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Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming
A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that’s meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it’s meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the native cuisines of those who fled the “American wars” in Southeast Asia.
In Healing Grounds , Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people.
Cultivating this kind of regenerative farming will require reckoning with our nation’s agricultural history—a history marked by discrimination and displacement. And it will ultimately require dismantling power structures that have blocked many farmers of color from owning land or building wealth.
The task is great, but so is its promise. By coming together to restore these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet, we can heal our communities and ourselves.
In Healing Grounds , Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people.
Cultivating this kind of regenerative farming will require reckoning with our nation’s agricultural history—a history marked by discrimination and displacement. And it will ultimately require dismantling power structures that have blocked many farmers of color from owning land or building wealth.
The task is great, but so is its promise. By coming together to restore these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet, we can heal our communities and ourselves.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published March 10, 2022
50 people are currently reading
1340 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
January 5, 2024
An informative, sobering, and inspiring read by my incredible and dedicated professor. Whether you’re invested in the climate crisis, interested in US history and politics, or are passionate about regenerative farming practices, this book is a must-read. Beautiful artwork by Patricia Wakida, too!
June 17, 2022
Excellent, truly enjoyable and educational read. Carlisle does a really wonderful job of using individual profiles/stories to weave together larger histories and critical lessons about how the climate & food/ag crises are linked to colonialism, racial injustice, and damaged relationships to land. A refreshing take on regenerative agriculture and rebuilding soil carbon that links these movements back to the types of farming long practiced by BIPOC communities across the globe. A really readable book, which is delightful given its simultaneous thoroughly-researched substance and academic connections.
March 17, 2023
A beautiful imagining of possible future where we work to repair our relationship with the land via anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist practices.
May 4, 2025
A fascinating read about sustainable, regenerative farming and social, economic, and agricultural justice.
November 2, 2024
this book is incredible (brutal, but hopeful and fascinating and full of wonder from marginalized communities’ traditional knowledge applied to the needs of the world today and the steps forward. the voices most oppressed are really gonna save the world) this was dismantling and healing to read. there is so much to learn ❤️
August 2, 2022
Damn. Good book. So many important ideas.
Here are some of my favorite clips:
Globally, soils constitute a carbon repository some three times as large as the amount of carbon stored in all the plants on Earth. This soil 'carbon sink' is also three times larger than the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere. And there's good reason to think that, with the help of plants, our soils could be holding even more carbon. A lot more.
To do this, of course, they need a steady diet of carbon-rich materials - stuff like compost, mulch, crop residue, and, their favorite, plant roots. All this organic matter - microorganisms like bacteria, macroorganisms like earthworms, and the decaying life forms they like to eat - makes up the most ecologically significant portion of the soil.
Soil organic carbon isn't all the same. At a minimum, we should understand this heterogenous substance as composed of two separate pools, or 'fractions.' Think of these two fractions like a checking account and a savings account, with plants making the deposits. One fraction is available for meeting day-to-day needs - after all, microbes need to eat too. The other fraction is stashed away in association with mineral compounds underground. Building up the saving account of soil carbon involves a different set of processes than building up the checking account. Aboveground biomass - stuff like compost, mulch, and crop residue - is perfectly adequate for building up the checking account and creating fertility that farmers can immediately use. But if you want to build up a saving account too, you need roots, Carbon exuded by plant roots is nutritious and easy for microbes to digest. As a result, carbon from plant roots is five time more likely than aboveground carbon to be stabilize as organic matter in soil - the microbes gobble it right up and ultimately deposit much of it to their mineral-associated savings account.
3 suggestions for sustainable ag:
--Farming systems out to keep living roots int he ground all year long, by rotating diverse crops and using cover crops in the offseason. Perennial crops are a particularly elegant strategy, since they remain in the soil for multiple years and develop extensive root systems.
--In order to retain that stored carbon, plowing needs to be reduced or eliminated.
--And farmers might want to choose crops that allocate more of their energy to developing carbon belowground, rather than just pumping out the highest possible grain yields.
A healthy community of microbes needs a diverse diet, and if they can't get it from plants, they'll break open the soil carbon savings account to get at the nutrients inside, releasing stored carbon back into the atmosphere.
Both human atrocities and environmental destruction stemmed from European societies' effort to remake the world in their image.
The story of climate and agriculture was, fundamentally, a story about racial violence.
Following emancipation, the nation's agricultural labor would be passed on to slave descendants, then immigrants whose legal status was carefully manipulated to approximate a similarly oppressive social condition.
The very people who have the skills right now [to implement regenerative agriculture] are the very people who we have marginalized the most in this country.
We also need to think hard about who farms and why. Will agricultural labor continue to be structured as a punishment for the oppressed and a means of marking and fortifying class hierarchies? Or might it be woven into the fabric of social life for all of us, in ways that are regenerative for the human spirit and sustainable for the human body.
By coming together to rebuild these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet and its carbon cycle, we can heal ourselves and our communities too.
If the native foodways of the original prairie people in North America had not been interrupted in the way that they were by colonization, you really can't put much of a time boundary on how long those systems would have been viable.
In the hottest, driest part of North America, Indigenous peoples built a significant portion of their food system around these CAM (Crassulacean acid metabolism) plants, which historically made up about 1/3 of the plant species in their diet.
