At Ninth Letter, we were introduced to Stephanie Anderson’s work when her essay, “Disturbance,” won our inaugural Regeneration writing contest, sponsored by I-Regen, which asks writers to “submit poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction responding to or exploring the subject of “regeneration,” specifically as it relates to food and food systems.”
Anderson’s essay was a standout with its meticulous research woven amongst evocative, observational prose. It takes a particular talent to inform without falling into didacticism, to take a stance while attending to the complexities in arguments with real-world stakes. It takes another particular talent to accomplish this with beautiful, embodied writing. These are Anderson’s specialties.
When we read Anderson’s new book, From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture (The New Press 2024), we knew she’d done it again. In From The Ground Up, Anderson brings the same dedication to literary reportage and the human stories as she did in her first critically acclaimed book, One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture (University of Nebraska Press 2019).
We are proud to present this exclusive excerpt from From the Ground Up and an enlightening interview between Anderson and Ninth Letter editorial assistant Steven Bergmark. Thank you for reading.
—Liz Harms, Editor
An excerpt from
From the Ground Up:
The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture
The year is 1978. New York City native Bu Nygrens is twenty-seven years old and has lived in San Francisco for about four years, working odd jobs as twentysomethings do, but with an ecological bent. This was the era of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet and Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative. Americans were growing concerned about agricultural pollution, the connection between poor food quality and disease, and notions of what we today call food sovereignty and food justice.1 “Coming from a big city, I was personally sort of a ‘back to the lander’ type and I thought my destiny was going to be on a hippie collective farm someplace on the West Coast,” Bu explains. A friend of Bu’s worked at a produce distributor called Veritable Vegetable, which operated with the grounding belief of “Food for People, Not for Profit.” The company supplied produce for the People’s Food System, a collective network that brought affordable, nutritious food to San Francisco food stores. Bu’s friend offered her a gig driving a truck a few days a week. “I said, ‘I’ve never driven a truck. That sounds fun. And besides, you work with farms. Maybe I’ll find out where all the cool farms are,’” Bu recalls saying to her friend.
By 1979, Bu was working full-time for Veritable Vegetable. Two other women, Mary Jane Evans and Karen Salinger, were also on the VV team. VV had a trucking operation and its own warehouse and was supplying produce for dozens of retailers. “Organic” was not yet an official USDA label, but the company prioritized pesticide-free, sustainably grown food anyway. Women were increasingly finding a professional home at VV, drawn by the likes of Bu, Mary Jane, and Karen and the welcoming environment they helped create. Paying farmers fair prices; offering equitable wages, benefits, and equipment for staff; and contributing to environmental and social justice were the company’s priorities. Through the eighties and into the nineties, VV amplified its connections with farmers, increased its emphasis on organic growers, expanded its trucking division, and offered commercial freight service to avoid empty backhauls and fuel waste.
Bu relays this history to me over a bowl of fresh cherries in VV’s current offices in San Francisco’s Dogpatch district. The story is more than simple background information for me, a curious writer. “Food for People, Not for Profit” is still a guiding principle. The city’s famed progressive social movements shaped Bu, Mary Jane, and Karen in profound ways, helping them turn 1970s ideals into lasting realities. They developed values related to food, feminism, the environment, and social justice, and they brought these values into their leadership of a company that models what a regenerative food system might look like.
When I began looking into such a system, produce distribution seemed dizzyingly complex—and it is thanks to unpredictable variables like weather, crop performance, prices, and labor availability—but Bu provides a straightforward overview. “We buy from farmers,” she said, “and then we bring the product back here and then we sell it in smaller quantities. So we buy fifty cases to three hundred cases of one thing at a time, depending on how the pallet is built and how big the boxes are. We then sell in single-case units to our customers. For smaller customers, we may break the cases.” VV has a diverse mix of customers, the largest sector being retail. Others include restaurants, caterers, food service operators, manufacturers, juicers, corporate campuses, box or meal kit providers, schools, hospitals, wholesalers, and freight customers. VV features midsize farms on its product list but supports both large and small producers. Today VV delivers organic produce and other select organic perishable, floral, and grocery items all over California and to parts of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico. They also ship to Hawaii and New York. Working with hundreds of growers, some direct from farms and some through packers or shippers, they offer more than 750 different source-identified organic fruits and vegetables daily.
