How Monoculture Undermines Soil and Communities with Dr. Joshua T. Anderson

We trace how the Great Plains still lives with Dust Bowl forces as Dr. Joshua Anderson links soil loss, monoculture, and rural decline to a culture that no longer asks if we are growing food. Caregiving for his father with MS shapes a vision to “restory” land and rebuild soil health through minimal disturbance, living roots, diversity, and cover.

Joshua T. Anderson is a writer and soil conservationist from rural North Dakota committed to flyways, foodways, and folkways. His featured article on the intersection of soil health and human health appears in the fall issue ofEarth Island Journal, and his creative nonfiction essay on the dominance of the sugar industry in North Dakota’s Red River Valley appears in Open Space(the online journal of North American Review). His recent publications on regenerative agriculture and grassland conservation appear inMary Swander's Emerging Voices,Iowa Capital Dispatch, andNorth Dakota Monitor. He was recently an artist-in-residence at the Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture in Sisters, Oregon. His soil and water conservation efforts have been featured in newspapers throughout the Great Plains, including feature interviews about his podcast, prairie conservation through arts and education, and his work to protect his home watershed. He is the co-founder of the Flyway Institute, which brings artists to rural communities in support of conservation efforts throughout the North American flyways. His first narrative nonfiction book Soil Horizons will be published by Plainspoken Books. 

In this episode:

• topsoil loss in North Dakota since the 1960s
• monoculture sugar and fuel displacing real food
• food deserts amid vast agricultural acres
• soil health principles and prairie ecology
• costs of inputs rising as organic matter falls
• cultural change and land consolidation pressures
• small diversified farms feeding communities
• language links: humus, humility, human
• excerpt reading from Rooted In Care
• forthcoming book Soil Horizons and its themes

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Transcript

Welcome To Breaking Green

Steve Taylor 0:00

Welcome to Breaking Green, a podcast by Global Justice Ecology Project. On Breaking Green, we will talk with activists and experts to examine the intertwined issues of social, ecological, and economic injustice. We will also explore some of the more outrageous proposals to address climate and environmental crises that are falsely being sold as green. I am your host, Steve Taylor. Soil conservation is not something that typically dominates the evening news. But the loss of topsoil essential for food growth is occurring in the Great Plains at an alarming rate. Many Americans would be shocked to learn how our monoculture farming practices are accelerating the loss of soil and how it grows scarcity and creates food deserts. On this episode of Breaking Green, we will talk with Dr. Joshua Anderson, who authored the featured story Roots of Care that was published in the autumn issue of Earth Island Journal. The story gives parallel narratives of how Dr. Anderson left academia to be a primary caregiver for his father debilitated by MS and his work as a soil conservationist in North Dakota. Dr. Joshua T. Anderson is a writer and soil conservationist from rural North Dakota, committed to flyways, foodways, and folkways. His featured article on the intersection of soil health and human health appears in the fall issue of Earth Island Journal, and his creative nonfiction essay on the dominance of the sugar industry in North Dakota's Red River Valley appears in open space. He was recently an artist in residence at the Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture in Sisters, Oregon. His soil and water conservation efforts have been featured in newspapers throughout the Great Plains. He is the co-founder of the Flyways Institute, which brings artists to rural communities in support of conservation efforts throughout North American flyways. His first narrative nonfiction book, Soil Horizons, will be published by Plain Spoken Books. Dr. Anderson, welcome to Breaking Green.

Dr. Anderson 2:14

Thank you for having me, Steve.

Speaker 2:15

One of the reasons we really wanted to have you on here is I read an article, a feature article in the autumn issue of Earth Island Journal. It was called Rooted in Care. So it was sort of a parallel story about you caring for your father who has been diagnosed with MS, and also about the food desert that you grew up with that he is living in in Walsh County, uh North Dakota. And also you talk about how monoculture is harming our health and the land. Tell us a little bit about it.