The settlers were instructed to plow up the 'virgin' prairies, which rapidly released somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of their soil carbon to the atmosphere. During the 28 years following the first European tillage, the productivity of the Great Plains decreased some 71%. A century later, much of the remainder of that soil carbon would be gone too.
In place of deep-rooted and diverse prairie vegetation, settlers were encouraged to plant large monocultural blocks of annual grains: shallow rooted plants that could not survive on their own and had to be replanted each year.
Synthetic fertilizers - far too concentrated for plants that evolved to take up slow and steady streams of biological nutrients - also turned into GHG themselves.
So steadily did barbed wire advance across the western US, that just 6 years after the patent was granted, its inventor was already manufacturing enough to circle the world 10 times.
Indigenous people who had survived the military campaigns intended to kill them - were likewise rounded up and confined within the boundaries of reservations.
To understand the origin of the climate crisis brought about by US grain ag, it's instructive to read the central piece of Federal Indian Law from this era, the 1887 General Allotment Act. Known as the Dawes Act, after the senator who proposed it, the law promised to carve up indigenous prairie ecosystems even further - not just into discrete reservations, but into discrete parcels assigned to individual tribal members. This was attractive to government officials because it allowed them to seize 'excess' reservation land deemed 'surplus'. But it was also part of a systematic strategy to erase coop land management and remake Indigenous people as individual ag producers. As one proponent of the Dawes Act put it, 'kill the Indian, save the man.'
White southerners also tried to hold on to cheap agricultural labor through a debt-peonage system that looked so much like slavery that contemporary observers were often hard-pressed to describe the difference. White plantation owners offered many former slaves the opportunity to farm a portion of their land in exchange for a share of the crop, usually between 25 and 50%...the result was often an endless cycle of debt that allowed landowners to retain their labor force indefinitely and dictate most of the terms of their work. Sharecropping, effectively a system of slavery in all but name, became the only way many capital-poor and disenfranchised southern Black people could survive financially.
Black families who did manage to acquire land were targeted, often with outright violence. More than 4,000 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, many of them landowners. An AP investigation conducted in 2001 documented a devastating 150-year pattern of land theft from Black families, corroborating the dispossession of 406 Black landowners and a total of 24,000 acres.
Mycelium is really a great teacher in terms of reminding us how collective things are.
George Washington Carver lauded the two-toned legume (black eyed pea) as absolutely indispensable in a wise crop rotation.
In the early 1900s, practices like compositing and cover cropping were not alternative or countercultural; in fact, they were considered mainstream tenets of scientific ag. (https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/ca...)
This line of education (being an ecological educator) is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people (a letter from George Washington Carver to Booker T. Washington in 1896).
Harriett Tubman's knowledge of wild plants and herbal medicine proved crucial in her ability to guide runaway slaves on long journeys through the woods, and she also used her skills to heal Union solders in the Civil War.
1/3 of the produce grow in the US is raised in the CA central valley, mostly in massive industrial monocultures.
Some researchers have found the desire to get away from pesticides is often the main reason farmworkers leave their employer and start their own farm.
Farm labor was different in El Pedregal. Whole families participated together, helping one another and their neighbors in a somewhat raucous ritual that made the long hours feel more like a party than a slog of a workday. Physical labor was interspersed with food, laughter, conversation, and music, as well as profound expressions of gratitude for the bounty of the earth - in which all of those involved would share. This is what farming looked like when it wasn't wage work for an oppressed few but an entire community's way of life.
In the Zapotec village there was no 'working class'. Rather, everyone was expected to contribute to the 'maintenance' of their household and community. Physical work was not considered unpleasant or undesirable, but simply a normal part of everyday life. Staple crops were seen as community members themselves.
Farmers who identify as Latino own just 3% of US farms. Meanwhile, they constitute 83% of the US field workers. The reason for this massive gap, researchers say, is simple. Built on plantation slavery, US ag has never evolved beyond its dependence on an oppressed workforce. 'Emancipation,' says Union of Concerned Scientists agronomist Ricardo Salvador, 'never really came to ag.'
Technically, we no longer allow slavery. But for agribusiness to maintain its current profits while selling food for so cheap, somebody still has to harvest the crop for meager wages. Somebody who's not in a position to complain.
Exploitation didn't end when Black ag workers fled southern farms in the so-called Great Migration. Rather, their place in the US ag economy was largely taken up by immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who were oppressed in nearly all the same ways. Importing temporary migrant workers from south of the border became the new means for US agribusiness to exploit noncitizen workers.
Mexicans were first recruited as temporary laborers during WW1, on 6 month visas. This arrangement was greatly expanded with the 1942 establishment of the Bracero Program, which would bring more than two million Mexicans to the US to work int he fields. Bound to a specific employer, Braceros received wages (from the Mexican government) only once they completed their contract and returned home to Mexico. The temporary workers had no recourse for exploitative treatment and abuse, which was rampant. Yet two million Mexican laborers were not enough for US agribusiness, and growers began encouraging others - w/o papers - to migrate as well.
