To save their soil, Kansas tribe shifts to regenerative agriculture – and transforms their farms

IOWA TRIBE OF KANSAS AND NEBRASKA RESERVATION, Kansas — When one of the elders in the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska asked if he could keep bees on the reservation, Tim Rhodd's answer was straightforward: "Absolutely."

Soon, the bees started buzzing in the alfalfa fields. Then they started pollinating.

Then they all died.

"Once we started looking into it, we found there was a chemical (class) called neonicotinoid that caused the death of these bees," said Rhodd, the tribe's chairperson. "That was the very, very first part of what I had seen that we were doing things wrong."

Facing the reality that their soil was contaminated – and the realization that the same harmful insecticides that killed the bees would be bad for them, too – the Ioway started questioning their farming practices.

After receiving a grant in 2019, the tribe switched its farming operations from monocropping – growing one plant in the same soil, year after year – to regenerative agriculture, a process designed to promote biodiversity and soil health by minimizing disturbances and maintaining living roots as much as possible.

By caring for a rotation of diverse crops throughout the year – rather than controlling the soil year-round for just one seasonal crop – farmers eliminate the need for herbicides and pesticides.

Moving away from monocropping is as much a challenge to standard practice as it is a physical feat. The so-called Green Revolution in the 1960s changed industrial farming to address food shortages by ushering in the extensive use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Working to improve the yield of a single crop became the norm, thanks in part to profitability and operational efficiency.

But monocropping has been shown to damage soil health, and farmers' reliance on pesticides and...