Parallel Stories Of Care And Soil

Are We Growing Food Or Fuel

Speaker 1 3:11

Yeah, thank you so much. You know, the the piece that I published in Earth Island Journal, you know, it it really is that kind of parallel track of the work that I was doing as at the time the district conservation manager at the Soil Conservation District, overseeing a county that is 1,294 square miles. Uh, you could fit all of Rhode Island into my home county and still have 80 square miles left over. So it's uh it's it's a big um job in and of itself. It's a county where we've lost 50% of our topsoil since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. So we tend to think about the Dust Bowl as something that ended in the 1930s, but in much of the Great Plains, and in my part of the world where I come from, um, the Dust Bowl never really ended. Um, the the kind of agriculture that we see there is is largely still losing lots and lots of topsoil. And so that um was one track that I was thinking about is how are we losing all this topsoil? Why isn't this a national story? Why aren't we covering this? Um and um the other side of it is a deeply personal side where I was back in rural North Dakota to take care of my dad, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998 when I was 13 years old. Um, and the the joke I say is that you know, I promised my dad back then when I was 13 that I would become a doctor someday and find the cure for MS. And uh he likes to tease me that, well, you did become a doctor, uh, but my PhD is in English, you know. Um, so um the best I can do is be a storyteller. Um and you know that that actually is to my mind one of the things that's missing in the broader landscape when we're thinking about agriculture, when we're thinking about uh soil health, when we're thinking about monocultures and the farm bill and all the complexities of what we describe as the food system, um, we we really don't have enough folks working on the story side. Um, and one of the things that I've been advocating is that the first step in soil restoration or ecological restoration is to restory our relationships with land. And I've seen that as one of the things that I've been trying to do through my work. In fact, when I was interviewed for the job uh in my home county to be the soil conservation district manager, I had just left a job as a professor of American literature. So a pretty big swing from one thing to the next. But I said during that interview that the word agriculture reminds me that we don't just grow food, we also grow the conditions for the culture. And how we grow food, the ways in which we go about it, will grow the conditions for a lot of other things. Um, and you know, the last thing I'll say on that is that um we often make the argument that um the methods that we're using in modern agriculture today are necessary to feed a growing population. We've got you know something like 8 billion people on the planet, it's uh hard to feed everybody, and so we've got to have these big monoculture fields uh growing that scale of food. But if you look at just my home county and just my home region and the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota, a lot of what you're gonna see growing there isn't food. Um, it's biofuel, um, so biofuel corn, it's um things to make ethanol, it's um sugar. Um, the Red River Valley in North Dakota and Minnesota is where we grow more processed sugar than anywhere else in the country through the sugar beet. And as much as I have a sweet tooth and everyone likely has kind of a soft spot for sugar, uh, the human brain is hardwired to desire it. Um it's uh it's hard to argue that that's a necessary food. And the repercussions ecologically and I would say culturally of having monocrop agriculture dominate these regions is something that we're we're now having to face and having to reckon with.

Why Soil Health Matters

Speaker 8:02

One of the things that really just jumped out to me when you were speaking, though, was that uh that the conditions of of the 1930s Dust Bowl really haven't, you know, they haven't vanished. They haven't vanished. So could you talk to us a little bit about soil conservation and why it is such an urgent issue? Um because I don't think a lot of people understand or are aware, as you said, it's not on the news, it's not national news, that we are still losing soil, topsoil.