In 1954, the US government created the first federal program to explicitly target and deport Mexican immigrants. Termed 'Operation Wetback,' the initiative deported 1.3 million people, some of whom were legally working in the country as Braceros. At the same time, Operation Wetback led untold millions of immigrant farmworkers to retreat into the shadows - in the face of the first public relations campaign to brand Mexicans as 'illegal'. Growers, initially concerned that anti-Mexican hysteria might eliminate their labor force, discovered that 'illegal' workers were even easier to exploit than temporary ones. And so it has gone, for over half a century: essential as laborers and unwelcome as citizens. Mexican immigrants and their polycultural farming traditions have been continually and systematically displaced. If we want a more regenerative food system, we'll need to replace this approach to labor with something far less hierarchical.
The structure and conditions of work are seldom raised in discussions about how to store more carbon in soils, but the two issues are powerfully connected. In our current food system, the exploitation of people and the exploitation of land are inextricably joined together. Our future food system must be one of mutual flourishing.
Because most Hmong lived far away from market centers, specialization and monoculture weren't options.
One of my colleagues refers to the soils in the Central Valley as basically hydroponics at this point.
A synthesis of recent research estimates that even with the current intensive ag practices, widespread cover cropping could store enough carbon to offset 8% of the direct annual GHG emissions from farming.
Overuse of this synthetic fertilizer contributes to climate change not once but twice: generating emissions when it's manufactured and escaping from farm fields as nitrous oxide.
Even as early organic reformers in the US were adopting Asian farming practices, the US government was pulling out all the stops to exclude Asian farmers.
By 1882, 7 our of 8 farmworkers int he state of CA were Chinese. But by then, the US had spent a decade in economic depression, spurring widespread unemployment. Blaming Chinese immigrants for taking their jobs, rural White lobbied the federal government to pass its first discriminatory immigration law: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
By 1920, Japanese farmers were growing about 1/3 of all produce in CA.
Alien Land Laws - The first such law, passed in 1913, prohibited noncitizens from owning land -a nd limited lease terms to 3 years.
In response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US government swiftly rounded up thousands of Japanese Americans - many of them citizens - and incarcerated them in internment (i.e., concentration) camps. Between 1942 and 1945, some 120,000 Japanese Americans were send to remote, makeshift prisons across the West - for no reason other than their ancestry.
Cutting back on the volume of wasted food could shave emissions by as much as 90 gigatons over the next 30 years - about six times as much as we might save by switching to electric cars.
Itadakimasu. It means I gratefully accept this food, but also, I acknowledge the laborers who grew it, I acknowledge the trees, I acknowledge the far, thank you to everybody who brought it to me.
The future of regenerative ag hinges on whether the people needed to practice it are afforded stable access to land. The possibility of belonging to a place - of being intimately connected to lives beyond our own - is central to healing our soils and our climate.
We often point the finger at farm policy for destroying our rural environment, but immigration policy and racialized incarceration are to blame as well.
By the time you start tying to quantify how many hors of Indigenous labor went into building up the soils that supported the past two hundred years of European American ag - not to mention the food and sustenance Indigenous peoples provided to settlers when they arrived - it becomes readily apparent that the US food system is almost entirely built on the work of Black and Brown people. And yet, POC own just 2% of the ag land in this country.
This stark inequality in ag land ownership is not only unjust, it's also holding back regenerative ag practices - rooted in the ancestral traditions of these very communities of color - that we desperately need to combat climate change.
It wasn't just individual farming practices standing in the way of agricultural climate solutions. It was our society's entire way of relating with land - an with each other. The extraction of carbon from soils was just one integral piece of a much large process of extraction, a process that included the theft of indigenous lands, the forced enslavement of millions of Africans, and the extortion of immigrant labor. To repair the soil, we needed to repair it all.
Climate change signals a profound imbalance, rooted in the violent restructuring of relationships between people and land that lies at the very heart of this continent's history. That means the vital work of rebuilding soil carbon is inextricably woven together with the vital work of racial justice.
So healing the climate means healing land, I asked, trying to follow Morningstar's train of thought, and healing land means healing colonization? "that's it," Morningstar said. "That's the work."
Here are some of my favorite clips:
Globally, soils constitute a carbon repository some three times as large as the amount of carbon stored in all the plants on Earth. This soil 'carbon sink' is also three times larger than the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere. And there's good reason to think that, with the help of plants, our soils could be holding even more carbon. A lot more.
To do this, of course, they need a steady diet of carbon-rich materials - stuff like compost, mulch, crop residue, and, their favorite, plant roots. All this organic matter - microorganisms like bacteria, macroorganisms like earthworms, and the decaying life forms they like to eat - makes up the most ecologically significant portion of the soil.
Soil organic carbon isn't all the same. At a minimum, we should understand this heterogenous substance as composed of two separate pools, or 'fractions.' Think of these two fractions like a checking account and a savings account, with plants making the deposits. One fraction is available for meeting day-to-day needs - after all, microbes need to eat too. The other fraction is stashed away in association with mineral compounds underground. Building up the saving account of soil carbon involves a different set of processes than building up the checking account. Aboveground biomass - stuff like compost, mulch, and crop residue - is perfectly adequate for building up the checking account and creating fertility that farmers can immediately use. But if you want to build up a saving account too, you need roots, Carbon exuded by plant roots is nutritious and easy for microbes to digest. As a result, carbon from plant roots is five time more likely than aboveground carbon to be stabilize as organic matter in soil - the microbes gobble it right up and ultimately deposit much of it to their mineral-associated savings account.
