Episode Twelve - Regenerating
Episode Description:
Many folks look at the new year as not just a clean slate, but as a time to take what came before and turn it into what will come next. Here at Grounded Hope, after a year of bringing you stories rooted in regenerative practice, that impulse is as strong as it is anywhere else.
In this episode, which will round out our first season, we'll do a little reflecting on what the past year of episodes has taught us, and we'll be looking forward to how this podcast will regenerate for its second season. We'll also learn about the work ahead for the podcast supporting organization, the Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice, and what regeneration means to some of the folks who work at Agraria. We hope you'll stay with us to find out what's coming up in 2022.
Agraria Barn in June
Photo Credit: Amy Harper
Podcast Script:
HOST INTRO:
Lauren Shows
Many folks look at the new year as not just a clean slate, but as a time to take what came before and turn it into what will come next. Here at Grounded Hope, after a year of bringing you stories rooted in regenerative practice, that impulse is as strong as it is anywhere else.
In this episode, which will round out our first season, we'll do a little reflecting on what the past year of episodes has taught us, and we'll be looking forward into how this podcast will regenerate for its second season. We'll also learn about the work ahead for the podcast supporting organization, the Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice, and what regeneration means to some of the folks who work at Agraria. We hope you'll stay with us to find out what's coming up in 2022.
I'm Lauren Shows. From the highways to the hedgerows, we bring you Grounded Hope.
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Shows
If you've been listening to Grounded Hope from the beginning — or if you're out and about in Ohio's Miami Valley region — you'll know something about the work of the Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice, a nonprofit that focuses on bioregional regeneration. At its 138-acre farm in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and through its media and conferences, Agraria aims to demonstrate and teach practices that restore ecosystem and human health, cultivate community resilience and grow just and equitable food systems.
Agraria was founded in 1940, and for decades has centered the role of community in the evolution of human society. Today, it's interested in new ways of thinking and living in relationship to each other and the natural world.
Macy Reynolds is a master gardener and a volunteer, educator and board member at Agraria. Here she is speaking about how she views the idea of regeneration, and how that idea is integral to Agraria's work now, and the work that's ahead.
Macy Reynolds at Agraria
Photo Credit: Lauren Shows
Macy Reynolds
When I think about regeneration, the word to me says something is broken, and it needs to be revitalized and reenergized. And I think to me, what we're doing out here with soil and saying, "Hey, it is a broken system in this country," we're losing it to the Gulf of Mexico. Not only do we need to stop losing it, but we need to bring it back to what it was with all the biota and so forth in the soil that nourish us — because it feeds our plants that nourish us, and therefore we can do what we need to do to regenerate ourselves.
Because we are going to have to regenerate in a time of climate change and uncertainty. And I think, you know, it has to be with the kids. And that's why I think we are also giving some regeneration to some young people who come out here and say, "Oh, maybe it's not so bleak. I think there is hope there is a chance that we can do something."
This place just makes me feel like, yeah, it can be done — we can regenerate and help other communities do the same.
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In 2021, Agraria launched Grounded Hope to introduce listeners to the past, present and future of Ohio agriculture. Last month, Agraria's Susan Jennings and Megan Bachman sat down to ruminate on Grounded Hope — both the podcast and the idea itself.
Susan Jennings
Photo Credit: Amy Harper
Susan Jennings
So I'm Susan Jennings. I'm executive director of the Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice.
Megan Bachman
And I'm Megan Bachman. I'm the assistant director and media director of the Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice.
Megan Bachman
Photo Credit: Amy Harper
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They talked about the theme for the podcasts' upcoming second season, which will focus on Black farming and efforts around food justice, community healing and collective empowerment in the Dayton, Ohio area and beyond, and how that theme bloomed from a first season episode and from Agraria's work outside of the podcast.
Jennings
Well, we ran — in collaboration with many other partners — a Black Farming Conference, the first one in September of 2020, which was far more successful than we ever dreamed. Because of COVID, it went online, and we were assuming it would be an intimate kind of Southwest Ohio conference, and it ended up attracting people from across the country. So that kind of launched us on an inquiry into Black farming. And because it's just such a complex and interesting subject, we thought using it as the focus of season two made a lot of sense.
Bachman
I think, at the same time, there's been a lot of awareness and acknowledgment of the systemic discrimination that Black farmers have faced, and even efforts to ameliorate that through the USDA and new loans, which, of course, are being challenged.