Principles Of Soil Restoration

Speaker 1 8:38

Absolutely, yes. Uh, you know, what one of the remarkable things about Earth is that we have soil. You know, the combination of soil, sunlight, and water make the conditions possible for biological life on Earth. You can look out into our solar system, and maybe you can, you know, make a case that there might be life somewhere out there. But what makes Earth thrumming with life is soil, um, this uh just amazing um ecosystem. And I grew up surrounded by agriculture, surrounded by these huge monocrop fields. The joke in my part of the world is the glaciers from the last ice age bulldoze the landscape so flat that you can watch your dog run away for two weeks. Um, and where where I come from, you know, you can look out on that landscape, um, and you typically now you see these fields that are growing just one thing. But 200 years ago, you would have seen a tall grass prairie with bison and elk and a wide variety of grasses and flowers in this tall grass prairie ecosystem that are very deeply rooted. So a lot of those prairie plants would have had really deep roots. Um, and under the under the soil or in the soil, there it's thrumming with life. You know, um you can take something like a a teaspoon or a tablespoon of living soil, and there are more microbes in it than there are human beings on earth. Uh it's it's um one acre of living soil, if you were to add up the weight of all of the microbes in that soil, they would weigh as much as two cows. And so when we are thinking about soil health, we're really trying to ask: are we feeding those underground cows, that underground herd of microbes that give us all of our micronutrients that support the health of the plants? Um and the the kind of face of the dust bowl is those big plumes of blowing topsoil, but soil erosion of that kind is really just a symptom of deeper rooted uh poor soil health practices. And part of what I I think uh I would the case I'd like to make is that really the the conversation about um soil and soil health should really begin with are we growing food? And I like to actually quote Abraham Lincoln um on this. You know, many people are familiar with his speech, uh, A House Divided, um, you know, that famous line, a house divided against itself cannot stand. And that, of course, was a speech he delivered when he was still a senator, and he's talking about the the fissures in a divided nation over the issue of chattel slavery. And um, but that speech begins with what I think is a really important line that we can also think about in terms of modern agriculture. And the line is if we can first know where we are and whither we are tending, then we can better judge what to do and how to do it. And one way of kind of getting at this is that um the methods of modern agriculture have us believe that it has to be this way because we've we're trying to address the the issue of trying to feed people, but by and large, we're not growing food, and so instead I had to ask, what are we growing instead? And we're growing profits for uh you know uh processed food uh corporations, we're growing you know, profits for Pepsi and General Mills and folks like that. Um, we're growing a synthetic fertilizer industry, we're growing um the big implement uh industries for John Deere and similar companies like that. Um, but for the people that live in these places, we're growing scarcity. So something like 45% of rural North Dakotans live in a food desert, which is a tragic irony if you think about it. We're surrounded by agricultural land, but when I was living there, most of my lunches came from the gas station. You know, I had to eat at, I'd eat gas station pizza and gas station hot dogs, even though we're supposedly growing all this food. And so um that issue of thinking about the ongoing legacy of the Dust Bowl, um, in the 1930s, we got the soil conservation district system, which put a soil conservation district in every county in the country. And so that was one of the ways that we were trying to address this this issue is we we know that soil has to be our literal bottom line, not just in agriculture, but really throughout the culture. Without healthy soils, we do not have a future. And so it's it's imperative that everybody kind of gets in on this conversation and that we really start thinking about soil health and human health and the future of whatever we're trying to build as a nation, as local communities, soil is is the bottom line.

Speaker 14:43

Is there any reading on how much soil is being lost, how much is there, because soil is essential. Uh so where are we at with that?

