Note: This newsletter pairs well with Grand Canyon by The Wind and The Wave.
Hiiiiiiiii—
Y’all. I’ve missed you.
It’s been 18 long months since I last wrote to you, and what a year and a half it’s been. I’ve been speaking, writing, podcasting, learning, and even winning a few awards. In fact, you should subscribe to my upcoming show, The Only Things That Lasts: Unraveling the Mysteries of US Farmland wherever you listen to podcasts (and you can listen to the trailer there too):
And you should read my favorite story that I worked on last year, How to Unbraid a River.
I’ve been keeping busy, tipping sacred cows in a ski mask and scheming on strategies to subvert the ways we think about the food and farm system. I want to give you the nut-shelliest version of the journey I’ve been on and why I’m back here, but if it’s all too much (or you’re like, what the hell is the agrarian myth again?, you can skip ahead to Get To The Point).
So where the hell have I been?
I’ve been keeping busy, but I never quite kicked the desire to come back to this forum. But I also walked away for good reasons, and I wanted coming back to be less defeatism, take-downs, and fury, and more whimsical, weird, and world-expanding, for me and for you all.
The pursuit of these 3 Ws (my personal punk rock) led me to both the Ambrook Research projects I just plugged. At their collective heart is a question of place and space, embodied in land, but also in community systems and culture, and in the mythological spaces that we create to understand where land meets community.
Questions of space and place are, first and foremost, very personal to me. I was born and raised in Wyoming (bred and fed, as some Wyomingites might say), but no one else in my family was. I don’t live there anymore, but I think about it a lot. I think about what it means to be of Wyoming, to have more than once worn the nickname “Wyoming,” and to have a complicated, fucked up, fundamental bond with things like rocks and tumbleweeds and wind that sucks the breath out of your mouth.
Added to this private obsession were the feelings of angst that I struggled with after Big Team Farms was published. I got lots of exciting questions about what’s next, but I felt like I’d reached a dead end. I kept running into the problem that though there were plenty of very cool people interested in challenging our culturally pre-conceived notions about how farming works, who wanted to debate carbon credits or the merit of regen ag, the role of the farm bill and subsidies, how farm businesses are organized, etc., waaaaaay fewer were interested in talking about what I felt was the heart of the issue— not the how, but the why. In other words— why do we put farming, and farms, at the center of the people-food-land universe in the first place?
I was beginning to realize that the next challenge I wanted to tackle, and the one I felt well-suited to tackling, wasn’t a question of practices, economics, or policy. It was a question of narrative. My ideas were being raw dogged by our agricultural myths, and I wanted to talk about.
My first foray into directly challenging or small farmer mythology with a live audience debuted at the 2022 Regenerate conference, where I gave a closing keynote called Big Team Farms. I spoke about my personal sense of what it means to be from a place, and how a longer, deeper look at the history of our planet, our species, and our culture can lead us to a wide range of possible ways to organize a food system, where farms are just one of many possible tool we could use to feed each other.
Here’s the part that meant the most to me:
Consider this one particular human…
She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a geography squarely located in the Rio Grand watershed. Believe it or not, that makes this her about 65%, by weight, Rio Grande river.
But this human spent their childhood, a critical time for physical development in humans, in southeastern Wyoming. A meaningful portion of her solid mass is mineral; bones, teeth, muscle mass, and some portion of those minerals were harvested from her landscape and food sources growing up. The chemical make up of her internal, animated minerals is likely to share similarities with the minerals in the soil, air, and rock in southeastern Wyoming.
And right now, this human is in Denver, Colorado. She is, at last check, actively breathing, continuing to process the abiotic world and harvest the landscape to build and maintain her biological body.
In these ways, this human is an incarnation of these abiotic factors. She’s the river, the earth, and the air, walking around.
I did give the talk at 4pm on a Friday, at the very end of a three-day conference in Denver when a blizzard was kicking up, but let me tell you, it would be generous to say that audience panned my performance. Oof.
