By Ray Levy Uyeda
Native farmers want newcomers to know there’s nothing novel about caring for the land that grows our food.
When spring hits, Kelsey Scott finally breathes a sigh of relief. Come May, her 120 cows will be ready to birth calves, and as the weather warms, Scott knows the newest members of the herd will be able to grow strong before the arrival of another unforgiving South Dakota winter. While winters test the herd’s resilience, snow on the soil actually protects the soil’s microbes, small critters, and plant root systems that support the cattle’s larger ecosystem.
Everything on Scott’s ranch, DX Beef, is done a little bit more slowly than one might see on a conventional ranch: Cattle graze rotationally on 14 different permanent pastures across 7,000 acres of land.
Colonialism via Cattle
Cattle, specifically, can help tell the story of colonization of Native peoples on Turtle Island. Ranching was one of the reasons settlers and colonizers began to claim land from Native peoples west of the Mississippi in the mid-1800s, according to Ryan Fischer, a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, and the author of the book.
After processing, about 90% of the finished beef is sold in the two counties nearest the ranch. The direct-to-consumer business model means Scott is able to offer beef raised on the same land her customers themselves interact with. She’s also been able to address some of the food-access challenges that peoples living on the Cheyenne River Reservation face by bringing healthy options directly to them.
In this way, Scott says her business is “an expression of resiliency amongst a system that disregarded the functioning relationship that we had in agricultural production prior to colonial impact.”
Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Agriculture practices that prioritize soil health and honor an inherent relationship between cattle and the land are increasingly seen as an environmentally sustainable alternative to industrial farming. Raised this way, cattle can create a thriving habitat for soil phytonutrients, support the growth of native grasses, and result in beef that some say is tastier than the industrial alternative.
Raising Climate Resilience
Western science is now backing Indigenous knowledge that eating locally is best for personal and environmental health. But Spanish and English colonizers brought cattle to the U.S., meaning there are no cattle native to this land.
Still, so-called heritage breeds can be a key tool for climate resiliency, according to Jeannette Beranger, a senior program manager at The Livestock Conservancy, an organization dedicated to raising, sustaining, and saving breeds of livestock whose populations are threatened by industrial agriculture.
Even though many of the breeds supported by the Conservancy aren’t native to the U.S., the genetic diversity they offer can be critical to staving off disease and illness, which industrial agriculture practices are exacerbating with a high usage of antibiotics, pesticides, and other chemicals. With a reliance on breeds of marketable animals, like standard broiler chickens that gain weight quickly, monoculture industrial agriculture threatens to eclipse the cultural and culinary value of other breeds.
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