Speaker 1 14:52

Yeah, so in 1960, North Dakota State University sent researchers to my home county and to other places throughout North Dakota and measured the depth of the topsoil. Um, and then they came back in the 2010s and to those exact same coordinates and measured the topsoil. And in many of those places, we had lost over 50% of the topsoil. Um, and so that's just that's just like the quantity. I mean, that's a lot of topsoil to blow away. Um, and where it ends up is in the river, it ends up in um, yeah, it ends up being blown very, very far away. But it's not just the loss quantity, it's the loss quality. Um, you know, it used to be that in my home county, we would have somewhere between like, you know, seven to eight to ten percent organic matter, which is really, really good. Um, you'd be hard pressed to find 3% organic matter or 4% organic matter today. And to be honest, in comparison to other places, that's still really good because our our topsoil in the Red River Valley has long been the envy of the world. It's some of the newest soils in the world because it's um a site of the most recent ice age in North America. So those soils are new in that regard. Um, but in uh you know, erosion is a natural process, it's part of geology, but we've accelerated it by magnitudes that are hard to quantify as a result of large-scale industrial agriculture and tillage, um, where we're tilling the soil year in and year out, and we don't have any living roots holding the soil. Um, and so soil health, the principles of soil health are actually quite simple. It's minimal disturbance. So we want to disturb the soil with as minimally as possible, with as minimal tillage, no till if possible, or minimal tillage, um, minimal chemical inputs, minimizing that as much as possible. Um, having living roots in the soil as much as possible, a diversity of species, a diversity of plant species, because the more diverse the plant species are, the more diverse the microbial habitat is, and that's good for soil health. And then soil cover or armor, so leaving residue to help keep the soil cool, help keep it covered, help keep it from leaving through erosion. Um and as you might know, the Great Plains would have also had a long history of bison grazing, um, and that contributed greatly to soil health in that region, as well as indigenous people and natural fires. So both uh managed fires by indigenous folks like the Lakota and the Anishinabe, um, and um natural fires, which would have helped the um the prairie. Um prairies really co-evolved with fire, and so fire is necessary for prairie ecosystems, but really it's those four principles: minimal disturbance, living roots, uh, diversity of plant species, and soil armor or cover that um are um the principles that if farming were to adopt those, we would have a regrowth and a rebirth of soil. The issue, though, is that um, and I used to make this joke a lot, you know, part of my job back in North Dakota was to do some prairie restoration work. And so I would joke that some days my job was literally to watch grass grow. But I've been a professor before, and I would say that, you know, I can assure you that grass grows a lot more reliably and often more quickly than the human mind changes. As a teacher, that's something that I learned. And that myself included. And so what we're up against isn't just the science of how soil works, we we understand the function of soil today. Um, and we understand the function of soil today much better than we did previously. But what we're up against is more cultural in nature. It's how do we get the human mind to change on a scale large enough to change the way we're farming, to change the kinds of questions we're asking.

Monoculture’s Hidden Costs

Speaker 19:39

Yeah, let's talk about that a bit. Uh in your article, uh rooted in care, um, you you made mention of returning in 2022 to uh help care for your father uh from New England uh to uh Walsh County, North Dakota. And and one of the things you mentioned was was re-acclimating to the acrid smell of the sugar factories. So let's talk a little bit about what this monoculture industry looks like and how that may be inimical to soil health.

Speaker 1 20:17

So 200 years ago, if you were to be on the Red River, what you would see is um a few trees along the riparian corridor, and then an ocean of grasses and flowers and bison as far as the eye could see, and indigenous people living and working in that region. And then um, if if we're talking 200 years ago, around the time of Lewis and Clark, you would have also seen some fur traders. Um, but good luck being a fur trader in my neck of the woods today. It's an industry that it doesn't exist anymore. Um, and that's part of the the issue when you think about the sugar industry. There's this idea that we can keep doing this forever, that this is the way it's always been, which is patently false. It's it's not the way it's always been. Um, and that's easy to prove, easy to show. And it's something that can't last. We are we are seeing the ways in which it can't last, and that it's we're running out of time based on how much soil depletion we're seeing. And it's not just the loss of soil, it's the cost of the inputs that farmers now have to use. Um they have to put much more fertilizer back into the soil to maintain the yields, not even to increase the yields, but to maintain the yields that they were previously able to get because the soil's been so depleted. So the visual of what you asked for, of what it looks like today, um, it's a river that's now lined with factories. That are producing processed sugar. Three billion pounds or so of processed sugar every year come out of the Red River Valley. And that's tons and tons and tons of sugar beets that are being extracted. And we have this kind of romantic story about the American farmer. I mean, I grew up doing farm labor. I have a strong affinity for farming. I believe in it. It's honest work when it's done, honest. And there's a lot of really good folks that are still trying to make their way as farmers. But what it's become is really an industrialized extractive economy. So it's very similar. I would say it's more similar to the extractive economies of like coal mining or oil extraction than it is to that romantic image of the American farm. And it would be easier to see that if what was coming out of the earth was a bottle of Pepsi, is which is what it is going to get turned into, um as opposed to what comes out of the earth looks green, it looks lush, you know, and so there's this kind of quaint romance to seeing it. But, you know, we could ask a really simple question, and that's how much processed sugar is required in the human diet? And the answer, of course, is none. We don't need any processed sugar in moderation, sure, but we're not growing it in moderation in my neck of the woods. We're growing it in abundance. And the result of that, when you look on the culture side, is that we're growing shuttered storefronts, we're growing um closed schools in rural communities, we're growing food deserts, the very same chemicals that are being used on the farm fields are producing algae blooms in our waterways. The very same chemicals are often the ingredients to make meth in meth labs. Um, some of the same farm chemicals were used by Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Oklahoma City building, federal building. Um, and so you know, you can kind of see this um dangerous kind of cross-pollination that happens in a monoculture. And then as a writer, the way that I'm also thinking about this is that um, you know, what we don't grow there are writers. We don't grow artists. Um, monoculture kind of means what it says. It's not just that we only grow one kind of plant in a large space, a large field. It's also that we only are allowing one kind of story to grow in such a place. Um, and it's really hard to um counter uh have to have a counter-narrative in a monoculture and to be a voice of a counter narrative to imagine what could this place look like if we were asking a different question, such as how can we grow high-quality food and keep our soil healthy?

