“Does Your Soil Have a Smell?”: Experiences of Regenerative Farming across the Great Plains!
Book chapter, 2025Authors: Janna Bystrykh and Clemens Driessen
Often seen as flyover country, the Great Plains in the US appears as the center of large-scale, industrial and technology driven agriculture. This chapter, based on an extensive interview-based documentary project with farmers in the region, is also a groundbreaking site for efforts to transition towards regenerative farming and community practices.
Regenerative farming focuses on restoration of soil through changes in farming practices that help restore organic matter and biodiversity in the soil. Many of the farmers we interviewed share an intimate understanding of their soil life, including the ways through which different plants can influence each other when planted in proximity and/or sequentially. At the same time, many of these farmers are active in their local and regional rural and farming communities, trying to help reshape the food system and associated livelihoods in rural areas. Through three interviews presented in this chapter, we reflect on the lived experiences and visions of influential voices who, each in their own way, are driving the movement of regenerative agriculture across the Great Plains. Their accounts offer layered narratives of the close connections between soil and communities, biodiversity and society, economic regeneration and regeneration of the soil and land – with a deep sense of historical injustices and possible futures.
Chapter 25, featured in Peeren, Esther, and Tjalling Valdés-Olmos, eds. 2025. Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World. 1st ed. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004731943.
Images: Mason Brown (2021)
ISBN: 9789004731943, 9004731946
Publicher: Brill, Leiden, 2025
Chapter 25: @Brill, @Kudos
Book: Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World
