How different cultures and ways of growing up shape our perspectives on agriculture and food

In Fall 2024, students in WWU’s ENVS 499D: Readings in Environmental Justice are reading about regenerative agriculture. This post reflects some of the group’s learning and discussion.

By Meli and Ady

When it came to our turn to lead the group discussion for our readings on Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming by Liz Carlisle we decided to take a broader approach than other groups have gone in the past. Our hope being that we can apply what we are learning in these chapters to our own lived experiences. For our discussion we were assigned to focus on Chapter 4: Putting Roots Down, which, while it has lots of different themes and key points, focuses largely on cultural practices and perceptions as they relate to agriculture. The structure of our discussion was outlined by a few refresher questions to review the material but our goal was to have a mainly open-ended discussion that related to the overall topics of the chapter. We really wanted to focus on our own individual relationships and perceptions with/of agriculture and how American culture and the environments that we have grown up in have shaped these.

Ady’s Relationship with Agriculture

I grew up in a small town in Eastern Washington where wheat farming is the main industry, and my family has run a wheat farm for generations, one in which I grew up for 18 years of my life. However, when I tell people this about myself, I find that my relationship with agriculture is different from what people often expect it to be. For all of my life, my dad has been working on the farm, largely by himself aside from harvest, until my older brother got old enough to help him out. I figured that I would get to join as well as I got old enough but instead, I was not asked to come help on the farm but assigned to do all the typical sort of housework that you would probably imagine someone in the “mom” role of the house would do. It was only my dad, brother, and me for the most part as my parents were divorced so I suppose it made sense, but at a young age, I didn’t understand why I had a different role. It’s not necessarily like I really wanted to work on the farm, especially because my older brother complained about it all the time. But it felt as though I never even got the chance, simply based on the fact that I am a girl and not a boy. Even in discussing who would take over the farm after my dad, it was always that if my older brother didn’t want to, it would go to my little brother, who is 9 years younger than me, as if I wasn’t even there. This created an interesting relationship with agriculture because even though I grew up on a farm, I felt very detached from it as if it was something that I wasn’t ever really a part of or connected to. So when people ask me what it was like to grow up on a farm I have a hard time explaining that while I may have grown up on a farm, that doesn’t really mean what they think it might. I doubt they would like to hear about the hours of chores and cleaning that I did every day, or how the only time I ever got to do anything on the farm was when some piece of equipment needed cleaning. It’s because of this that I often don’t mention that I grew up on a farm because I feel like my experiences will disappoint people, especially when they have this perception of what it is supposed to look like when someone grows up on a farm.

Meli’s Relationship with Agriculture

My mom grew up in Hostotipaquillo, Jalisco and my dad grew up in Los Mochis, Sinaloa. Both of my parents’ families relied on their farms for sustenance. From a young age, my parents told me stories of growing up in their ejidos and running around everywhere unsupervised, they also told me how hard it was to feed their family of 8+. After moving to the United States, my dad was a gardener for 15 years, for 15 years I had to watch him come back wet, cold, and shivering or sweating with heat exhaustion. I have some fond memories, like when he would come back with Easter eggs after tending to someone’s garden the Monday after Easter. That memory has since bittered since I’ve realized that those eggs came from families who could spare a few compared to our family who made sure to count every single egg. My parents tend to their own garden where they grow tomatoes, tomatillos, jalapeños, corn, and plums. While I can admit that I spent an entire summer picking tomatillos and making chilaquiles verdes in the morning (the most delicious chilaquiles I’ve ever had), I would say I have a bad relationship with agriculture. In large part due to watching the physical toll it took on my dad. This book and this chapter has left me wondering what my parents’ relationship with agriculture is. How has it changed over the years and how do they feel when gardening? And in what ways will my relationship with agriculture change?