Food Sovereignty and the Future of Regenerative Farming
As I mentioned in my first article in this series, I am a white university student in the settler population of Turtle Island (North America), aiming to challenge white settler dominance. I grew up in a rural settler town in Upstate New York, surrounded by farms. Despite this fact, I was a stranger to where my food came from, and sadly, I would say to a large degree I still am. A little more than a year ago I traveled to India to learn and do agricultural research with an Indian non-profit. Through this experience I began to think critically about who has power over a community’s food system. All of the questions I have asked so far through this series are inherently related to this question of power in settler colonial states, and I will explore them further here.
The Origins of Food Sovereignty: A Global Movement
A self-described international peasants’ movement, La Via Campesina coined the term food sovereignty in an effort to advocate for giving more power to the people to define their own food and agricultural practices. An important acknowledgment is that the movement was largely founded by Indigenous peoples of the Global South as a response to the encroachment of various colonial-capitalist actors over their food systems. Since its inception as a term, food sovereignty generally has come to mean a movement away from the dominant paradigm of food security that emphasizes maximizing agricultural output despite the costs to the environment, culture, and nutrition; and towards biodiversity, sustainability, nutrition-dense foods, and self-determination. The first formal declaration of the right to food sovereignty, the Declaration of Nyélén, asserts:
Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations
Food Sovereignty in Practice: Getting Started
I had the honor of speaking with Dr. Himanee Gupta-Carlson, an educator and farmer who lives and cultivates in the settler region of Saratoga, New York (Haudenosaunee territory). She and her husband, Jim, run a small farm called Squashville Farm:
[I]t was started in 2011…really as a backyard garden, and we always liked growing food for ourselves, and when we moved to New York from Seattle one of our goals was really to have a house with a larger yard so we could have a larger garden...
Himanee Gupta-Carlson at the Saratoga Farmers Market in summer 2020 with collard greens from Squashville Farm.
Himanee explained that their efforts to start a backyard garden got off to a rough start when they discovered that the soil was in terrible condition, depleted of vital nutrients.
The land had been a dairy farm until about WWII, and then people started planting white and red pine to harvest as lumber and paper, and all of that depleted the soil. Then the area turned residential. So basically, what we inherited was a lot of dead soil and weeds, and to top things off, one of the boys of the previous owners built a dirt bike racetrack basically in the prime garden area. My husband likes to say the soil was so dead not even weeds would grow. So, a lot of our neighbors actually encouraged us to excavate the land, [but] I couldn’t bring myself to do that and I also couldn’t afford it.
Rebuilding the Land: Lessons in Regenerative Farming
Himanee ran into a roadblock that both novice and experienced farmers run into: attempting to grow crops in less than favorable soil conditions. The extractive colonial roots of the anthropocentric view of our environment (a topic covered in my last article) and industrialized agriculture have both contributed to normalizing the farming and land practices that are depleting the world’s soil of its life-sustaining nutrients. Many farming practices, like the use of mono-cropping, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides, continue to take from the earth’s soil without giving anything back. The alternative is regenerative farming, and Himanee is no stranger to its benefits:
We began to talk to farmers that we met at farmers’ markets, and they actually encouraged us to rebuild the soil with natural means. So, for about a year and a half, we poured in tons of bags of topsoil and any manure we could find. We would go out to goat farms and fill up bags and buckets full of goat manure and bring it back and pour it into the soil. We planted way too much zucchini, which was good because a lot of it spoiled and we ended up turning it back into the soil as green manure. Gradually as we were doing all that we started to learn about incorporating animals into the rotation. So, in 2012, we got our first four chickens we named them Henny, Penny, Lucky, and Clucky. They immediately became friends, partners, and allies for us in our farming.
Crucially, she highlighted the fact that regenerative farming always involves ongoing process of learning through direct experience:
During this time, we were constantly learning about regenerative farming practices. I do not know if we used that term at the time. But we started to understand things like if you don’t mow, the weeds will actually start providing a beneficial habitat. We started learning about interplanting. I had sort of read romantic stories about the three sisters’ method but [before] I hadn’t really understood the benefits of it. So that all became part of our practice.
