The regenerative ag revolution starts with women: Q&A with Stephanie Anderson

A former farmer and now an assistant professor of creative non-fiction at Florida Atlantic University, Stephanie Anderson spent years interviewing female farmers, ranchers, online farmers-market subscription organizers and agricultural investing experts to learn more about a burgeoning trend she didn’t see abating anytime soon.

In her new book, From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture, the author focuses on the efforts of women focused on driving food and agricultural change in the U.S. From a mother/daughter team who run a diversified fruit and vegetable farm to Kelsey Scott, a Lakota Sioux member who runs a direct-to-consumer regenerative beef business, DX Beef LLC., each chapter tackles a different agricultural topic and someone devoted to making a change. 

“Women-run farms and ranches across America are upending conventional agriculture and going regenerative instead, with support from women-led investment funds, training programs, restaurants, food brands, and advocacy groups,” she writes.

Anderson has investigated the benefits of regenerative agriculture in other work before. In 2019, she wrote One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture, which focused not just on her years working on her family’s farm in South Dakota but profiled farmers who sought to use sustainable farming practices on their crops.

Agriculture Dive spoke to Anderson about the key themes that emerged from From the Ground Up and to find out which stories she found particularly compelling.

AGRICULTURE DIVE: When were you first introduced to the idea of regenerative agriculture, and what impact did it have on you?

STEPHANIE ANDERSON: I wanted to write something that was more journalistic in nature. I was really interested in what was happening to farmers back home in South Dakota and I could see there was a lot of struggle, and much of it was related to things like weather and sustainability, and being unable to weather high prices, and dealing with issues such as soil loss.

I interviewed Gabe Brown of North Dakota [a farmer and author of Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey Into Regenerative Agriculture], that’s when I first heard the term “regenerative agriculture,” and he told me you can’t just sustain a degraded resource, you have to regenerate resources. That really turned my thinking and led me down the path of learning about something beyond sustainability where we can actually build back resources specifically around soil.

Why did you decide to focus on women working in the regenerative agriculture sector? 

When I wrote my first book, One Size Fits None, I interviewed male farmers, and as I started looking at the movement anew when I was approaching my second book, I realized how there were a lot of women involved, and the more I talked to women the more they were saying that this is a growing trend, and that women had been there all along and weren’t always getting the kind of recognition or the focus that they deserve.

Can you share some examples of how the rising number of women involved in redesigning our food system is altering this historically patriarchal profession?

Kelsey Scott is a great example. She’s in her late twenties, highly educated, an indigenous woman from the Lakota Sioux tribe. She’s drawing on this idea of inclusivity and reciprocity with the land that extends generations in her case, and she shared with me this idea that we give back what we take from the land, which comes back to Indigenous principles of agriculture, land management, land stewardship, animal stewardship. I think she is really representative of the new generation of women stepping onto these farms.

Another great example is mother and daughter Carrie and Erin Martin, a duo working the land in North Carolina on a farm that’s been in their family for a century. They are descendants of enslaved people who were freed and were able to get this land and hang on to it. So, they’re representing all this African American wisdom of land stewardship that’s been passed down, and making it fresh for a new generation. 

It was fascinating to read about regenerative agriculture’s African American, Latino and Asian roots. What do you think most people may not know about these origin stories? 

We have short memories, and so we’ve sort of divorced regenerative from long-held wisdom that predates the industrial movement. As we move away from that industrial model, well, we’re trying to get farmers to move away from that industrial model, there is this idea that it’s new which also makes it sell a little bit more, too. I think that people want to emphasize the newness. But we also need to emphasize that this is very old and time-tested.

Were there any regenerative agricultural techniques or approaches that you found to be more consequential in how these farmers manage their crops?

The use of cover crops. This is something that is not new, and it doesn’t push boundaries, but just the basic principle of keeping soil covered, that wasn’t something that we were used to when I grew up on a farm. We used summer fallow, which helped keep land barren when it was not in use, allowing it to rest. But cover crops have changed the way that the soil processes work in ways that really make a massive difference. 

What do you think about the younger generations embracing regenerative practices more so than older generations do, generally?

It is incredibly exciting to speak with young farmers to see what they’re concerned about and how they’re taking our food system in a new direction. I think the big linchpin on that is climate change. We have a generation who understands that climate change is real, and it’s not a theory for them. It’s happening before their eyes and in their communities. They understand that the model we have been using, the more industrial-dominant model, does not work in a changing climate where conditions are no longer so certain, and they realize they need to do something differently.

You wrote in the book that women tend to approach problem solving through collaboration, and they lead with empathy rather than domination. Regenerative agriculture is, as you write, the ultimate form of collaboration and empathy between people and nature. Can you elaborate more on that sentiment?

That approach translates well to forms of agriculture such as regenerative, as it’s all about balance, and working with nature rather than against it. Female farmers engaged in regenerative approaches are not just thinking about the now. They’re also thinking ahead, and women are very good at understanding how actions reverberate across time.

I could see that in the farms I visited, but also in people working on policy, the science aspect of it, and those who have supported farmers and have long understood the differences they can make on the land.