3 suggestions for sustainable ag:
--Farming systems out to keep living roots int he ground all year long, by rotating diverse crops and using cover crops in the offseason. Perennial crops are a particularly elegant strategy, since they remain in the soil for multiple years and develop extensive root systems.
--In order to retain that stored carbon, plowing needs to be reduced or eliminated.
--And farmers might want to choose crops that allocate more of their energy to developing carbon belowground, rather than just pumping out the highest possible grain yields.
A healthy community of microbes needs a diverse diet, and if they can't get it from plants, they'll break open the soil carbon savings account to get at the nutrients inside, releasing stored carbon back into the atmosphere.
Both human atrocities and environmental destruction stemmed from European societies' effort to remake the world in their image.
The story of climate and agriculture was, fundamentally, a story about racial violence.
Following emancipation, the nation's agricultural labor would be passed on to slave descendants, then immigrants whose legal status was carefully manipulated to approximate a similarly oppressive social condition.
The very people who have the skills right now [to implement regenerative agriculture] are the very people who we have marginalized the most in this country.
We also need to think hard about who farms and why. Will agricultural labor continue to be structured as a punishment for the oppressed and a means of marking and fortifying class hierarchies? Or might it be woven into the fabric of social life for all of us, in ways that are regenerative for the human spirit and sustainable for the human body.
By coming together to rebuild these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet and its carbon cycle, we can heal ourselves and our communities too.
If the native foodways of the original prairie people in North America had not been interrupted in the way that they were by colonization, you really can't put much of a time boundary on how long those systems would have been viable.
In the hottest, driest part of North America, Indigenous peoples built a significant portion of their food system around these CAM (Crassulacean acid metabolism) plants, which historically made up about 1/3 of the plant species in their diet.
The settlers were instructed to plow up the 'virgin' prairies, which rapidly released somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of their soil carbon to the atmosphere. During the 28 years following the first European tillage, the productivity of the Great Plains decreased some 71%. A century later, much of the remainder of that soil carbon would be gone too.
In place of deep-rooted and diverse prairie vegetation, settlers were encouraged to plant large monocultural blocks of annual grains: shallow rooted plants that could not survive on their own and had to be replanted each year.
Synthetic fertilizers - far too concentrated for plants that evolved to take up slow and steady streams of biological nutrients - also turned into GHG themselves.
So steadily did barbed wire advance across the western US, that just 6 years after the patent was granted, its inventor was already manufacturing enough to circle the world 10 times.
Indigenous people who had survived the military campaigns intended to kill them - were likewise rounded up and confined within the boundaries of reservations.
To understand the origin of the climate crisis brought about by US grain ag, it's instructive to read the central piece of Federal Indian Law from this era, the 1887 General Allotment Act. Known as the Dawes Act, after the senator who proposed it, the law promised to carve up indigenous prairie ecosystems even further - not just into discrete reservations, but into discrete parcels assigned to individual tribal members. This was attractive to government officials because it allowed them to seize 'excess' reservation land deemed 'surplus'. But it was also part of a systematic strategy to erase coop land management and remake Indigenous people as individual ag producers. As one proponent of the Dawes Act put it, 'kill the Indian, save the man.'
White southerners also tried to hold on to cheap agricultural labor through a debt-peonage system that looked so much like slavery that contemporary observers were often hard-pressed to describe the difference. White plantation owners offered many former slaves the opportunity to farm a portion of their land in exchange for a share of the crop, usually between 25 and 50%...the result was often an endless cycle of debt that allowed landowners to retain their labor force indefinitely and dictate most of the terms of their work. Sharecropping, effectively a system of slavery in all but name, became the only way many capital-poor and disenfranchised southern Black people could survive financially.
Black families who did manage to acquire land were targeted, often with outright violence. More than 4,000 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, many of them landowners. An AP investigation conducted in 2001 documented a devastating 150-year pattern of land theft from Black families, corroborating the dispossession of 406 Black landowners and a total of 24,000 acres.
Mycelium is really a great teacher in terms of reminding us how collective things are.
George Washington Carver lauded the two-toned legume (black eyed pea) as absolutely indispensable in a wise crop rotation.
In the early 1900s, practices like compositing and cover cropping were not alternative or countercultural; in fact, they were considered mainstream tenets of scientific ag. (https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/ca...)
This line of education (being an ecological educator) is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people (a letter from George Washington Carver to Booker T. Washington in 1896).
Harriett Tubman's knowledge of wild plants and herbal medicine proved crucial in her ability to guide runaway slaves on long journeys through the woods, and she also used her skills to heal Union solders in the Civil War.
1/3 of the produce grow in the US is raised in the CA central valley, mostly in massive industrial monocultures.
Some researchers have found the desire to get away from pesticides is often the main reason farmworkers leave their employer and start their own farm.
Farm labor was different in El Pedregal. Whole families participated together, helping one another and their neighbors in a somewhat raucous ritual that made the long hours feel more like a party than a slog of a workday. Physical labor was interspersed with food, laughter, conversation, and music, as well as profound expressions of gratitude for the bounty of the earth - in which all of those involved would share. This is what farming looked like when it wasn't wage work for an oppressed few but an entire community's way of life.