The diverse product list and grower network are strengths that set VV apart from bigger competitors, Bu says. “Because we work with small growers in particular, it would be much more efficient, effective, cheaper, if we did like other mainline distributors do, which is you offer one size, two items, and those are the choices. So when somebody buys an apple they don’t get to select between several. Our price list, what we offer, is seventeen pages long every day because we give customers the choice between not only different varieties in different sizes, but different farm sources. Because we have source-identified product, we might have kale from six or seven different farms at the same time. A broadline distributor like Sysco or US Foods or somebody like that, you have no choice between this kale or that kale, maybe organic kale or nonorganic kale if the price is different.”
Distributors like VV are not the norm in America’s food system. Instead, national and global corporations circulate most of what we eat, companies like Sysco and US Foods, which Bu mentioned, but also others like Performance Foodservice, Gordon Food Service, and McLane Company.2 When it comes to produce, meat, dairy, and other farm goods, these companies work almost exclusively with big, conventional growers that supply large volumes of consistent products. Because these companies set the prices—and set them low in many cases—farmers stay financially afloat by operating industrially: monoculture cropping, pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, continuous cropping and grazing, rock-bottom wages and few benefits for farmworkers, heavy machinery use, feedlots, cheap livestock feed, and so forth. For most distributors, profit is king, gained at the expense of the environment, farmers and their workers, and the food’s nutritional quality.
In contrast, VV is a regional food hub, according to the USDA’s definition. A regional food hub is a business or organization that actively manages the aggregation, distribution, and marketing of source-identified food products primarily from local and regional producers to strengthen their ability to satisfy wholesale, retail, and institutional demand.3 “Food hub” is a relatively new term to describe what VV has done since its inception. Food hubs take a triple-bottom-line approach, striving for economic, social, and environmental gains simultaneously, particularly regional gains. “We created that model without calling it that until after the fact,” Bu says. “The food hub model as purported or promoted by the USDA and other world development agencies and ag economists and people like that has always been that regional control of distribution is more appropriate. Short value chains are agile and impact local economies more than long supply chains, where food is considered a commodity and prices are forced down. Leveraging your resources and consolidation definitely does make things cheaper, but does it make them better? Are diversity and quality and value more important than price and quantity?”
Compensating farmers fairly, encouraging them in sustainable practices, and adapting to the farm’s needs rather than dictating policies are a few ways VV and similar distributors support regenerative production and rural communities. Growers are partners, not just exchangeable cogs in a profit machine. Like the cherries we’re snacking on: Bu tells me exactly what farm they came from, describing family members there she’s known for decades. She relays how climate change and labor shortages have collided to disrupt their business. As weather patterns vary and temperatures warm, the farm’s cherries and peaches now ripen at the same time. Worker shortages, worsened by restrictive immigration policies (almost three-fourths of agricultural workers in America are immigrants, by the way), mean the farm can’t harvest both crops.4 Either the cherries or the peaches rot in the field.
That Bu knows any of this is incredible. Not a single buyer affiliated with concentrated animal feeding operations knows my father’s or brother’s name, for instance, let alone the ranch’s history or current struggles. The relationship is one-way: the beef packers prefer certain breeds of cattle (which may or may not be suited to the rancher’s environment), determine the weight the cattle should be at auction time, collude with other companies to fix prices, and pay zero premiums for regenerative practices. Whether my dad or brother stays in business makes no difference so long as cattle that meet industry standards keep showing up at the sale barn. That’s not how VV does business. “Communication is key in a value chain where you really want your partners to survive and thrive,” Bu says. “In a long supply chain, you don’t have a story. You’re not a person.”
And as VV proves, people matter very much.
Footnotes
1. Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal (Boston: Mariner Books, 2022), 228–35.
2. USDA Economic Research Service, “Wholesaling,” https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-markets-prices/retailing-wholesaling/wholesaling/
3. USDA, “Regional Food Hub Resource Guide,” https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Regional%20Food%20Hub%20Resource%20Guide.pdf.