With my ego thoroughly checked, I shelved this project and plugged along with other work, until an ag-adjacent friend nominated me for an artists residency— which involved spending two weeks over the summer working on whatever art called to me (y’all, I’d never been called an artist before). Before going, I reached out to some mentors, and had one conversation that sharpened my focus in an unexpected way. The heart of the conversation was that old frustration— in short, that we have confused agrarian mythology for agricultural fact, and our food system, and a lot of people, are suffering and dying in the gap between the two. So how, I asked my mentor, do I kill the myth? In response, he challenged me— myth, he said, is actually the purest source of truth. Myth is a keyhole through which we look to understand something fundamental about our place in the world. My problem, my mentor suggested, might not be that the myth is false, but that it is out of place. Myths belong to people and to spaces, and a myth that’s spread beyond its native range is not unlike an invading plant, animal, or person. Myths do not die, he instructed, but they can be contained, when they come into contact with other, competing stories. He gave me some book recommendations, and we signed off, and I have thought about that conversation every single day since.
Then this fall, I went to Minnesota to talk to some college kids about the progress I’d made in my battle with the myth. I gave a speech called The Agrarian Dilemma: The Farm System We Have and What Else is Possible, and I named and described agrarian mythology, and it’s harmful outcomes, directly. It was impactful and interesting for me (and hopefully the audience too), but the most formative moment came during the Q&A, when an intrepid audience member asked a few questions that ended with something like, “so shouldn’t we just make a more people-centric food system?”
Yes. Yes we should. And that, from my perspective, is exactly what our agrarian mythology denies us. The agrarian myth says, give the people land to farm, and farming the land will make the people good (i.e. more democratic, patriotic, kind, compassionate, self-sacrificing, hard-working, etc.). Farms and farming are at the heart, and people are stuck in the margins.
This helped me put a fine point on the questions I want to answer. Questions like:
How do we put people at the center of the food system, instead of farms?
How can we imagine food systems that operate fundamentally differently than the one we’ve been building in the US for the last 500 years?
How might crafty humans feed themselves and one another if we replaced, “first, there were small farms, and they were good,” with “first, people roamed the land, and then they got hungry?”
Get To The Point
(Hi Skippers!) So this is the kitchen I’ve been cooking in. I’ve been tinkering with agrarian mythology, army worms and miller moths, beans, naturalization, magic-making, cowboys and outlaws, the rights and responsibilities of being from here and not from here, god-shaped holes, the scent of juniper, forbidden fruits, arroyos, and Wile E. Coyote. I’ve been experimenting with recipes for stories that might be strong enough, interesting enough, get-under-your-skin-and-carve-out-a-seat-in-your-heart enough to engage successfully with the stories that we’ve been importing and blanketing over North America’s countless distinct landscapes, about how to create, maintain, and participate in a food system. That’s what’s getting me out of bed in the morning these days— exploring the food and land possibilities that exist just a little bit beyond what already is.
Which brings me to the fact that, as you may have noticed, this newsletter is no longer called Big Team Farms. I’m changing the name because I’m doing something different, but also because writing a newsletter (and two books) with “farm” in the title contributes to the centering of farms, and I’ve come to realize that affixing the words “big” and “team” to it didn’t do nearly enough to challenge that fact.
So let me welcome you to People Eat the Land, a newsletter exploring fantastical possibilities for more whimsical, weird, diverse, dynamic, just, resilient, sacred, and delicious food systems.
I have a ton of ideas of what I want to do here, from unpacking more of the work I’ve done recently (including some fiction-ish projects?!) to imagining-out-loud what the future might look like and how we could get there. But I’ll also emphasize, all this geo-mythology and agro-magical talk doesn’t mean we’re not also going to get into the news from time to time, and topics like regenerative ag, carbon markets, and the 2024(?) Farm Bill. Nothing is off the table, there are no rules, and all the pieces matter.
If you’re wondering, at this point, whether or not I have a wall in my house dedicated to sticky notes, index cards, maps and pictures, all connected by red string— I do. Am I slipping slowly into madness? A girl can dream.