In the Zapotec village there was no 'working class'. Rather, everyone was expected to contribute to the 'maintenance' of their household and community. Physical work was not considered unpleasant or undesirable, but simply a normal part of everyday life. Staple crops were seen as community members themselves.
Farmers who identify as Latino own just 3% of US farms. Meanwhile, they constitute 83% of the US field workers. The reason for this massive gap, researchers say, is simple. Built on plantation slavery, US ag has never evolved beyond its dependence on an oppressed workforce. 'Emancipation,' says Union of Concerned Scientists agronomist Ricardo Salvador, 'never really came to ag.'
Technically, we no longer allow slavery. But for agribusiness to maintain its current profits while selling food for so cheap, somebody still has to harvest the crop for meager wages. Somebody who's not in a position to complain.
Exploitation didn't end when Black ag workers fled southern farms in the so-called Great Migration. Rather, their place in the US ag economy was largely taken up by immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who were oppressed in nearly all the same ways. Importing temporary migrant workers from south of the border became the new means for US agribusiness to exploit noncitizen workers.
Mexicans were first recruited as temporary laborers during WW1, on 6 month visas. This arrangement was greatly expanded with the 1942 establishment of the Bracero Program, which would bring more than two million Mexicans to the US to work int he fields. Bound to a specific employer, Braceros received wages (from the Mexican government) only once they completed their contract and returned home to Mexico. The temporary workers had no recourse for exploitative treatment and abuse, which was rampant. Yet two million Mexican laborers were not enough for US agribusiness, and growers began encouraging others - w/o papers - to migrate as well.
In 1954, the US government created the first federal program to explicitly target and deport Mexican immigrants. Termed 'Operation Wetback,' the initiative deported 1.3 million people, some of whom were legally working in the country as Braceros. At the same time, Operation Wetback led untold millions of immigrant farmworkers to retreat into the shadows - in the face of the first public relations campaign to brand Mexicans as 'illegal'. Growers, initially concerned that anti-Mexican hysteria might eliminate their labor force, discovered that 'illegal' workers were even easier to exploit than temporary ones. And so it has gone, for over half a century: essential as laborers and unwelcome as citizens. Mexican immigrants and their polycultural farming traditions have been continually and systematically displaced. If we want a more regenerative food system, we'll need to replace this approach to labor with something far less hierarchical.
The structure and conditions of work are seldom raised in discussions about how to store more carbon in soils, but the two issues are powerfully connected. In our current food system, the exploitation of people and the exploitation of land are inextricably joined together. Our future food system must be one of mutual flourishing.
Because most Hmong lived far away from market centers, specialization and monoculture weren't options.
One of my colleagues refers to the soils in the Central Valley as basically hydroponics at this point.
A synthesis of recent research estimates that even with the current intensive ag practices, widespread cover cropping could store enough carbon to offset 8% of the direct annual GHG emissions from farming.
Overuse of this synthetic fertilizer contributes to climate change not once but twice: generating emissions when it's manufactured and escaping from farm fields as nitrous oxide.
Even as early organic reformers in the US were adopting Asian farming practices, the US government was pulling out all the stops to exclude Asian farmers.
By 1882, 7 our of 8 farmworkers int he state of CA were Chinese. But by then, the US had spent a decade in economic depression, spurring widespread unemployment. Blaming Chinese immigrants for taking their jobs, rural White lobbied the federal government to pass its first discriminatory immigration law: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
By 1920, Japanese farmers were growing about 1/3 of all produce in CA.
Alien Land Laws - The first such law, passed in 1913, prohibited noncitizens from owning land -a nd limited lease terms to 3 years.
In response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US government swiftly rounded up thousands of Japanese Americans - many of them citizens - and incarcerated them in internment (i.e., concentration) camps. Between 1942 and 1945, some 120,000 Japanese Americans were send to remote, makeshift prisons across the West - for no reason other than their ancestry.
Cutting back on the volume of wasted food could shave emissions by as much as 90 gigatons over the next 30 years - about six times as much as we might save by switching to electric cars.
Itadakimasu. It means I gratefully accept this food, but also, I acknowledge the laborers who grew it, I acknowledge the trees, I acknowledge the far, thank you to everybody who brought it to me.
The future of regenerative ag hinges on whether the people needed to practice it are afforded stable access to land. The possibility of belonging to a place - of being intimately connected to lives beyond our own - is central to healing our soils and our climate.
We often point the finger at farm policy for destroying our rural environment, but immigration policy and racialized incarceration are to blame as well.
By the time you start tying to quantify how many hors of Indigenous labor went into building up the soils that supported the past two hundred years of European American ag - not to mention the food and sustenance Indigenous peoples provided to settlers when they arrived - it becomes readily apparent that the US food system is almost entirely built on the work of Black and Brown people. And yet, POC own just 2% of the ag land in this country.
This stark inequality in ag land ownership is not only unjust, it's also holding back regenerative ag practices - rooted in the ancestral traditions of these very communities of color - that we desperately need to combat climate change.
It wasn't just individual farming practices standing in the way of agricultural climate solutions. It was our society's entire way of relating with land - an with each other. The extraction of carbon from soils was just one integral piece of a much large process of extraction, a process that included the theft of indigenous lands, the forced enslavement of millions of Africans, and the extortion of immigrant labor. To repair the soil, we needed to repair it all.