Speaker 25:24

Josh, you're talking about monoculture. Uh Global Justice Ecology Project, who produces this program, uh I did some work with them in both Chile and Brazil. What's very interesting is um there's heavy impacts on indigenous cultures in both of those countries because people are moved out for the planning of these monoculture eucalyptus trees. So um that that word uh now now that you mention it, it I I I I I very much relate to that take on its meaning.

People Leaving As Soil Leaves

Speaker 1 25:56

And I think it gets to the root of the way that I see my work and my role in this. Um, you know, I mentioned that statistic about losing 50% of the topsoil in my home county since 1960. But if you look at the census from 1960 in my home county, there was about 18,000 people in my home county in 1960. Today, there's about 10,000 people. So we've lost roughly the same percentage of population in the same amount of time that we've lost 50% of the topsoil. And, you know, to kind of paint the picture of this, you know, you one of the kind of iconic images uh that you'll see anywhere in my home county if you were to drive along the dusty gravel roads would be abandoned farmsteads. It used to be that everybody could make a little bit of a living as a farmer with fewer acres. And the one of the outcomes of monoculture agriculture is that fewer and fewer people control more and more of the land. And then the state that it's gotten to today is that fewer and fewer of the local people own the land, and much of the land is sold or bought by people that see it as an investment, and they're outside. So one of the larger landowners in our home, my home county is Bill Gates. Um, you know, and we've got folks like that that buy up the land, the farmland. Um, and so the part of the issue is like, you know, I can talk about the problem all day long, but one of the ways to think about the solution is it would it would take um a radical re uh return of rural people to rural places to be become farmers again to grow local food. Um where I'm at right now in Connecticut, I'm right down the road from a fantastic farm called Holcomb Farm and another great farm called Garlic Farm. These are both farms that are operating on 20 acres, 20 to 25 acres, which would be that's a garden where I come from. It's no offense to these farmers out here, but that's a that's a very small amount of acreage. But they're growing food and they're growing food that feeds a lot of people on small acreage. Um, and the way that they're able to do that is, you know, it's a it's a very different mindset and it's a very different methodology. And if we were to take a lot of those monocrop acres that we see devoted to ethanol or other forms of biofuel devoted to some of these um uh ultra-processed foods, if some of that were reallocated to people that were committed to growing high-quality food, we wouldn't have food deserts in rural places in North Dakota or elsewhere throughout rural America. Um and so that's that's that's a big piece that we're always missing if we don't talk about the the labor side of like who actually works the land. Um, you know, a lot of migratory labor, a lot of immigrant labor, um, and a lot of local labor have long combined to do the actual work of farm labor, um, but are increasingly not getting food out of that and um aren't getting the wages and things like that. So we need to address that issue, the people side issue. Um and the the good news is both of those things can be addressed if we develop uh a new mindset toward agriculture that puts more everyday people back on the land to grow real food for their community. Um and uh that's yeah, that that's one of the things that's not happening when we uh have monocultures. Instead, um, you know, you can see it from an artistic point of view as well, right? A monoculture, um uh, you know, we take all of the beautiful color of the prairie, all of the bright flowers and beautiful grasses, and all of that ends up going away. Um, and those bright colors end up in the uh convenience store to market us the um, you know, the sugary drinks and the sugary cereals and things like that. Um, but I'd love to see what could happen if we put more color back in the local um uh through agriculture and getting more folks access to being able to actually be farmers. Right now, they're really most people are priced out from being able to own land, work land, and raise food on land um because of the way that the system is sort of rigged in favor of monocultures. So, really, all we need to do is unrig it, you know.

