Rooted
in Care
SMOKE
BILLOWED FROM the sugar stacks. The vegetal rot
of processed sugarbeets wafted over the
interstate. The vinegar aftertaste coated my
throat. Stung my nostrils. The sharp scent of
sugary wastewater seeped into my pores. Outside
my Toyota pickup, the wind blew across fields
crusted with December snow and salts. It was my
first North Dakota winter in three years. My
first drive along the Red River since leaving my
career as an American literature professor in
New England to assume my position as a soil
conservationist in my home county. The smell
from the sugar stacks along I-29 was a reminder
of how long I’d been gone. It would take a week
for me to reacclimate to the noxious odor that
the sugar industry has rescripted as “the sweet
smell of jobs.”
Like
many folks from the rural Great Plains, I’ve
left home more times than I can count.… But the
prairie and my father’s long battle with
multiple sclerosis have perennially called me
home.
The
chipped-tooth border between North Dakota and
Minnesota is a landscape dominated by salt and
sugar. We grow more processed sugar in the Red
River Valley than anywhere else in the country.
The American Crystal Sugar factories that line
the Red River produce 3 billion pounds of
processed sugar per year. The industrial methods
used to grow sugarbeets and other monoculture
cash crops leave behind patches of water-soluble
salts trapped on the surface of compacted soils.
These saline conditions spread across bare
fields that were once tallgrass prairie, the
biodiverse grasslands replaced by growing
patches of salted earth, where almost nothing
grows.
An
aerial view of my home in flyover country bears
resemblance to the MRI scans of my father’s
brain and spinal cord. The salt crust on black
fields mirrors the plaque that builds up along
dad’s myelin sheath. The chisel plows that cut
through dense networks of mycorrhizal fungi,
ritually destroying the soil microbiome, are
akin to my father’s confused immune system that
attacks the protective fatty tissue around his
nerve fibers and spine.
It’s
been three years since that winter homecoming.
Today, in my dual roles as a soil
conservationist and my father’s caregiver, I
have begun to dream about an alternative to the
monoculture economies that poison the land and
our bodies.
Writer Josh Anderson explores
the deep connections between human health and
soil health, and his vision for a thriving Great
Plains prairie ecosystem that supports
both. | 