And I thought that was one of our best episodes. I was really, frankly shocked that there were only 135 Black farms in Ohio right now out of almost 80,000 farms, and that it wasn't always that way. It was much more proportional to the population, the Black population, 100 years ago. So how that happened, I think, is an underreported story and one that we need to continue to uncover. We're really going to go deeper into the history — the first season was focused on history and Ohio and we want to continue that historical focus. And we're also really going to be looking at food as culture and food as healing and really highlighting some personal stories of people in that realm.
Jennings
The reason that we are interested in this podcast and interested in regenerative growing in general is that, as became apparent to everyone through COVID, international supply chains are going to be increasingly challenged, and especially around food. And so in order for even a farm-rich country and soil-rich country as the U.S. and a farm-rich and soil-rich and water-rich state as Ohio, it doesn't mean our grocery store shelves are going to continue to be filled unless we really get at the root of why we're not growing locally and regionally. And that's kind of the basis of why we did Grounded Hope and why we do all of our work in general.
All kinds of people across the state in areas that we drive through every day are doing amazing work and building soil. And all of us really benefit from understanding that we're not the only people who are interested in this work. So that was wonderful, and I've heard that, actually, from a lot of colleagues: That it's really inspiring for them to recognize that the network that they thought was maybe, you know, a little bit slim is actually a lot deeper than the than they feared.
Bachman
So I think that's reflected in the title "Grounded Hope" — that real hope comes from actual work actual work on the ground, and that there are all of these kind of points of light that we need to connect with. And it's not "hopium" as the people now say, which is a kind of delusion, but we've seen it working, we've seen it happening and it's almost miraculous.
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This year, Agraria will move forward with its own work on the ground — both literally and figuratively — as the organization continues to grow food on its operational farms work toward land conservation, and grow knowledge about regenerative practice. Some of that growth comes through Agraria's educational programming, like "The Big Map-Out." While the world at large navigated the isolation imposed by a global pandemic, local students and families spent a year getting outside to connect with nature by creating maps of their own backyards, participants studied soil, water, plants and animals with field guides and supplies provided by Agraria. The year-long project was led by local elementary school teacher Sarah Amin. Here's Amin speaking about the event, and how it informed her vision of regeneration.
Sarah Amin at Agraria
Photo Credit: Lauren Shows
Sarah Amin
So regeneration to me — so when you think about it, the denotation of that is that you're rebuilding on something that used to exist or improving that somehow, or taking it back to its natural state. And so when I'm thinking about regeneration, within "The Big Map-Out," here we were, human lives had completely been turned upside down. Students are used to going to school and learning with each other. And now all of a sudden, they're into their homes with a computer. So there was a huge disconnect. And so in this respect, I feel like the regeneration project around "The Big Map-Out" would be, how do we restore kind of how we learn, even though the way it looks is completely different? So my goal was to go back to staying connected as human beings, even though we're isolated between four walls.
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Continuing its educational programming in 2022, Agraria will launch the second iteration of its Regenerative Farming Fellowship program. Through a partnership with The Nature Conservancy and Central State University in nearby Wilberforce, Ohio, the 25-week program guides and remunerates its farming fellows as they learn about regenerative agricultural practices, build up their businesses and collaborate with others who work the land. The first group of fellows were named last year. Here's Susan Jennings again.
Jennings
One of the things that came out of the Black Farming Conference was this Regenerative Fellows Program. And so last year, we had our first cohort of six fellows — which were actually women, so it's a little bit of wrong language — but six women, five of them BIPOC, who learned about regenerative farming and visited farms around the area and worked on their own farms or gardens. And that was such a tremendously successful program that we're continuing it and expanding it this year. And the first participants actually are doing skill shares, so they're becoming teachers and facilitators of learning of other gardeners. So it's really helping to kind of ground what we had started us as more of a conversational network. it's grounding the network in real practice around the region. So we're very excited about that.
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Agraria is also expanding its reach in 2022 through a variety of media. Here's Megan Bachman again on those efforts.
Bachman
We have, as well as our podcasts, are doing more video. And we have our incredible biannual magazine, The Agraria Journal, that has information about regeneration. And as Susan said, this year, we're going to be writing about Black farming in the first journal and the second journal is going to be about critical agrarianism.