Climate change signals a profound imbalance, rooted in the violent restructuring of relationships between people and land that lies at the very heart of this continent's history. That means the vital work of rebuilding soil carbon is inextricably woven together with the vital work of racial justice.
So healing the climate means healing land, I asked, trying to follow Morningstar's train of thought, and healing land means healing colonization? "that's it," Morningstar said. "That's the work."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 9, 2022
Fantastic book that weaves together the ancestral farming traditions of Indigenous, Black, Latino, and Hmong communities and shows us what we can learn from them. We as a culture desperately need to turn to these wise ways of farming if we want to stop the climate crisis from happening, and continue to grow a diverse array of food well into the future.
February 27, 2023
bring back the buffalo
October 2, 2023
As someone who reads regenerative agriculture and food news the way most people follow the uh, regular news, this book does not come as (sorry I'm wincing as I write this) news to me. However! This book fulfills its brief perfectly, and I honestly think Liz Carlisle's background as a country singer helpfully informs her approach to making things understandable and compelling. If you can relate to the following, give this book a try!
1. Are you interested in how agriculture can be part of the solution to climate change, and are you curious or at least skeptical about what you've heard so far?
2. Are you only interested in (1) enough to read a tight 177 pages about it?
3. Can you relate, or imagine you could relate, to the following passage, which is part of the book's conclusion?
"...I realized how fully my understanding of regenerative agriculture had shifted. In the beginning, I'd pored over research papers about carbon sequestration and soil organic matter, trying to pin down the potential for agricultural climate solutions in technical terms. Then I'd started visiting farmers, hoping to learn about the regenerative practices they were implementing to capture carbon and reduce emissions. But when it became clear to me that many of the communities with the strongest commitments to a regenerative food system were lacking secure access to land, I had to take a step back. It wasn't just individual farming practices standing in the way of agricultural climate solutions. It was our society's entire way of relating with land - and with each other. The extraction of carbon from soils was just one integral piece of a much larger process of extraction, a process that included the theft of indigenous lands, the forced enslavement of millions of Africans, and the extortion of immigrant labor. To repair the soil, we needed to repair it all."
Thanks to this author, I finally have something succinct to point to when I tell people - sober! mind you - that everything is connected to everything else and agriculture is the means through which I've discovered that.
1. Are you interested in how agriculture can be part of the solution to climate change, and are you curious or at least skeptical about what you've heard so far?
2. Are you only interested in (1) enough to read a tight 177 pages about it?
3. Can you relate, or imagine you could relate, to the following passage, which is part of the book's conclusion?
"...I realized how fully my understanding of regenerative agriculture had shifted. In the beginning, I'd pored over research papers about carbon sequestration and soil organic matter, trying to pin down the potential for agricultural climate solutions in technical terms. Then I'd started visiting farmers, hoping to learn about the regenerative practices they were implementing to capture carbon and reduce emissions. But when it became clear to me that many of the communities with the strongest commitments to a regenerative food system were lacking secure access to land, I had to take a step back. It wasn't just individual farming practices standing in the way of agricultural climate solutions. It was our society's entire way of relating with land - and with each other. The extraction of carbon from soils was just one integral piece of a much larger process of extraction, a process that included the theft of indigenous lands, the forced enslavement of millions of Africans, and the extortion of immigrant labor. To repair the soil, we needed to repair it all."
Thanks to this author, I finally have something succinct to point to when I tell people - sober! mind you - that everything is connected to everything else and agriculture is the means through which I've discovered that.
July 17, 2023
This book took a whole different direction than I had expected. I picked it up expecting to feed my interest in indigenous farming practices and learn more about how to build resilient and fertile soils all while sequestering carbon from the air. Instead I was thrown into a complicated web of racial injustice, colonialism, and land inequity. I learned a lot about the history of oppression in the US and how most of it stemmed from stealing land. The author’s take is that in order to fight climate change we must reverse these injustices by giving land back to those who know how to care for it in the first place, and those individuals are Native, Black, Latino, and Asian farmers. I am extremely against industrial-ag, and I agree these groups deserve reparations to regain access to land to foster communities and provide nutritious food. But as a white woman who is motivated to move into the regenerative ag space, I feel like I may be knocking at the wrong door according to this book. There are already other people who have long been waiting for their turns and they hold the keys to the practices.
November 19, 2025
audiobook. 4.5 🌟 round down. really enjoyed this book! i always love a nonfiction book about just food systems, but this one was the best i’ve read. i learned a lot about US and California history, but so so much more, too — especially how the regenerative agriculture movement we see blossoming now is not actually new. to make a truly regenerative food system, people, histories & relationships are key, and those are what make healthy land possible to begin with. the author really captivated my interest (i love when an author narrates their own audiobook!). i’ll be thinking about this one for a long time to come.
February 24, 2025
So good! I found this super approachable (as someone who didn’t know very much about Agriculture in the United States). I really loved the story about the re-introduction of buffalo to the N. American prairies by the Blackfeet Nation and the resulting « mosaic » of ecosystems the buffalo create through their interaction with the grasses. Helped me develop my understanding of how the climate crisis is connected to colonization and how reconnecting with the land, healing the land is a way forward.
