I really enjoyed the language that was used in Chapter 3, Hidden Hotspots of Biodiversity. I think an important part of maintaining biodiversity, the lands, and everything in between, is to really understand the intricacies of food production. Guzman’s research into fungi and farms in California revealed spots of biodiversity among some private polyculture farms. She spoke with these farmers and learned that many of them brought seeds, practices, and culture from their homelands when they immigrated to the U.S.
Guzman counted bees and used DNA sequencing technology to analyze soil microbes. She found that more diverse agricultural lands, like those of the small polycultures, attracted a variety of pollinators, even some that she never expected to see. She noted in her studies that the practice of the three sisters (squash, corn, and beans) was used in every polyculture she came across. If some did not have those three exact crops, they would have some variation of these, and generally a lot more variety of crops as well. Mexico and Central America established traditions such as this for their crops that date back thousands of years, even evident in Aztec and Mayan societies.
They located farms with wetland agriculture that had retained 30% organic matter, which is practically unheard of in common soils. When these wetlands were artificially drained, however, the remaining clay dried up, leaving only about 2 inches of organic matter. Biodiversity flourished in farms where they were able to keep the ecosystem in balance, which prevented one species from dominating. All of these components work together with the plants, the soil, and the species living among them.
Guzman also discussed her family’s history of agriculture in Mexico. Her family-owned land was in El Pedregal, and she went there frequently as a child to visit. She shared how harvest season was so busy, and her parents and the older family members would be out all day harvesting. However, even harvesting practices in these small communities are different than modern monoculture harvesting. They would get together, play music, have food, and harvest as a team. This shared experience is part of the hidden aspects of agriculture. It’s not practiced in our industrial agriculture, but it CAN be. Maybe if more people were aware of the history of agriculture across the world, we could all collectively do better.
This chapter also touched on the Bracero Program, the federal governments' program of “Operation Wetback” -- which are clearly based in racism and prejudice. The book also spoke of Efraim Hernandez Xolocotzi, a scientist in Mexico in the 1920s-1930s. He was working for the Mexican Agricultural Program and was tasked with finding as many corn seed varieties as he could across the country. The government ended up turning on these small farmers in the 1940s to push agriculture in a different direction, and Xolocotzi then focused more on ethnobotany and ethnobiology as the Green Revolution and NAFTA developed.
Chapter 4, Putting Down Roots, started with introducing another farmer that Guzman worked with, Keu Yang Moua. She was an older lady with a small farm in Fresno. She was from a small tribe in Laos called the Hmong, and she was teaching local farmers how to utilize cover crops, which she successfully incorporated into her garden. Compost and cover crop were two aspects that were new to America but not to the old farmers of Asia.
Franklin King wrote a book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, that detailed farming practices he witnessed in China in 1909. In this, he talks about these farmers using a “living mulch”, aka, compost. The biggest difference between the farmers in the rice fields of China and the industrial agriculture in America was that the Chinese farmers did not see manure or rotting plants as waste; they saw it as a resource. They also incorporated raising fish and ducks in their rice fields. This allowed the fish to eat some of the planthoppers, release their feces to fertilize the plants, and also release a chemical that helped with plant blight.
These closed-loop systems were also used in Japan, Korea, and India. These countries practiced their agricultural systems for thousands of years and helped to keep a lid on greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have shown that incorporating cover crop systems with our current intensive agriculture systems will offset 8% of the annual greenhouse gas emissions from farming. We could have potentially missed this information if we had not studied the agricultural practices from other countries and cultures. We wiped out most traces of these kinds in America by the late 1800s.
Chinese immigrants arrived in the U.S. as laborers in the 19th century. By 1882, though, 7/8 farmworkers were Chinese. The rural whites close to these immigrants lobbied the federal government to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act. This made Chinese laborers “illegal” in the United States. Still, some of them stayed and persisted with the encouragement of their bosses (most likely to continue exploiting them for cheap labor). However, being illegal, like with the case of many Mexican immigrants, kept these farmworkers stuck at the bottom of the totem pole. Renting land was almost impossible, and even when it was, it was on a short lease. Mouas bought her own land in 2002. She now works with local farmers and growers, showing them the practices that made her farm so successful.
Masumoto studied her Japanese heritage for her thesis and became engrossed in her ancestors’ struggles. During WWI, after Pearl Harbor, Japanese American citizens were incarcerated, purely based on their ethnicity. Even minors were taken to the concentration camp, and finished school incarcerated. After 1945, they were released, but nothing was as it was when they left. Most of the incarcerated had nothing left to return to. Once again, they took what they had and started over. Eventually, for the Masumoto family they were able to establish roots and had a few acres of their own by 1950.
The struggles immigrants have faced while also providing nourishment to our entire country are something we should be ashamed of. This book was really amazing, and I loved every part of it. I’m glad I will have it to always refer back to.