Regenerative agriculture represents a unique opportunity to address modern Appalachia’s poverty in a way that honors the region’s cultural history, the need for diverse circular economies, and the abundance of the land.
The history of Appalachian coal country is one of boom and bust. It can be seen through the rise and fall of the coal industry, the failed initiatives of the War on Poverty, and the vacant industrial office parks that once held the promise of big business and steady jobs. Appalachia is one of the poorest and most stigmatized areas of the United States. The region has been othered, forgotten, exploited, and used for short-term profit seeking that has left mountain citizens just as poor, if not poorer, than they were before. Through each of these boom and bust cycles, the global capitalist economy has encouraged Appalachians to shift away from their rich, place-based economic potential by introducing industries that extract resources from the region. To chart an equitable path forward for Appalachians, solutions must address the structural inequalities of the area; build sustainable, wealth-generating businesses that are not reliant on external capital and lean into the region’s abundant land, labor, and cultural resources. While there is no silver bullet that will fix every problem in Appalachia, I will argue that regenerative agriculture deserves inclusion in the multi-pronged approach to revitalizing the region. As a practice, regenerative agriculture compliments the cultural legacy of family farming in Appalachia, presents the opportunity to restore decimated land, and has a proven ability to drive economic and community development. It is time we work with — not against — Appalachians on their road to prosperity.
Before one can imagine solutions to the problems of Appalachian coal country — eastern Kentucky, northeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and West Virginia — one must understand the history of coal, poverty, and discrimination in the region. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Appalachia was a hub for coal mining. In many ways, the industry defined the region and attracted scores of workers from the American South in search of new opportunities. Many workers lived in “model towns” in which the coal company owned everything — “the housing stock, the stores where their employees would spend their hard-earned dollars…the schools, the churches, and the land.” These towns strove to be industrial utopias, but as with most utopias, they demanded “blind obedience” and created a corporate monoculture that continues to haunt modern Appalachia to this day.
The monoculture of the coal industry — defined by years of boom and bust — is at the core of Appalachia’s cycle of poverty. With little other opportunity in the area, residents depended on the coal industry for their livelihood and its increasing instability plunged countless workers into severe economic hardship. In addition to falling behind the rest of the country financially, American citizens looked upon Appalachians as a backwards, “strange and peculiar people” — a region comprised of “toothless hillbillies [who] subsist solely on roadkill and moonshine.” These damaging, one-dimensional stereotypes, partnered with the region’s financial insecurity, encouraged a cultural perception of Appalachia as a region fundamentally different from the rest of the country. This attitude gave tacit permission for businesses to exploit and “tap the region’s natural resources in the name of development” and prompted a series of prescriptive measures meant to “fix” Appalachia. As a part of this crusade, President Lyndon B. Johnson positioned Appalachia as ground zero for his War on Poverty. This was highlighted by his visit to eastern Kentucky to promote the initiative in 1964.
The War on Poverty in Appalachia was marked by short-sighted investments in extractive economies and misguided attempts to urbanize the region by attracting branch plants from global businesses. Appalachian Studies scholar, Dr. Ronald Eller, explores the distinct difference between the idea of meaningful community development and the fallacy of corporate growth that was a trademark of the era in his book, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945,
We have mistaken growth for development, change for progress. Indeed, growth has become central to the American idea of development. Attainment of the good life, assume, is dependent upon the continued expansion of markets, transportation and communication networks, mass culture, urban centers, and consumer demand. Economic growth may indeed generate employment opportunities, but if those jobs provide low wages and few health benefits, they can reinforce conditions of dependence and powerlessness.
The growth that Eller alludes to here is the increasing emphasis that local and federal leaders placed on modernizing Appalachia’s infrastructure to recruit outside businesses. Highways, shopping centers, consolidated schools, and industrial parks were built throughout the late twentieth century, costing governments millions of dollars in construction funding and other public resources. These operations saw Appalachia’s breathtaking mountains “as a barrier to progress, something to be overcome and its resources tapped in the name of growth.” However, these extractive initiatives mostly failed and left Appalachia in the same economic depression it was in when the War on Poverty began. Eller explains this, saying:
After taking advantage of incentive packages and tax rebates, most of the branch textile, shoe, food processing, and other small plants attracted to Appalachia in the 1980s and 1990s left the region by the end of the century…Manufacturing in Appalachia, relative to the rest of the country, looked much the same in 1992 as it had in 1967 — lower wages, lower productivity, and much more reliant on branch plants.
