2024-04-30, Support sustainable economics in pine ridge

Me and my family have been living near the small community of Porcupine, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, for about a month now. We were invited because of our experience with regenerative horticulture and sustainable resource management oriented toward ending food apartheid, and so we've been taking time talking with folk to see how those skills should be applied here. And, we think we know what we should do:

One of the first things we learned as a problem here was how much of the land is used for cattle grazing. That isn't something we can directly change, so our focus turned toward looking at how that problem can be a solution for other problems, in a way that does change the primary issue.

So, our question became, is there a way we can enable alternative incomes?

There's a lot of forms of pollution that come from cattle ranching. One of the most known is the contamination of surface water with pathogens, but one we found ourselves looking toward as a possible solution was the changes in plant populations that occur as a result of cattle grazing.

When cattle graze an area, it changes what plants grow there, and this in turn changes what plants grow nearby. For example, mullein is a plant that spreads easily into recently disturbed areas. It spreads into them more easily than lots of plants that have been in the area for longer can, so you end up with mullein where there were once native asters that had more complex relationships with the ecology. (Cattle grazing an area also generally depletes the soil, as the nutrients they collect from eating grass is metabolized or ends up elsewhere when the cattle are herded out for processing.)

This is part of how "invasive plants" do their "invading," and end up reducing the biodiversity, and thus ecological health, of an area.

Fortunately, mullein is also a plant that many people use in various ways. So is stinging nettle, and catnip, and a wide variety of other plants that have found themselves growing in over-abundance here.

We want to set up a small mobile facility for harvesting and processing these plants according to the FDA's Current Good Manufacturing Practice, and a nursery for cultivating plants that will be better for the area's ecological health.

The mullein, the stinging nettle, they can all be another form of getting economic support from the land: harvest them, dry them, package them, and sell them.

And in their place, plant echinacea and other plants that have those complex relationships with the rest of the local ecology.

This type of economic participation is more sustainable and more accessible than the current model that relies on cattle grazing, and makes space for folk to make decisions about what to do with the land uninhibited by the harms and pollutions of grazing.

What we're planning to do here isn't that much different than what we were doing in North Carolina. The difference is, rather than facing antagonism from the local community, and thus being limited in scale to what we could forage and grow in our backyard, we have the interest and cooperation of families having hundreds of acres of land.

In order to meet the opportunity that provides, we need to be able to come to folks' land with the means to process and package the plants we're targeting, and then bring those back to the local post office for mailing out. We also need to be able to grow a variety of native plants, healthily enough that they can be used to start new plant communities where we're working.

Some of this we already have: We have a vehicle that'll let us get to where folk are living, and we already have some planting trays, irrigation hoses, and other equipment for running a nursery.

But to do this, we'll need to increase our solar power capacity, and get bigger dehydrators. We'll need to have space for storing boxes, shipping labels.

We're working on a more concrete plan for all this, as we talk more with other families and figure out how their own aspirations and skills overlap with ours. We're also helping another family plan how to set up a mobile lumber mill, and another wants to get into turning scrap metal into wood stoves. These ideas weave in tightly with the sustainable resource management part of our skillsets, so we're going to be taking tree ring samples at the same time we're talking over how much chicory we think we'll be dehydrating in a week.

But with monetary support from you, we can make the most of these opportunities to make these big changes, helping improve the land and quality of life for the people living on it.