We are really interested in documenting more of our story and working towards a film about Agraria. We have an incredible archive from being an organization that's been around for 80 years talking about community self-sufficiency and community economics and a host of other topics. So bringing forth a lot of the writings that are still valuable today from that long history.
We are the Center for Regenerative Practice. So I think drilling more into what is regenerative really mean, and how does that operate on different scales? What does regenerative mean for our lives? How can we become a regenerative organization? Of course, regenerative agriculture is something that people are more familiar with. So what does it look like to enact regeneration on a bioregional level?
The other thing that is happening this year is that we are, through a grant through The Nature Conservancy, remeandering a creek on our property. "Remeandering" means to change the course. You can imagine it in your mind: The river on our property was channelized, so it was made straight so that there could be more land used for this intensive agriculture. And that's not healthy for the stream. The stream wants to follow a more curving course through the landscape. And that provides more habitat — different speeds of water, for example. So we've talked about this idea of remeandering; what does it mean to remeander society? What does it mean to remeander the mind following a more natural course? So it's going to be really interesting to tell stories around this very physical project that will create kind of an upheaval in the ecosystem for the long term benefit of the ecosystem. So how do we think about that remeandering at different scales as well. And ultimately, it's about creating a more diverse ecosystem. Monocultures—
Jennings
—of all kinds, not just monocultures in the ground but monocultures in the mind. And institutions.
Bachman
We need more diversity throughout all the world.
Shows
We'll end this episode — the final one in our first season — with some words from Omope Carter Daboiku, who is a graduate of Agraria's first Regenerative Farmer Fellows program and an artist-in-residence at Agraria — as well as a storyteller, as you'll hear. She'll be one of the first interviewees in Grounded Hope's second season. Here she is speaking at Agraria Farm last fall on what regenerative practice means to her.
Omope Carter Daboiku at Agraria
Photo Credit: Lauren Shows
Omope Carter Daboiku
Well, when you're a little kid, and you find a skink, and you pull the tail off, his tail will regenerate, it will grow back. And so when I think regenerative practice, I think, "grow back."
So I find the word "regenerative practice" to be the new vocabulary for the old-fashioned way of growing, which is you don't waste anything. You try to utilize as little new as possible so that you're always focused on using what you have to create what you need. That way you keep your costs low. Which is why my mama called the dog "the garbage disposal," — she wasn't gonna pay money for a garbage disposal because we had a dog. And dogs only eat dog food when there ain't no leftovers.
And so I said to my mom, "So, Tippy's like Grandpa's pigs?" Because my grandfather grew pigs in the city when it was legal, and he had 11 kids. And so there were chickens in the yard on Thursday. There was chickens in the bathtub on Friday, and then it was cleaning out the bathtub on Saturday. And it was chickens in the dumplings on Sunday. So that's how I grew up, you know? Turnips came from somebody else's patch and you grew more than you needed to give to somebody. You never bought fertilizer — who needed fertilizer? You know, you didn't buy seed because wasn't no such thing as GMO, modified and "You can't grow it because I own the patent." You know, you grew corn, you kept an ear or two so you'd have seed corn for next spring. So you know, I remember those ways. I remember.
One year my mother — we had farmed, we were living in Lawrence County, were outside of Ironton — and my father was always looking for ways to gift my mother things that she wanted. My mother didn't want jewelry. She didn't dress up to wear jewels. She was a handy person. By the time I was 14, she'd repainted the walls, taken the sofa apart, reupholstered the sofa. She built this case my daddy had told her not to build — he was mad because it worked perfectly. And so she was always looking for ways to enhance our way of life, and to make it possible for us to have as much as possible. So she was a master at regenerating things, making things over again. And then you know, we come from, I come from Appalachia — we know how to take scraps and make a whole piece out of it. That's our specialty is turning nothing into something. And so for me, it's just new vocabulary for old-time practices. Getting the most out of what you can — always.
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Host outro:
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Grounded Hope is brought to you by the people at Agraria, Ohio's first center for regenerative practices, and is funded in part by a grant from Ohio Humanities. Visit our website at groundedhope.org to hear past episodes and keep an eye out for our upcoming second season, where a new host will guide you through stories of Black farming in Ohio.
I'm Lauren Shows — and thank you for listening to Grounded Hope.