24: Food: The Rural-Urban Link
USA
A Climate Pollinator story by Sierra Ross Richer
The winds were so strong in Freeman, South Dakota last spring that Roy Kaufman said, “Some days you could barely see a quarter mile because of the dust.”
The soil blown off of agricultural fields filled irrigation ditches so that some farmers had to use tractors to return it to the fields.
Eighty five percent of the state of South Dakota, located in the Great Plains region of the United States, is agricultural land. Most of those acres are used to grow commodity crops like corn and soybeans and are farmed using industrial farming methods.
A study referenced in Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reduce Global Warming published in 2017, estimates that in the last century, 50 percent of the planet’s soil carbon has been released into the atmosphere through tilling. Industrial farming practices also erode and compact the soil, deplete fertility, drain groundwater and pollute waterways.
With so much land in the United States being used for industrial agriculture, the potential for sequestering carbon and restoring environmental health through conservation agriculture, regenerative agriculture and farmland restoration (three climate change solutions ranked 16th, 11th and 23rd by Drawdown, respectively), is huge.
But, for farmers who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, the transition to more sustainable practices can appear a big, and risky undertaking.
What will it take for farmers to change their practices? Roy, a retired Mennonite pastor and agrarian historian from Freeman, has an idea.
Roy said that urban people often critique rural communities for being conservative, or slow to change. He wants urban Mennonites to understand that agrarian cultures only make changes when it’s clear that something will work.
“It worked to use bigger tractors, it worked to use pesticides,” Roy said. “Our heritage now is industrial agriculture.”
Roy has seen a growing divide between urban Mennonite churches, which are often more progressive, and more conservative rural communities. But, he said, if urban Mennonites want farmers to change their practices, they have to support them, not just point fingers.
In his community, Roy knows farmers who have stopped tilling their fields and started planting cover crops. Others are growing organic vegetables and raising chickens, goats and pigs on a small scale. These farmers sell produce to their neighbors, at farmers markets and through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, but doing their own marketing is inhibitively difficult.
Urban churches could provide the markets needed to give Mennonite farmers the confidence that transitioning to more sustainable practices will work.
By forming partnerships, rural and urban churches can both benefit. Urban Mennonites gain access to healthy, locally-grown vegetables and meat, and farming communities gain a secure market for their produce.
Instead of letting the differences between urban and rural communities become a dividing force, Roy sees an opportunity for working together to heal the environment.
“I think there’s a lot of potential in this area,” he said, “if the broader church would get the vision for this.”
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