It is easy, then, to see how Appalachia ended up with one-third of the region living in poverty. With a dramatic loss of jobs due to the industry’s collapse – there were 15,000 coal-mining jobs in 2012 compared with 45,000 in 1980 — and solutions that prioritized “short-term growth at the expense of more sustainable development,” there is a sentiment among many Appalachians that their only option is to leave the region. An eastern Kentucky native explains this outlook saying, “It’s not that anybody hates this place, it’s just that they don’t want to see their families suffer.” This vicious cycle of poverty and outmigration is a direct result of local and federal leaders’ inability to create circular economies based upon the region’s most sustainable attributes: a rich cultural history, one of the most biodiverse landscapes in the western hemisphere, and locals’ deep knowledge of the land.
Although coal mining was how most Appalachian residents made a (meager) living, mountain citizens built incredibly strong relationships to the land through small-scale agriculture and regional cuisines. To fight the poverty caused by coal’s boom and bust cycles, families learned to farm their fertile land and forage in the plentiful hills for fresh fruits, mushrooms, ramps, and more. According to former residents, “everybody in the community had a garden, and in their yard they raised their own greens, beans, tomatoes…everybody had a place for their livestock…to feed the chickens.” The biodiversity of the region provided Appalachians with a rich bevy of foods to eat, shaping a strong culinary culture as described by journalist Jane Black in the Washington Post,
Appalachian cuisine is derived as much from the culture of the mountains as from its ingredients. Perhaps here more than in any region in the United States, families carefully saved seeds, preserving heirloom varieties that vanished quickly in areas where commercial seeds were widely available. In 2011, researchers at Slow Food’s RAFT Alliance documented 1,412 distinctly named heirloom foods in the region, including more than 350 varieties of apples, 464 varieties of peas and 31 kinds of corn.
With the vast array of available foods, “many of the coal miners’ children joked that they had ‘Whole Foods before there was a Whole Foods,” and relied on family gardens and mountain foraging instead of local supermarkets. In direct contrast to the monoculture of the coal industry, mountain residents found choice, diversity, and sustenance from their relationships with the land.
Regenerative agriculture represents a unique opportunity to address modern Appalachia’s poverty in a way that honors the region’s cultural history, the need for diverse circular economies, and the abundance of the land. As a practice, regenerative agriculture rejects pesticide use, tilling, and the farming of monocultures — hallmarks of industrial agriculture. Instead, it supports the cultivation of healthy soil through permacultures and rotational farming. Healthy soil is where the power of regenerative agriculture lies — it leads to increased agricultural yields which puts more money into the hands of farmers; it eliminates the need for dangerous, carcinogenic pesticides which results in food that is safer to eat; it eradicates the need for farmers to rely on government corn and soy subsidies by allowing them to grow beneficial cover crops; and, perhaps most importantly, healthy soil sequesters carbon which, when done at scale, has the ability to reverse climate change. The practice is predicated on the fact that human beings should work with the land, not against it, and draws its roots from “the farmers who know their land and crops.” Regenerative agriculture, sometimes called agroecology, is a holistic system that exists in opposition to modern industrial farming, as Daniel Moss and Mark Bittman explain in the New York Times:
Agroecology measures its success by a yardstick that includes not only bushels and calories but by how well food nourishes people while regenerating soil and water and helping more farmers make a good living. Agroecological techniques also sequester carbon (industrial methods release it); encourage multicropping, which regenerates the ecology of the soil instead of depleting it; preserve local seed varieties instead of replacing them with patented, unaffordable varieties; sustain local food cultures and people; support local businesses operating close to farms; and create jobs.
In many ways, the ethos of regenerative agriculture matches the plight of Appalachia. It represents a rebuke of the unsustainable, extractive practices that have plundered the region, it fights the existence of monocultures, and it works with the land, not against it.