Growing Local Food On Small Acres

Speaker 31:18

So you have a book coming out called uh Soil Horizons. So tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 1 31:24

Yeah, thank you. So um the book that I'm currently working on, it'll come out um sometime in 2027. Um, it uh will be published by Plainspoken Books, um, which is an imprint of the University Press of Kansas. And it's focused on restorying our relations to land um by focusing in on the issues that I'm describing in my home county, but going deeper. Um, and so um it brings together the cultural, ecological, and geological histories held in my home soils in the Red River Valley, um, and tries to reckon with how we got to where we're at today, um, how we went from a tall grass prairie to a landscape dominated by sugar, um, but also uh a kind of hopeful imagining of what could grow in in such a place and what would have to happen for us to be able to grow something else in my home region. Um and so uh the book in progress, you know, I've I've talked with a number of friends, some of whom are soil scientists, ranchers, farmers, geologists, uh a linguist uh who's helping me to unearth some of the um etymology or word histories that are relevant to thinking about our relationship to land through farming. Um and all of this is also kind of paired with some personal stories of growing up in this region um working in industrial agriculture. Um before I was anything, I was a truck driver for um uh on the custom combine tour where I would follow the wheat harvest down to places like Oklahoma and Kansas and Nebraska and the eastern plains of Colorado back up to my home in rural North Dakota. Um, and so it's uh it's a book that's thinking about that um those kinds of relationships and the title, Soil Horizons, is really getting at how we measure soil is by horizons. The O-horizon is the thinnest layer at the surface, and that's where the organic matter is. Um, and it's this really interesting zone where it's like kind of the friction point and meeting place between the living microbes and the dead, the dead and decaying. Um, and it's also a kind of good metaphor for thinking about um cultural ideas and cultural histories and that kind of turning over that we have um happening all the time. Underneath that is the A horizon, that's what we refer to as topsoil. Um, and then we keep going down all the way down to bedrock. Um and so the way that I imagine the book in terms of its structure is thinking about structuring the book around those kinds of horizons and digging deeper into our shared histories that are held in the soil and all that grows from it. Um, and then one last note I'll say is that by far the most popular book and most important book in my home region and in much of farm country is called the Plat Book. In my case, it would be called the Walsh County Platte Book. The word plat comes from the old English word plot, meaning a plot of land. Um, and a plat book comes out every year and it tells us who owns the land. That's why it's the most important book in my home region, right? Um, a lot of uh contention over who owns different parcels and things like that. But I it also occurred to me in my research and working on the book that as a former English professor, the word plot is an essential element of story, how we plot a story and how we organize the sequence of events. Um, and so I'm playing with both both meanings of that, both the the plot book version of who owns the land and all the all the interesting issues we can get into when we're thinking about that. And also the narrative plot and what kinds of plots narratively are possible in a monoculture, and how can we maybe grow something that allows for other kinds of stories to come out.

Speaker 36:16

Fascinating. You I I think I heard you share once uh uh somewhere where you're speaking uh about the word humility. Could you give us an etymological uh breakdown of that one?

