Healing Grounds: Introduction and Chapter 1

  The introduction of this book touches on how there were debates about agriculture. Even though regenerative agriculture was a promising idea, it was still debated even by people who seemed like they would support it. No matter how good something sounds, there are still issues that exist within it. It’s important to figure out what methods are best in order to truly reach success.

It also brings up how a lot of people who helped out with figuring out how to create a more sustainable agricultural system are indigineous people or immigrants. In general they were people who did not have titles, meaning they may have been previously overlooked or ignored. I agree that it’s important to look at the history of agriculture in the U.S. because before colonization, the land was treated much differently by indigeneous people and groups. “Reversing the clock” may be able to efficiently aid agriculture currently. 

I found it facsinating the positive impact that buffalo have on plants and how the relationship between them and the land is mutual. The connection of buffalo grazing to assisting with climate change is a concept unheard of to me until now. They are the keystone species for Native American praries. This makes me wonder why they aren’t more common in our current agricultural system, they have so many benefits. How did we come to the conclusion of using cows? Is it just adopted from European farming practices? But this also makes me wonder if differnet species are better off in different biomes, surely buffalo can’t be the keystone species all over the country because of the differences in climate and such. 

The first chapter does a lot of comparing European farming to indingenous farming, it highlights the issues with our current system that has been “broken from the start”. The importance of having a connection to the land and working with it instead of against it is crucial for regenerative agriculture. Instead of continuing with the colonizer’s method of farming, we need to adopt and return to what previously has worked.