European settlers arriving in North America brought many novel things with them, but the concept of agriculture wasn’t one of them. Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat cultivation of corn, beans and squash (collectively known as the “Three Sisters”), as well as sunflower and tobacco, on the shores of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River long predated colonization of the Americas. Jacques Cartier, on the first recorded up-river voyage on the St. Lawrence River by a European in 1535, noted the “good and large fields of corn” being grown by the Haudenosaunee people living in what is present-day Montreal. The Old Farmer’s Almanac still calls the Three Sisters “companion planting at its best,” as the trio grow “symbiotically to deter weeds and pests, enrich the soil, and support each other.”

Every year, Ó:nenhste, Corn, is the first sister to return — tall, slender and stoic, with silky yellow hair that glistens in the July sun. Her ambition to stretch for the sky sets her apart, earning her the posture of confident authority that eldest sisters tend to have. After all the growth she achieves, Ó:nenhste watches over her sisters from above and guides them to grow in their own ways. Her strong will and even stronger stalk make her a natural-born leader, helping and inspiring her sisters to fulfil their original instructions.

Ohsahè:ta, Bean, is the second sister. As a wandering spirit, she winds her way from place to place; opportunity to opportunity, blindly sending tendrils in every direction. But without someone or something to cling to, many of them would wither and die, wasting her precious energy. When, instead, she finds the eldest sister, her purpose to sustain life is emboldened. She clings to Ó:nenhste and, with the support of her sister, climbs to new heights. Using stalk as trellis, Ohsahè:ta will gift a bountiful harvest that far exceeds what she could have grown along the ground by herself.

Nourishment and good management of the soil are not always a certainty in agriculture. We need look no further back than the 1930s, with its dust storms and failed crops, to know that poor farming practices can turn good soil into what one Canadian farmer at the time called, a “dust-choked perdition… dried out, lifeless expanses of sun-smitten prairie.” Alongside releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere, excess tillage leaves soil vulnerable to wind, sun and water, hastening erosion and the loss of nutrients. Chemical fertilizers swept away during that accelerated erosion and introduced into water systems have been linked to eutrophication, algal blooms and the death of aquatic life.

Blake Vince operates a 1,200-acre farm near the shores of Lake Erie, producing corn, winter wheat, soybeans and cattle. Vince chose to shift his operation towards regenerative techniques after learning of the detrimental effects pollutants have on water systems. And he was no longer comfortable with his crops being put towards non-edible products like ethanol, plastic and biodiesel. “I recognized that I was growing commodities. I wasn’t growing food.”

Already a no-till operation since the 1980s, he switched to using primarily non-GMO seeds, planted cover crops, installed water monitoring equipment and purchased a small herd of grazing cattle. Like Lamothe, Vince is hesitant to ascribe himself any labels. “I don’t want to hitch myself to a wagon. I’m not about buzzwords. I’m doing it because I believe it’s the right thing to do. It makes sense physically, psychologically and financially.”

For many farmers across the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed, finances were a consideration on par with the environment. Yet the annual cost of soil erosion in Canada from reduced crop yield alone is estimated to be in the billions, and the cost of fertilizers is substantial. Sébastien Angers, an agronomist in Nicolet, Que., says these costs could be minimized if we stop practising agriculture through an “empty space” mindset. In conventional agriculture, he says, “we destroy and create a vacuum into which the weeds come.” It takes time and money to clear that space by applying pesticides and herbicides. Angers, who is also a farmer and practises regenerative techniques on the commercial pumpkin fields of his Ferme de l’Odyssée, says the ecological structure created through regenerative techniques allows farmers to limit inputs like pesticides and herbicides while buoying a crop’s natural resilience.

Farmers lead chancier lives than most, their income relying heavily on structures far beyond their influence, including the global economy and the weather. It stands that farmers desire to control what they can, be it by using ever-improving mechanical equipment, irrigation practices, hybrid and genetically modified seeds, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It’s through these techniques that the total yield for key crops like potatoes, corn and barley has increased more than twofold over the past 20 years. As long as high yields are the metric used to measure successful agriculture, conventional farmers have little reason to alter their methods.

While the commercial farmer bases their income on high volumes of product, and the organic by demanding a higher price, Angers thinks the value of a regenerative farm should be measured by what natural systems it is able to retain. While it may be a little esoteric to put a dollar price on biodiversity, water and soil health, it creates a major incentive for farmers. He is hopeful that as more farmers apply these techniques, data gleaned from their efforts can go toward creating roadmaps to help farmers optimize any particular crop they want to grow in concert with their farm’s natural biodiversity. “A lot of people think I’m crazy,” he said. “I’m just 25 years too early.”

Though Angers’ work may seem inchoate to some, it is an endeavour to modernize and scale practices that have existed for millennia, an attempt to refashion techniques that were standard in pre-contact North America, such as the Three Sisters.

There was a dark time in Haudenosaunee history, when people forgot how to live in accordance with their original instructions. They were so preoccupied with warring against local and European nations, fighting for territory, power and even money, that they harmed the land in the process without care. In the new world, many Haudenosaunee stopped conducting ceremonies, taking care of their mother and even giving thanks to the life sustainers. The rest of creation began to take notice of their wicked ways.

Feeling that their hard work was unappreciated and unreciprocated, the sisters wanted to end their lives on Earth and return to the Skyworld. In a vision, they met a Haudenosaunee man called Kaniatario, Handsome Lake. He, too, was feeling hopeless after surviving a gruesome attack from a more powerful nation (America) and deeply mourned the state of the world in constant despair. Kaniatario and the Three Sisters prepared to journey to the other side of the sky together.