Creating sustainable relationships
For Himanee and many others who are engaging in some way with food sovereignty and regenerative farming, it is about not only the land or the food but also the relationships. For millennia, humans have lived in interconnected webs within the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Food is about community, but the food system that industrialized society has come to see as normal has severed many from those relationships. Himanee is in the process of rebuilding them:
Our crop yields got bigger and bigger every year, our quality improved, and I would say by 2013 or 2014 we started to have more food than we knew what to do with. So, in 2014 we also began working with a local food pantry...and started thinking about ways of incorporating healthier foods into the diets of people with lower incomes. So, I ran a food sampling program that we called Two Wooden Spoons because the argument was that you could cook just about any vegetable with a simple pan, a little bit of oil, lemon juice and water, salt and pepper, and two wooden spoons. Then in 2015, we were invited to join a farmers market in our community, and we kind of just grew every year from that.
While Himanee began selling her surplus meats and vegetables at a farmers market, the connection with her community remained anything but transactional:
I always believed in having control of your own food system on a local level, and to me that has always meant you feed yourself first, you always make sure you provide for others in your community who are vulnerable and need it. You can sell your surplus, but you don’t want to gouge anybody. You always want your prices to be fair...We do a lot of bartering. We barter for services, and we also barter for other kinds of food. The relationship-building [through bartering] is one aspect of it, the other aspect of it was about the relationship I built with customers. I don’t want them to be unhappy with what they buy. I want them to try something new. But I want them to get the most out of it. So, I talk to them about the vegetable or the meat. I talk about growing practices. I talk about nutrients to the extent that I know them.
A Challenge to Settler Colonialism
Who controls the food system is an essential question to ask when attempting to challenge any form of settler power. In the time of Covid-19, this has become increasingly clear. While Dr. Gupta-Carlson is empowering her community in Saratoga, Katsitsionni Fox revealed in my first article that she and her community in Akwesasne have been doing the same:
Some of the acts of indigenization, our practicing sovereignty, is through our planting of gardens and I think with Covid-19 going on there is a lot more people having the time to get back to planting our traditional gardens and using our heirloom seeds. It’s really important we do things like that to carry on these seeds that our ancestors have saved for generations and that we still have.
Looking to the future, Dr. Gupta-Carlson echoed this sentiment of hope:
My hope is that as winter approaches people will start to take a look into crops that the modern farmer is not growing [but that] we are growing, like dried corn and dried beans, and start to really investigate having them be part of their diet more and be part of their garden in the future.
Abenaki corn at the Squashville Farm stall at the Schenectady Greenmarket in May 2020.
In the time of Covid-19, reimagining our food systems and getting closer to our food has become a topic of increasing importance for many people. To learn more about food sovereignty and regenerative solutions to the climate crisis, join Talking Wings Productions for the upcoming North Country Art, Land, and the Environment Summit. You will hear from Katsitsionni, Himanee, and many other individuals who have close connections to these issues and most importantly their solutions. We can truly change our world if we just take the time to learn.
The North Country, Art, Land, and Environment Summit is being organized by Talking Wings Productions and will take place between September 9 and October 2, 2020. Their team is primarily comprised of Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo. You can find out more about Talking Wings athttps://talking-wings.com and the Summit athttps://nocoenvironment.org/.
Himanee Gupta-Carlson is an Associate Professor at Empire State College. A former journalist, she completed her master’s in American Studies and her doctorate in Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i. Questions of diversity, inclusion, and justice play a central role in her teaching and her research. These interests are reflected not only in the courses on American History, Asian American histories, community sustainability, and Hip Hop as an emancipatory practice that she teaches but also in her many publications and community activities. These include her book Muncie, India(na): Middletown and Asian America (University of Illinois Press, 2018); her ongoing research and teaching on Hip Hop as a community building and political organizing practice; her hands-on work in running a small farm with her husband Jim; her development of online curricula using open educational resources; and her passionate involvement with farmers' markets, food pantries, and other food and farming organizations in the Saratoga area. She currently is writing a book A Hip Hop of Food that seeks to offer a philosophical yet pragmatic approach to social justice through food security at a grassroots level. She will be a panelist in the Food Sovereignty in the Time of Covid-19 panel on September 16.
Katsitsionni Fox is an artist, filmmaker, and educator. She is the owner of Two Row Productions and you can find her new documentary “Without a Whisper - Konnon:kwe” that tells the story of how Haudenosaunee women influenced the women’s rights movement athttps://www.withoutawhisperfilm.com/. Katsitsionni will be a panelist in the Food Sovereignty in the Time of Covid-19 panel on September 16.
Banner image is a photo of heirloom white corn courtesy of Katsitsionni Fox.