Plus, I’m excited to explore new ways to integrate your interests and feedback on what I’m researching, what’s coming out of it, and how you interact with my work. But to hopefully avoid this thing devolving into total chaos, I wanted to lay out some broad strokes of what my current aims are here.
So what are we going to do here?
Understanding our agri-cultural history
The most common idea of the history of agriculture that I hear goes something like this. “In the beginning, humans were hunters and gathers, and everyone’s lives were nasty, brutish, and short. Then humans learned agriculture, civilization dawned, we weren’t hungry anymore, and the rest is history.” This story is not true, despite how common it is.
And yet, this idea—that farming, and thus farms, made us who we are—is foundational to our farm-centric understanding of food, land, and everything. Unpacking the real human history of procuring calories from the landscape has been eye-opening for me, and I’m excited to share. In learning a more complete agricultural history, we’ll begin to lay a new, more stable foundation for our thinking about the food system.
Engaging modern agrarian mythology
Our culture and lives are literally littered with agrarian mythology. I wrote about this detritus weekly in the Big Team Farms newsletter, and we’ll continue the tradition here— discussing farming, food, agriculture, and land in pop culture and beyond, understanding how exposure to a very specific agricultural mythology shapes our perspectives not only on the food system, but on everything from politics and patriotism to finance and the environment.
Imagining along all the edges of the future food system
This is the part I’m most excited about. With our new foundational understanding of agri-cultural history and with our bias towards agrarian mythology illuminated, we’re going to explore ideas—from marginal to radical—for how we might engage with land and food differently. We’ll hear from experts, engage with practitioners, and most of all, we’ll imagine. We’ll shape and tell stories about the food and farm system we want beyond the bounds of what the current power players deem “practical” or “feasible” given the constraints of American capitalism.
What will it look like?
People Eat the Land will (for now) come in three flavors— Original (Essay), Book Club, and Podcast.
Essays will feel familiar to Big Team folks out there— but these are going to be a lot more wide-ranging than they’ve been in the past, including everything from opinion and analysis to creative essay and short stories. Upcoming essay topics include:
Wanna Make a Difference? Stay: Moving for Work and the Anti-capitalism of Context
Eating in a World with Many Gods
Why the Renewable Fuels Standard Worked (And Other Counterintuitive Paths to Progress)
For the Love of Bananas
Strangely Like War: Violence, Love, and Our Relationship with Land
Book Club is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, ever since the late cretaceous period when I did a book-a-day challenge and wrote about the books I read. Plus, reading books about food and ag (by the broadest possible definition) can be a grind, and if I can save you some time by sharing what I’ve learned from various titles, that would make me happy. Upcoming book club books include:
Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, Virginia DeJohn Anderson
The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come from, and What Makes Us Happy, William von Hippel
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Podcasts. I still struggle with the idea that I’m a professional podcaster, because that feels weird (and… asshole-y? for some reason?). But I create and consume a lot of audio content related to food, agriculture, and land, and I want to process and integrate what I know, and share it with you. Upcoming podcast analysis includes:
Are We Running Out of Farmland? The Only Thing That Lasts
Powell Maps the Colorado River and Sees the Future, Ag Interrupted
Ghost Herd: A true story of family, fraud, land and power
in the American West
So that’s the plan.
Look out for this newsletter on most Friday mornings. I can’t wait to hear your feedback over the coming weeks and months as I work out the kinks. If you have requests or recommendations of what I should cover here, please email me!
In the meantime, I hope you are having a peaceful and joyful early Winter, and that all is well with you and yours.
Rock on,
Sarah
Here is a recent paper about center and periphery of food systems. It seems that the periphery is where the focus needs to be. https://ecologyandsociety.org/vol28/iss4/art16/
Happy that you are back! Your saying “rich farmers create food for poor people and poor farmers create food for the rich” from Farming and other F words still sticks with me. Really interested to hear what you are thinking about and looking forward to reading more.