August 9, 2024
Heaps of incredibly important information, woven into stories that too often don’t get to be told, but that must be heard if we hope to ever put an end to the systemic oppression and injustices in our country, especially in agriculture. <3!
Read
May 31, 2023Book 3 of book club, initial thoughts!
This one was really interesting. Liz Carlisle has created a clear narrative that helps succinctly depict how colonization has completely disrupted the natural order of the planet, its creatures, and its soils.
This was a fascinating book, with noteworthy spotlights focused on brilliant and deeply knowledgeable land justice advocates. They aptly attributed environmental harm to racial violence, capitalism and exploitation. Despite the swamp of horrible shit Carlisle guides us through, our attention is directed to amazing people like Stephanie Morningstar and Olivia Watkins - who are working to embrace agricultural ecosystems as communities of relatives.
Although Carlisle writes about plenty of larger philosophical ideas, she also presents concrete suggestions. We should leave living roots in the ground all year long, reintroduce bison populations across national parks, pass debt relief bills for farmers of color, introduce more affordable housing, revive chinampas, implement widespread cover cropping, and so much more.
In the course of reading this book I have added 5+ more books to my shelf. Who knew enzymes in bison saliva stimulated plant growth? I do now. There’s a lot more to learn here but Healing Grounds is a great start.
This one was really interesting. Liz Carlisle has created a clear narrative that helps succinctly depict how colonization has completely disrupted the natural order of the planet, its creatures, and its soils.
This was a fascinating book, with noteworthy spotlights focused on brilliant and deeply knowledgeable land justice advocates. They aptly attributed environmental harm to racial violence, capitalism and exploitation. Despite the swamp of horrible shit Carlisle guides us through, our attention is directed to amazing people like Stephanie Morningstar and Olivia Watkins - who are working to embrace agricultural ecosystems as communities of relatives.
Although Carlisle writes about plenty of larger philosophical ideas, she also presents concrete suggestions. We should leave living roots in the ground all year long, reintroduce bison populations across national parks, pass debt relief bills for farmers of color, introduce more affordable housing, revive chinampas, implement widespread cover cropping, and so much more.
In the course of reading this book I have added 5+ more books to my shelf. Who knew enzymes in bison saliva stimulated plant growth? I do now. There’s a lot more to learn here but Healing Grounds is a great start.
April 2, 2024
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. From the first page, this book was drag. It was so boring that I struggled to find the will to turn the page because I could not have cared less what was on the next one. The only thing that spurred me on was that I have not ever DNFed a book and I refused to let this be the first one. I have read some awful books, but this one takes the cake. I would not force this book on my worst enemy. As an active participant in the climate fight, this book made me want to quit working for a more just future. Reading about soil health is honestly worse than being stabbed in the eye with an icicle and how people compel themselves to care about the interworking of regenerative mushroom agriculture in North Carolina is beyond me. I seriously hope you heed my warning, but if not be ready to sacrifice 4+ hours of your life by reading this book. And please, I beg of you, if you are on the fence about supporting climate movements, DO NOT pick this up because it will persuade you that maybe the destruction of the earth is a necessity so no one else has to suffer through these stories.
October 12, 2022
One of the best books I’ve ever read on this subject! Carlisle does a deep dive into not only the traditional farming systems of “people of color”, black, latin, indigenous and asian peoples, but the racism and oppression they’ve faced.
These stories are especially important now as the way these peoples of color relate to the land in raising food also happens to be one of the best hopes in addressing climate change as their traditional agricultural systems do an incredible job of sequestering carbon.
Standing in the way of this needed transition are age old prejudices, and the control of land by people and entities who view land as a commodity rather than a living community of beings to whom we belong, to paraphrase Aldo Leopold. The many stories told in this book, shed needed light on the many dark corners of the injustices and oppression perpetrated against people of color throughout the history of this country. Healing these wounds is required if we are to solve climate change and move forward as a community of human beings.
These stories are especially important now as the way these peoples of color relate to the land in raising food also happens to be one of the best hopes in addressing climate change as their traditional agricultural systems do an incredible job of sequestering carbon.
Standing in the way of this needed transition are age old prejudices, and the control of land by people and entities who view land as a commodity rather than a living community of beings to whom we belong, to paraphrase Aldo Leopold. The many stories told in this book, shed needed light on the many dark corners of the injustices and oppression perpetrated against people of color throughout the history of this country. Healing these wounds is required if we are to solve climate change and move forward as a community of human beings.
May 20, 2024
Audiobook
Really fascinating look at the concept of regenerative farming. It's goals of taking care of the land and doing what's beneficial for the environment and how that benefits the farmer and the community as a whole. This is a fairly new concept to me, but I have heard of the Native American practice of planting the Three Sisters (corn, squash, and beans).
The really fascinating part of this book is how it's told. Through the eyes and work of BIPOC farmers. We meet Native Americans looking to bring back the bison, a Black farmer keeping her family's land, Latin American immigrants working their home gardens with diverse species, and Asian American bringing techniques that work to improve the land.
All these are juxtaposed to giant mono-agriculture, and even to corporate organic farms.
Another eye opening piece to this book is how the big monoculture farms are an extension of colonialism. The drive to remove Native Americans, take Black Land, and deny citizenship and rights to Asian and Latin immigrants.