Language, Humility, And Humus

Speaker 1 36:29

Well, you know, the the word human and the word humility um both kind of share some common ancestry. Um and then there's the word humus, uh which is the organic matter in living soil. And if you trace those back far enough, um all three of them seem to share a common root. Um, and so in to some degree that that makes sense that um you know, thinking of what is a human? It's an earthling, right? Uh we're we're earthlings. Um and so um I I like to think of those words in concert with each other, that um to be a a good human living with some level of humility, um, which is a virtue I think is really important and one that you'll learn really quickly when you start working with soil. Soil will humble all of us. It's there's so much to know, it's a really um rich and um wide-ranging um uh ecosystem that's beneath our feet. Um, but to be a good human, to be uh a humble human, I think we can take good lessons from humus or the organic matter in living soil.

Speaker 37:49

So to end the program, we're gonna have Dr. Joshua Anderson read a portion of his article, Rooted in Care, that was published in the Earth Island Journal.

Reading From Rooted In Care

Speaker 1 37:59

So this is from the piece you're referring to from Earth Island Journal called Rooted in Care. Smoke billowed from the sugar stacks, the vegetal rod of processed sugar beets wafted over the interstate, the vinegar aftertaste coated my throat, stung my nostrils, the sharp scent of sugary wastewater seeped into my pores. Outside my Toyota pickup, the wind blew across fields crusted with December snow and salts. It was my first North Dakota winter in three years. My first drive along the Red River since leaving my career as an American literature professor in New England to assume my position as a soil conservationist in my home county. The smell from the sugar stacks along I-29 was a reminder of how long I'd been gone. It would take a week for me to re-acclimate to the noxious odor that the sugar industry has rescripted as the sweet smell of jobs. Like many folks from the rural Great Plains, I've left home more times than I can count, watched the northern prairies disappear under clouds through an airplane window time and again. I've meandered south for construction jobs in Oklahoma, rumbled through Kansas and Colorado to harvest and haul wheat, traveled west for graduate school in Utah and east for a PhD in Ohio, eventually settling in the New England woods, where I landed a job in academia. But the prairie and my father's long battle with multiple sclerosis have perennially called me home. The chiptooth border between North Dakota and Minnesota is a landscape dominated by salt and sugar. We grow more processed sugar in the Red River Valley than anywhere else in the country. The American crystal sugar factories that line the Red River produce 3 billion pounds of processed sugar per year. The industrial methods used to grow sugar beets and other monoculture cash crops leave behind patches of water-soluble salts trapped on the surface of compacted soils. These saline conditions spread across bare fields that were once tall grass prairie. The biodiverse grasslands replaced by growing patches of salted earth where almost nothing grows. An aerial view of my home and flyover country bears resemblance to the MRI scans of my father's brain and spinal cord. The salt crust on black fields mirrors the plaque that builds up along dad's myeline sheath. The chisel plows that cut through dense networks of mycorrhizal fungi, ritually destroying the soil microbiome, are akin to my father's confused immune system that attacks the protective fatty tissue around his nerve fibers and spine. It's been three years since that winter homecoming. Today, in my dual roles as a soil conservationist and my father's caregiver, I have begun to dream about an alternative to the monoculture economies that poison the land and our bodies, to imagine how care work, rooted in daily commitments to interdependence, can inspire us to find common ground and tough political and cultural terrain, to believe in a future where it is still possible to cultivate resilient rural economies in the Great Plains.

Speaker 41:29

Dr. Joshua Anderson, thank you for joining us on Breaking Green.

Speaker 1 41:33

Thank you for having me, Steve. Really appreciated it.

Speaker 41:37

You have been listening to Breaking Green, a Global Justice Ecology Project podcast. To learn more about Global Justice Ecology Project, visit GlobalJusticeEcology.org. Breaking Green is made possible by tax-deductible donations by people like you. Please help us lift up the voices of those working to protect forests, defend human rights, and expose false solutions. Simply text Give G I V E to 1716 257 4187. That's 1716 257 4187.