“Healing Grounds” Makes a Case for the Climatic and Social Powers of Regenerative Agriculture

It’s a mist-shrouded early morning and a small group of journalists is gazing openmouthed at a miraculous sight. For miles and miles, hundreds of thousands of almond trees are synchronously, pale-pinkly in bloom on the flatlands and rolling hillsides of California’s Central Valley. While the group breathes in the stunning scene, our hosts — the almond farmer on whose ranch we’re standing and several representatives from the Almond Board of California trade group — point out a variety of tinier miracles: an owl pellet plopped under a desiccated tree; grasses sprouting up between planted rows; some pollinators. The landscape feels alive.

To that end, in her book Carlisle explores the virtues of regenerative agriculture — a term that’s being extensively bandied about these days and that’s defined in so many different ways, with varying degrees of complexity, depending on who you ask. For some, it is a comprehensive set of five farming principles that are used all together to achieve soil health. For agribusiness companies like Cargill, it is defined by primarily two of those — cover crops and no-till. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, it’s “climate smart” practices — voluntary for farmers — that include any action that reduces greenhouse gas emissions or sequesters carbon.

Throughout the book, Carlisle interviews BIPOC holders of this traditional knowledge and its history, who are working to resuscitate it. In this, she occasionally covers well-trod territory, featuring some farmers who have had much written about them already, including David “Mas” Masumoto, who wrote “Epitaph for a Peach” back in 1995; leader of Soul Fire Farm and author of “Farming While Black”, Leah Penniman, as well as her spiritual opposite, the Green Revolution’s Norman Borlaug.

But where the book excels is in clearly and simply laying out the trajectory of how industrialized American agriculture came to be — starting, notably, with English colonists arriving with their maladapted seeds then proceeding to foist them on the land. Carlisle then links that history to the farming practices that led to the desecration of landscapes and soil health — think, the Dust Bowl. And then to the vast suffering imposed by those practices on enslaved African, “imported” Central American and migrant Asian workers who were tasked with wreaking the destruction, even as they themselves understood how to do it better, growing their own vibrant and earth-nurturing subsistence gardens at home.

Perhaps most hopeful of all, Carlisle finds the places where regenerative agriculture is happening sometimes right under our noses. On the plains of Northwest Montana, for example, Latrice Tatsey is working to bring back the Blackfeet Nation’s bison herds. In a North Carolina forest, Olivia Watkins is raising mushrooms on land her family has farmed for 127 years. And in California’s Central Valley, Mexican and Hmong farmworkers are tending some of the most biodiverse small farms in between the massive tracts of almonds, building up soil health and attracting a large selection of diverse pollinators in the process.

Although Carlisle hopes the tenets of regenerative agriculture will be embraced and expanded widely, it’s her students at UC Santa Barbara she is most eager to inspire. “So many of them are low-income, first-generation college students who are people of color,” she says. “They’ve come up to me and said, ‘Agriculture isn’t something that my family has encouraged me to pursue because in our family history, it’s been a source of oppression.’ I wanted to write a book in which they could see people who came from their communities, who are doing the really, really important work on the frontlines of climate change and racial justice.”

Top photo by Lela Nargi