by Will Pry, American Heart Association
When one of the elders in the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska asked if he could keep bees on the reservation, Tim Rhodd’s answer was straightforward: “Absolutely.” Soon, the bees started buzzing in the alfalfa fields. Then they started pollinating.
Then they all died.
“Once we started looking into it, we found there was a chemical (class) called neonicotinoid that caused the death of these bees,” said Rhodd, the tribe’s chairperson. “That was the very, very first part of what I had seen that we were doing things wrong.”
Facing the reality that their soil was contaminated—and the realization that the same harmful insecticides that killed the bees would be bad for them, too—the Ioway started questioning their farming practices.
After receiving a grant in 2019, the tribe switched its farming operations from monocropping—growing one plant in the same soil, year after year—to regenerative agriculture, a process designed to promote biodiversity and soil health by minimizing disturbances and maintaining living roots as much as possible.
By caring for a rotation of diverse crops throughout the year—rather than controlling the soil year-round for just one seasonal crop—farmers eliminate the need for herbicides and pesticides.
Moving away from monocropping is as much a challenge to standard practice as it is a physical feat. The so-called Green Revolution in the 1960s changed industrial farming to address food shortages by ushering in the extensive use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Working to improve the yield of a single crop became the norm, thanks in part to profitability and operational efficiency.
“Just monocropping, eventually you use up all of your nutrients,” said Olivia Brien, tribe member and its director of communications. “And what happens is that you run out of the nutrients to grow good food, so then you’d have a desert. It becomes a desert.”
Originally published in PHYS Org, click here to read the full article.