Before they could leave, Kaniatario saw that his people had forgotten their instructions and that was the reason for such bloodshed and fear. He convinced the Three Sisters to stay with him on Earth and vowed to re-teach his people the old ways. The sisters agreed, and Kaniatario fulfilled his promise. To this day, Haudenosaunee still plant the Three Sisters in one mound and offer them our thanks and appreciation.

As life on Earth changes rapidly and new environmental threats emerge, so too do our responsibilities to protect the natural world that sustains us. When Haudenosaunee gather, we begin by bringing our minds together as one, akwé:kon énhska entitewahwe’nó:ni ne onkwa’nikòn:ra, to offer our thanks and greetings to the natural world as a collective voice. We recognize the work the life sustainers do to allow life to thrive and ask that they continue. Our stories teach us that everything we need is freely given to us by creation. Now we need to pull that wisdom from the old ways and use it alongside settler agriculturalists to collaboratively respect the land we’ve borrowed from future generations and ensure the life sustainers never want to leave us again.

There are some 190,000 farms in Canada, and of the roughly 62 million hectares they cover — about six per cent of the country’s land base — it’s unclear how many use regenerative practices. Régénération Canada, a non-profit that organizes workshops and connects farmers, scientists and consumers across the country, works directly with around 500 farms and indirectly with up to 3,000. It’s worth mentioning that some regenerative techniques are used by self-styled conventional farmers; my father’s farm and many other farmers I know in southern Manitoba use swidden agriculture (burning to promote growth), rotational cropping (moving crops from field to field), livestock grazing and multi- or polycropping without invoking the regenerative name.

“Farmers are going to do what farmers do until they can do it better,” Lamothe says. “No one goes out every day and says, ‘I’m going to go pollute the water,’ or ‘I’m going to taint the creek with my manure application.’ They’re going [to] do what they think is best given their circumstances and given their knowledge and practices, and to the best of their abilities. They don’t want to lose money. They don’t want to hurt the environment. They don’t want to hurt animals. They don’t want to endanger the population.”

The disconnect between farmer and non-farmer today is large enough to render farming something of an abstract concept — something that happens over there under vague circumstances. Farmers are under pressure to bridge the gap between nostalgic perceptions and modern realities. “I remember my father-in-law saying that, when he was farming, it was 95 per cent art and five per cent science,” said Lamothe. “Today, it’s the complete opposite. We’re looking at a system that’s 95 per cent science and five per cent art. I don’t wake up in the morning and look at the moon, smell the soil or listen to what birds are chirping to decide what I’m going to do that day or how I’m going to plant my crops. I’m looking at weather patterns and soil temperatures, at the soil analysis that I get from my GPS soil sampling points, at hybrid results from trial plots — and things of that sort to decide what kind of practices I’m going to use to grow my crops and improve my soil.”

Technologies are moving agriculture towards a future where sustainability encompasses both economics and the environment. Recent innovations have included heavy machinery that is less disruptive to the soil, smart seeds that read soil composition, and the use of microbes that remove methane from the soil and others that fix nitrogen. Yet readdressing agriculture is as much a social change as a technological one, as rooted in emotions as it is in economics.

In his 1733 work “An Essay on Man,” the English essayist Alexander Pope was already alluding to the battle between human desires and nature’s capabilities, writing “Where grows? — where grows it not? — If vain our toil, We ought to blame the Culture, not the Soil.”

Culturally, western nations have become accustomed to a worldwide agricultural system that prioritizes our eclectic tastes over the fair distribution of food globally, the treatment of agricultural workers and impacts on the climate. Grabbing a banana in Toronto in January today goes without a second thought. Philip Loring, the global director of human dimensions science for the Nature Conservancy’s global science team, suggests that changing this mentality is not merely about the facts but about rethinking how a farm works. “What is a farm for? Is it for producing commodity crops? Or is a farm for producing food?”

Loring, whose Conservation of Change initiative looks to Indigenous cultures around the world for examples of how communities can work with nature to survive over hundreds of generations, points to agricultural systems like those of the Haudenosaunee, who, Loring says, practised “great diversity in the food system, seasonal eating and a willingness to give space for aspects of the environment to heal.” Many studies, including several involving Loring, have shown that traditional polycropping techniques, along the lines of the Three Sisters, are sustainable and cost-effective.

“Regenerative thinking,” Loring says, “is asking people to realize that for us to get what we need, we need to leave space in that system for things that we don’t need, that aren’t for us.” “Many farmers now have been coerced onto a treadmill of supporting seed and chemical companies — and getting locked into bank notes and cycles of debt and finance. It’s almost a subservience to the commodity market they are selling into. Imagine getting out of that!”

The dual role of farmers as both scion and arbiter of the social direction was explored by the American naturalist writer Aldo Leopold in his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac. Leopold appealed to farmers’ sense of social responsibility when proposing the idea of a land ethic, which he envisioned as a widened notion of community, including the health of all soil, waters, plants and animals — and thereby extending to them the same social conscience we impart and expect of others to make coexistence peaceful and progressive. If not quite bestowing personhood upon creeks, dandelions and frogs, it was at least suggesting that minding them was an act of civility and good conscience.

As “ethic” implies, Leopold’s philosophy tended toward the moral, not the practical: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” he wrote. “It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Still, Leopold was not ignorant of the schism between a farmer’s pragmatic approach to land and the public’s remove from it, nor did he turn a blind eye to economics. Rather, he appealed to their “time, forethought, skill, and faith.”