Brittany Beck from the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. And another big thanks to Sequoia Carrillo from NPR. Buzzkill is a production of
the Food & Environment Reporting Network
and is distributed by PRX.
Adizah Eghan, Theodore Ross, Brent Cunningham, and Tom Laskawy are
Buzzkill’s
executive producers. The music arrangement and audio engineering were done by
Sound Sanctuary. Our theme song is by Sandra Lawson Ndu. Naomi Barr is our fact
checker. Funding for this podcast is provided in part by the BAND Foundation.
And I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Thanks for listening.
