“Feed the world.” I grew up hearing this phrase, usually in the context of agriculture. “Farmers and ranchers feed the world,” I heard in newspapers, TV, and ads. Within my rural South Dakota community, the phrase was a point of pride, a slogan of sorts. An idea to justify the long hours and struggles.
I don’t remember talking about what exactly “feed the world” meant in practical terms, though. I knew where some of our crops went. The oats went to the horses and cattle or served as seed for the next year. The corn fed the calves, and occasionally neighbors bought some for their animals. The hay and corn silage fed the livestock, too. My dad also sold around a dozen beeves a year to locals and kept our family’s chest freezer stocked with beef.
But the bulk of what the operation produced? No idea where it went. People bid on our calves at auction—we sold several hundred steers and heifers every year—but our family did not talk about the buyers beyond what they paid, or about what happened to the cattle. Every summer we trucked the wheat crop to local elevators that bought or stored it until my dad decided to sell, or we offloaded it into our own grain bins on the farm. We did not discuss where the wheat went or what became of it.
It wasn’t just my family. I spent a lot of time working with my dad, which often involved accompanying him to the elevator, feed store, sale barn, and other places. I listened to countless conversations about farming and ranching, and I don’t remember anyone talking about CAFOs or grain processing companies or consumer preferences or nutrient density or human health. All this happened a long time ago and my memory could be blurry. Perhaps such conversations did happen among producers, just not when I was around. I can say with certainty, though, that discussions don’t occur often about end consumers, supply chains, or the industrial-grain-oilseed-livestock complex of which conventional producers are a part.
And why would farmers and ranchers talk about such things? The consumer, it feels, is nowhere in sight, off in some distant city or foreign country. Some producers even have a slight sense of derision toward non-producers, who in their comfortable urban homes have no idea how much work agriculture requires and couldn’t run a farm if they tried. How dare urban consumers have opinions about cropping practices, animal welfare, and farm policy?
For many farmers, the consumer is not the person eating the food. The consumer is the CAFOs buying the cattle, the distributor picking up the produce, and the elevators purchasing the grain. Farmers and ranchers adapted to those entities’ needs, not actual people’s. Plus, thinking about one’s place in the food system is difficult when economic and physical survival is a day-to-day concern. When dealing with erratic weather, uncertain commodity prices, rising debt, and increasing input costs, issues of sprawling supply chains, corporate consolidation, overprocessed foods, and end consumer health often take a back seat.
“Feed the world” is as much as some producers want or have time to know—but not all.
After the food system collapse prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic, I went in search of people trying to make our food system more resilient in the face of emergencies, especially by connecting farmers and consumers, shortening supply chains, reducing industry consolidation, and prioritizing quality over quantity in food. What I discovered through my cross-country travels was a diverse cohort of women using regenerative agriculture as a basis for a more sustainable food system.
Regenerative agriculture means farming and ranching practices that restore organic matter and biodiversity in soil, which in turn improves water cycles, fuels life above ground, and increases crop resilience and nutrient density. What’s more, regeneratively managed soil draws down and stores carbon compared to conventionally managed soil, and regenerative producers rely far less on fossil fuels. Regenerative producers also take a holistic approach to land management. Rather than chasing narrow goals like yield per acre, they prioritize the ecosystem’s overall health, an ecosystem that includes human communities damaged by industrial agriculture.
There’s way more to regenerative agriculture than I can cover here, but when it comes to consumers, regenerative is less about producing mass quantities of industrially produced, nutritionally empty food and more about providing communities and regions with environmentally sustainable, nutrient-rich, climate-smart food. Food whose production has better economic outcomes for farmers and rural communities. Food that goes into a system that won’t collapse when a climate emergency or global pandemic strikes.
Women are leading the way in this regenerative movement for a number of reasons, not least of which is concern for the next generation. For these leaders, feeding the world is as much about nourishing land and community for tomorrow’s farmers as it is about providing food for today’s consumers. To my mind, that kind of holistic perspective, combined with the widespread adoption of regenerative agriculture, is exactly what our food system needs so that all of us stay fed well into the future.
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.