While regenerative agriculture offers a great deal of promise, it is not without its challenges. For farmers who are already ingrained in the industrial model, a switch to regenerative will result in decreased yields for the first few years of farming as the soil adjusts to the lack of chemical fertilizers. This represents a serious risk for modern farmers who often live harvest-to-harvest and do not have the financial security to risk losing income. Additionally, the environmentally exploitative practices of coal mining — particularly mountaintop removal (MTR) — have severely damaged Appalachia’s landscape. MTR is the violent “top-down removal of mountains by large machinery and explosives to get at buried coal seams [which] emerged in the 1970s as a labor cost-saving means of harvesting coal.” Since its inception, MTR has used chemicals and bombs to destroy “thousands of square miles of mountain topography” and “threaten the ecological renewability of wildlife habitats and human communities.” A blatant disrespect for the people of Appalachia and the region’s biodiversity, MTR represents the worst of the coal industry and admittedly poses a challenge to the viability of sustaining life — human, animal, or plant — in the area.
In addition to the topographical decimation of MTR, the soil health at coal mines is nonexistent, and it is not known how long it will take to recover. Catherine Moore outlined the challenges, both logistical and financial, to growing crops in this environment in YES! Magazine, saying:
The soil is compacted, composed of blasted rock, and lacks organic matter…Virginia’s Division of Mined Land Reclamation estimates that it costs about $2,400 per acre to re-establish a foot of topsoil on previously mined ground. These sites also don’t hold water very well – they were engineered to drain into valley fills, the terraced slopes where rubble from mountaintop removal is dumped.
Coal mines are also infested with Autumn Olive — an invasive species once planted by coal companies in a misguided effort to beautify the land. Autumn Olive is notoriously hard to get rid of and, coupled with the presence of other pests like Multifora Rose and Tall Tescue, presents a problem for would-be regenerative farmers who require healthy land and soil.
Despite these challenges, regenerative agriculture has the ability to not only succeed, but to thrive in Appalachia. The region is not a “barren moonscape,” but rather a “temperate region with heavy rainfall.” Healthy crops will grow there — it will just require patience, care, and a bit of know-how. Additionally, the very definition of what regenerative agriculture is and does refutes many of the concerns about introducing the practice into the region. Per a report from the U.N Environment Program, “evidence shows that organic agriculture can build up natural resources, strengthen communities and improve human capacity, thus improving food security by addressing many different casual factors simultaneously.” Most impressively, these benefits make the largest impact on “poor, marginalized smallholder farms.” Organic farming is central to the success of regenerative agriculture and the benefits cited by the U.N. Environment Program hold a great deal of promise for the system’s viability in coal country.
To combat the costs associated with getting a regenerative farm up and running — low initial yields, farmer education, and inputs — momentum is building for governments and companies to support sustainable agricultural practices. In the public sector, President Joe Biden has included soil-based carbon sequestration in his agenda and the Senate has introduced legislation to encourage farmers to make the switch to regenerative agriculture. Additionally, programs to train farmers on how to effectively employ regenerative practices are on the rise. In the private sector, companies like General Mills, Target, Kellogg, Nestle, Dannon, and Cargill are beginning to realize that current industrial farming practices are not viable over the long term. These companies are now in the early stages of investing in regenerative models with ambitious plans for the future. For example, General Mills has committed to applying regenerative agricultural methods to 1 million acres by 2030. The growing availability of resources supporting regenerative agriculture represent an exciting opportunity for Appalachia to capitalize on — and become a leader in — this movement.
While the suggestion that Appalachians partner with global corporations to bring prosperity to the region may appear to mirror the failed, short-sighted solutions of the War on Poverty, it is important to note the ways in which regenerative agriculture represents an opportunity for sustainable, long-term growth. For one, the effects of climate change will soon begin to monumentally impact the one thing that corporations care most about: their bottom line. It is becoming impossible to ignore the effect of diminishing returns, growing farm subsidies, and volatile weather patterns — all things that can be addressed by regenerative agriculture. Public and private sector commitments like the ones made by President Biden and General Mills are only the beginning.