Really fascinating look at the concept of regenerative farming. It's goals of taking care of the land and doing what's beneficial for the environment and how that benefits the farmer and the community as a whole. This is a fairly new concept to me, but I have heard of the Native American practice of planting the Three Sisters (corn, squash, and beans).
The really fascinating part of this book is how it's told. Through the eyes and work of BIPOC farmers. We meet Native Americans looking to bring back the bison, a Black farmer keeping her family's land, Latin American immigrants working their home gardens with diverse species, and Asian American bringing techniques that work to improve the land.
All these are juxtaposed to giant mono-agriculture, and even to corporate organic farms.
Another eye opening piece to this book is how the big monoculture farms are an extension of colonialism. The drive to remove Native Americans, take Black Land, and deny citizenship and rights to Asian and Latin immigrants.
April 25, 2023
Great exploration of regenerative farming that highlights the roots of social injustice in our food and climate crises and the necessity for social justice to truly solve those crises. This is critical since environmental texts too often neglect the social forces at play. I especially appreciated the historical accounts that tied past struggles for food justice by marginalized peoples to current struggles. I only have two critiques - first, I wish the citations were numbered in the text to track sources more easily. Second, I fear that the solutions briefly discussed that the author speaks about with her interviewees are overly romanticized - there have been plenty of shortcomings with cooperative farming and small farms throughout history - see Chris Newman's writings and the troubles that SylvanAqua Farms have faced for examples of that. However, I understand that given the brevity of the book there isn't much space to go into that.
December 17, 2024
This book gave me hope. The path towards regenerative agriculture is not hidden from us, it's just not broadly known how various communities (Black, indigenous, latin) are practicing them every day. The knowledge we need is held by these people. To appropriate Gibson's message, "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed."
Yet.
There's also plenty to learn, and unlearn, about the history of the U.S. treatment of nonwhite people who worked the soil.
Yet.
There's also plenty to learn, and unlearn, about the history of the U.S. treatment of nonwhite people who worked the soil.
September 21, 2022
If you care about how to bring about systemic change to our food systems, towards true regeneration, back to the ways Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Peoples of Colour have been farming for centuries, please read this book.
Healing Grounds is inspiring, educational, and galvanizing. Liz weaves together nuance, research, science, and heart-felt storytelling in such a brilliant way. And the acknowledgements section is the best I have ever read. It will make you misty-eyed, guaranteed.
Healing Grounds is inspiring, educational, and galvanizing. Liz weaves together nuance, research, science, and heart-felt storytelling in such a brilliant way. And the acknowledgements section is the best I have ever read. It will make you misty-eyed, guaranteed.
April 5, 2023
This was a very very impactful but short read.
I love that each chapter explores many different facets of each topic. Starting with native indigenous communities restoring prairies, Black history and Black owned land struggles, and then to Asian practices and their racial agricultural history in the US and there are sooo many things I knew in this as separate facts and this book just married all of it together.
I love that each chapter explores many different facets of each topic. Starting with native indigenous communities restoring prairies, Black history and Black owned land struggles, and then to Asian practices and their racial agricultural history in the US and there are sooo many things I knew in this as separate facts and this book just married all of it together.
June 30, 2023
4.3 stars. This book is generally well written. It seems that modern ag brings a lot of advantages but also makes some good, traditional practices lost. There are some brilliant researchers in this book. Some overcame unbelieveable obstables and live a meaningful life. Some are resourceful and really serve as the engine to connect personal story, science, and improvement together.
July 26, 2024
I love this book. I really liked the section on mutual aid systems during the Jim Crow era in the US… I have about 10 pages of notes from all the sources because I want to learn all about these farms and people and philosophies…
If you like the first portion of the book you should watch the film Gather. Also really recommend that documentary!!
If you like the first portion of the book you should watch the film Gather. Also really recommend that documentary!!
October 5, 2024
10/5 stars! As a farmer, this book is one I plan to turn to year after year. It is full of inspiration to engage with farming in ways that look different from typical organic farming in the US. Carlisle captures so eloquently the stories of BIPOC farmers and activists trying to change our food systems and social structures while articulating the inextricable connectedness of the two.
January 9, 2023
Illuminating perspective on regenerative farming -- why the social/people-based solutions (healing ancestral relationships to land) need to take center stage over the more narrow pursuit of scientific methods to sequester more carbon.
August 30, 2023
Carlisle is a fabulous writer. This should be a must read for anyone doing agriculture in the US. Although hard to imagine those in industrial ag giving this much space, I appreciated all her research and well explained history of how the current system came to be.
March 2, 2024
Great read! A new way of thinking about landownership, agriculture and soil (if I have ever actually thought about soil before). Next up is a deep dive into the end notes and all the rich source material and to purchase a second copy to share.
April 24, 2024
This was a book recommended to me by a teacher and at first I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it. Im happy to say I did and I would recommend this book to anyone with a passion for the environment!
October 9, 2024
Read this for the FIT program. Enjoyed the cultural lens in which Carlisle looks at our food system and the problems we face. Lots of inspiring stories and heart wrenching realities of our current agricultural climate.
November 18, 2024
A compelling, succinct look at the current state of farming/our food systems and how we return to a relationship of reciprocity with the land through the wisdom of Indigenous tribes and communities of color. If you’re into regenerative ag, this is a must-read.
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