4. “Immigrant Farmworkers and America’s Food Production: 5 Things to Know,” FWD.us, September 14, 2022, https://www.fwd.us/news/immigrant-farmworkers-and-americas-food-production-5-things-to-know/.
Copyright © 2024 by Stephanie Anderson. This excerpt originally appeared in From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
An Interview with Stephanie Anderson
Steven Bergmark (SB): Stephanie, thank you for writing this book. In our current era of polycrisis and anxiety, From the Ground Up offers a sober view of the problems we face, but it provides so many vectors for hope and action. For those who are unfamiliar, can you briefly describe “regenerative agriculture”?
Stephanie Anderson (SA): Thank you for those kind words! When I think about the definition of regenerative agriculture, I always come back to Gabe Brown, a North Dakota farmer and rancher I met when writing my first book on the subject of regenerative agriculture. He told me – and this is a paraphrase – that sustaining a degraded resource, like soil or water, doesn’t work. Instead, we should strive for improvement, new and richer life within our ecological resources; in other words, regeneration.
Regenerative agriculture means a set of farming and ranching practices that don’t simply maintain the status quo but instead improve and foster ecological health. A few modern examples include rotating livestock across the land in ways that mimic historical wildlife movement and planting cover crops to keep living roots in the soil year-round or close to. Those practices build organic matter and biodiversity in soil, which then boosts the health of water cycles, increases crop nutrient density, draws down carbon, and fuels aboveground life of all kinds.
Regenerative agriculture is, above all, a mirror of nature’s processes applied to food production. It reproduces the way natural cycles function in a given environment, and by doing so, it harmonizes rather than fights with nature. Regenerative agriculture looks a little different in every environment, and that is totally normal since ecological systems are unique. And regenerative is not new! Indigenous societies across the world practiced (and many still do) what we would today call regenerative agriculture and livestock stewardship. They deserve credit for that.
That said, regenerative agriculture is also not some outdated relic of the past that can’t keep up with the production demands of today. While many industrial norms and philosophies are not part of regenerative – like massive monoculture fields and genetically modified crops – modern technology, equipment, and tools make regenerative agriculture entirely possible at scale.
(SB): What makes your book such a hopeful read is just how intersectional regenerative agriculture is. We’re shown how political food is—how it connects to everything from race, gender, and identity to supply chains, nutrition, and climate change. After reading your book, it all seems so obvious. Why do you think it is the case that so many Americans do not think about the politics of food? Do you think this is changing?
(SA): Many Americans, though not all, are completely divorced from their food and the people who produce it on the land and across the food system. As a result, the politics of food are not apparent to most of us. That condition is not entirely our fault. For starters, Big Food obscures where food comes from. Think about the cute imagery on an egg carton, for example. In most cases, those eggs come from an industrial egg operation that in no way resembles that nostalgic imagery. The chickens live in horrendous conditions, and the farmers who tend them can barely make ends meet under the exploitive production contracts imposed on them by big companies.
American food culture emphasizes quantity over quality, so we tend to prioritize dollars-and-cents costs over ecological, social, and human costs. And with so many Americans struggling just to afford food, there isn’t much time or energy to consider food politics. Another reality is that most Americans live in urban areas, far from where farms and the people who work on them are located. Many of us can’t see the brutal conditions field workers endure on a corporate vegetable farm, for instance, or witness the soil erosion happening across the Great Plains because of industrial grain production.
I do think people are beginning to wake up to the damage industrial agriculture has wrought on our health, our planet, and our rural communities. We see it in the growth of organic and regenerative food sales, in attitude surveys cited in the book, and in the growing national consensus that climate change has to be mitigated, in part through climate-smart food production. Still, we have a long way to go as a nation in increasing awareness about how food intersects with almost everything else in our lives.
(SB): Your book demonstrates how folks from different cultural, racial, gender, and values backgrounds are invested in regenerative agriculture, and they all understand how important it is for the future. I felt tension in the differences in approach between women like Bu Nygrens, who views the future of food as regional and local, that food is for people, not profit, and women like Sarah Day Levesque, who believe that to adapt to climate change, regenerative agriculture needs to be scalable, and that involves dealing seriously with markets and capital. How can these two different approaches to the future be reconciled, or do they need to be reconciled at all?