Furthermore, the business of regenerative agriculture is in direct contradiction to the branch-plant, extractive economies characteristic of twentieth century Appalachia. While companies and governments of the past saw Appalachia as a place to dump industrial parks and impersonal manufacturing facilities, regenerative agriculture represents an opportunity to establish a post-coal identity in Appalachia. Akin to the French concept of terroir — most commonly applied to the distinct flavors of regional wines — regenerative farms can cultivate a place-based identity by capitalizing on residents’ cultural history and creating sustainable, wealth generating economies in rural communities.
Most importantly, regenerative agriculture can cement Appalachia’s place in the future. In Uneven Ground, Eller describes the Appalachian economy as one that is chronically one step behind the rest of the world:
During the 1970’s and 1980’s, as promoters of Appalachian development were building industrial parks, supporting the expansion of coal mining, and chasing runaway branch plants, the United States was undergoing a fundamental change from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. At a time when Appalachian leaders were struggling to recruit labor-intensive, low-wage manufacturing plants to an underdeveloped region, technology and globalization were moving these older forms of industrial growth abroad.
Due to the failure of leaders to address emerging labor trends and establish place-based economies, Appalachia suffered and remained perpetually prone to global economic fluctuations. An investment in regenerative agriculture would not only pull Appalachia out of the past and into the future, but it would also establish the area as a leader in the new, sustainability-oriented economy.
Fortunately, the movement for regenerative agriculture is already making waves in Appalachia. Refresh Appalachia, an inspiring social enterprise founded in 2015, is on a mission to “convert post-mine lands into productive and profitable agriculture and forestry enterprises” and get unemployed miners back to work. In addition to working on the land, Refresh Appalachia supports local farmers by providing them with resources such as mobile chicken processing trailers and community marketplaces where farmers can sell meat and produce.
Appalachian food is also emerging as a distinct, sought-after cuisine which has the power to bolster the region’s cultural capital. As Lora E. Smith, Founder of the Appalachian Food Summit, notes:
In contemporary eastern Kentucky, local food and agriculture, including culinary arts and foodways, are emerging as one of the most promising sectors in an economic transition rapidly underway following the collapse of the region’s coal industry…They are utilizing the region’s foodways as an economic opportunity for local entrepreneurship.
These foodways are gaining meaningful traction and drawing attention to Appalachia from national outlets. The Washington Post published an article in 2016 titled “The Next Big Thing in American Regional Cooking: Humble Appalachia” that declared Appalachia’s cuisine “as rich and unexplored in the American culinary scene as Tuscan food was in the 1980’s.” With 115 million Americans living within a day’s drive of Appalachia, a robust food culture — paired with the dramatic mountain landscape — presents an opportunity for Appalachia to build a robust culinary- and eco-tourism economy.
In summary, regenerative agriculture has the power and scope to be an integral part of a prosperous, sustainable future for Appalachia. In making this claim, it is not lost on me that I am joining the ranks of those who believe they have the prescription to cure what ails Appalachia. However, through compassionate study of the region’s history and culture, I believe that regenerative agriculture is a practice that honors the unique attributes of the mountains and the people who call them home. In deciding what their future will hold, Appalachian residents are undergoing what Ben Spangler, Director of the Appalachian Media Institute, calls a terrifying liberation: “It is terrifying because people are out of work, but it’s also this liberation, to reimagine what this place can be.” To capitalize on this pivotal moment and the opportunity to create a sustainable, diverse, and place-based economy, Appalachian leaders will need to implement a suite of solutions — in addition to regenerative agriculture — that give residents a reason to stay. These include investments in community resources, education, small businesses, housing, and health care. This holistic approach will give the region the tools to break away from the oppressive monoculture of coal and to create a renewed definition of what it means to be Appalachian — one that represents the people’s interests, traditions, and post-coal cultural identity.
Charlotte Cruze is in her first year of the Food Studies MA program and has a background in digital media and advertising. She's passionate about climate-smart agriculture, juicy tomatoes, and pressing the snooze button on her alarms.
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