(SA): You’re right that some of the women in this book have different approaches and might even disagree with one another—and I like that! As I argued in my first book, one size fits none when it comes to regenerative agriculture, and I think that logic also applies to the food system. Right now, we have a one-size-fits-all corporate food world, the size being big. We need way, way more diversity all across our food system, from the land to the boardroom and beyond. Resilience flows from diversity, and we desperately need to build more resilience into the food supply to counteract disruptions due to climate change, global pandemics, and other emergencies.
Regional and local foodways that put people and environment first can also be scalable and profitable. Big Food and Big Ag want us to believe that scalable means national and global enterprises and that profitable means excessive rather than sustainable returns (and returns that go to shareholders and CEOs rather than farmers and small businesses). But in a regenerative system, scalable means farms sized to fit their environment and operations that grow in complexity when it comes to the diversity of crops and animals. Those kinds of farms actually tend to be more profitable and productive. Scalable also means replicable. We can scale up the philosophy by making regenerative mainstream across the country. Capital is one tool we can use to help make that happen.
(SB): You make a point of not essentializing women and their role in regenerative agriculture, emphasizing that regenerative agriculture is open for anybody who seeks to look at the future of agriculture and our planet more holistically. What inspired you to focus on women revolutionizing regenerative agriculture?
(SA): I come from an industrial agriculture community in western South Dakota. I also reported on agriculture in South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota as a journalist. It might sound odd, but I did not realize how male-centered industrial agriculture was until I moved away from that part of the country. I did not question the notion that in most families, farms pass to sons, not daughters. I did not recognize Big Ag’s desire to dominate nature and tendency to view livestock more like machines than living beings as rooted in patriarchal ideas. I was even part of the problem; I realized: virtually every time I sought farmer or expert voices in my work, I turned to men.
I kept an eye on the regenerative movement after my first book on the subject came out in 2019, and I noticed women, especially women of color and young women, leading and participating in exciting ways. Data supports my observation that more women are getting involved with agriculture, specifically within sustainable food production. I wanted to highlight the trend because I felt women ought to be acknowledged for their work. And I wanted to show readers how many women were expanding the definition of regenerative to include social and environmental justice, equity and diversity, and success for young farmers.
Too often, we think of farmers as white and male. The regenerative agriculture world is more diverse in gender, race, and sexual orientation compared to the industrial space. In writing this book, I wanted women and men alike to see aspects of themselves represented in the agricultural narrative because their presence is real and impactful.
(SB): From the Ground Up values relationships in envisioning a healthier and more sustainable food system. Bu Nygrens from Veritable Vegetable describes in detail the family members of farmers she’d known for decades. What role do you think relationships will play in a more hopeful and healthful planet?
(SA): Relationships invite us to see and empathize. When we do that, we are less likely to make decisions that harm the person, animal, or land we are in relationship with. Physical or in-person relationships are obviously very powerful. It’s harder to hurt and easier to protect someone or something we have interacted with up close. Like if we interact with a prairie—if we feel the brush of big bluestem and hear the song of a western meadowlark—then we are less inclined to tolerate plowing it up to grow more genetically modified corn. And if we get to know a farmer, then we empathize with why they might be tempted to plow up that prairie and, in turn, push for policies that create better alternatives through regenerative agriculture.
But relationships can span time and space. I’m thinking of our relationship with future generations embodied by today’s children, for instance, or our link to parts of the world far removed from us in a physical sense. Our planet itself is deeply interconnected. The Indigenous seventh-generation principle—the idea that today’s actions should take into account the well-being of people seven generations into the future—is perhaps the best way to think about relationships.
Many women are uniquely adept at viewing the world through the context of relationships and acting accordingly. That’s why their presence in the food system is so powerful. The more people we have thinking about how food relates to health—for people, land, rural communities, future lives—the better chance we have of creating a truly regenerative food system.
Stephanie Anderson is the author of the award-winning One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture as well as From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture (The New Press). Her essays and short stories have appeared in outlets such as The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, Flyway, Ninth Letter, The Chronicle Review, and many others. She lives in South Florida, where she serves as assistant professor of creative nonfiction at Florida Atlantic University.
