Table Of Content“A brave and clear-eyed book by a farmer’s daughter about the problems in our agriculture and the factors
that keep farmers from making it better. Stephanie Anderson . . . points the way toward an agriculture that
regenerates our soil, our land, and our hopes.”
—Kristin Ohlson, author of The Soil Will Save Us
“Stephanie Anderson deftly counterpoints profiles of innovative farmers with affectionate yet honest
reflections on her family’s farm—and the compromises the industrial model demands. Anderson is a strong,
new voice for an agriculture that works for public health, for nature, and for farmers.”
—Judith D. Schwartz, author of Cows Save the Planet and Water in Plain Sight
One Size Fits None
A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative
Agriculture
Stephanie Anderson
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London
© 2019 by Stephanie Anderson Portions of this manuscript originally appeared as “In Search of Lost Grass”
in Kudzu House Quarterly 6, no. 3/4 (Winter Solstice 2016) and as “The McFarthest Spot” in Midwestern
Gothic (Summer 2018).
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image © iStock / enviromantic.
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Anderson, Stephanie (Stephanie Renee), 1987–
author.
Title: One size fits none: a farm girl’s search for the promise of regenerative agriculture / Stephanie
Anderson.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018011998
ISBN 9781496205056 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 9781496211927 (epub)
ISBN 9781496211934 (mobi)
ISBN 9781496211941 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Organic farming—United States. | Farmers—United States—Interviews.
Classification: LCC S605.5 .A525 2019 | DDC 631.5/84—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011998.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-
party websites or their content.
Contents
Introduction
Part 1: Conventional
1. The Vice President
2. The Farm We Grew
3. The Growth of Roth Farms
4. The Farm Town
5. The Muck
Part 2: Holistic Regenerative
6. The Holistic Philosophy
7. The Grass
8. The Buffalo
9. The End of the CAFO
10. The Sun’s Wealth
Part 3: Organic Regenerative
11. The Surfing Farmer
12. The Mission
13. The Plants
14. The Lifestyle
15. The Consumer
16. The Farmer Goes to the Table
17. The Urban Farmer
18. The Agriculturalized City
Part 4: Diversified Regenerative
19. The Diversified Farm
20. The Soil
21. The Abundance of an Acre
22. The Livestock
23. The Alternative to Hay
24. The Restoration of the Native Prairie
25. The Farmers’ Market
26. The Message to Conventional Farmers
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Introduction
I’m in western South Dakota, rolling across the prairie in a blue 1970s-era
pickup truck, when I first see them. Buffalo—faraway brown dots on a hillside
that become massive bodies outside the passenger window as we approach them,
their faces accented with beards and curved black horns. They are primeval,
ancient, mammothlike. They have a wise look about them, but also a wildness,
as when they flash the whites of their eyes, spin around, and gallop off, showing
us they’ll never be completely tamed.
I’m at Great Plains Buffalo Company, a ranch where Phil and Jill Jerde and
their children raise more than a thousand grass-fed buffalo. These buffalo will
eventually be slaughtered, providing consumers with meat, but they are much
more than food sources. They are the keepers of this grassland. With their
hooves they aerate the soil and push seeds into it. With their waste they fertilize
it. Through their grazing habits they encourage the growth of grass instead of
woody plants. They maintain symbiotic relationships with birds and insects.
They make the prairie function in a way it hasn’t since their ancestors walked it,
before we converted the Great Plains to corn and soybeans.
The buffalo show us what the prairie once was and how humans have changed
it—to some, destroyed it—and this in turn is a reminder of all the landscapes
we’ve changed. “Wrong side up,” said a Sioux Indian who watched a white
sodbuster rip the grassland open with a plow.1 The Native Americans knew why
soil was best left undisturbed: roots, twenty-five miles of them in a single square
yard of prairie turf just four inches deep, held the soil in place, had done so for
thousands of years.2 With a single plow swipe the settlers set it free to blow.
Result: the Dust Bowl. Later result: desertification turning the Great Plains into a
desert.3 Less than 4 percent of the original tallgrass prairie remains, and those
defiant acres are rigorously protected.4 Still, it is feasible that the tallgrass prairie
could be gone before I die. A human being’s lifespan is roughly how long it took
to destroy 96 percent of it, which does not bode well for the last 4.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The buffalo before me represent a new
agriculture that can help restore the prairie and other landscapes without
sacrificing the amount of food produced. These animals show us that there are
many ways to farm and ranch, that we can change how we define those terms,
that we can reverse the damage we have done and create a better agricultural
future. The buffalo are walking, breathing proof that human beings do not have
to destroy the earth in order to eat.
Years ago, I would not have seen the buffalo as keepers of the range. I grew up
about twenty miles from Great Plains Buffalo on a conventional ranch outside of
Bison, South Dakota, where my parents raise cattle, wheat, corn, and hay. Had I
not discovered a love for writing that drew me to college, I probably would have
stayed there the rest of my life, working alongside my father until I could start
my own operation. I’m serious about this. Even now, more than ten years after
graduating from high school, my “if I had all the money in the world” plan is to
buy a ranch somewhere, raise cattle and horses, and write. The ranch I’d run
today, though, would be nothing like the ranch my parents run.
We’re longtime pals, my father and I. I don’t know how many pictures my
mother took of me as a kid sitting on his lap in a tractor or in a pickup truck or
on an ATV (we call them four-wheelers in South Dakota). Blonde, brown-eyed
little me, all smiles, usually gripping the steering wheel pretending to drive,
leaning against Dad with his shaggy brown hair, big 1980s glasses, and baseball
cap with a cow graphic printed on the front. He taught me to drive a stick-shift
pickup at nine, a tractor at twelve, and a swather (a hay-cutting machine) at
fourteen. I rode horses on cattle drives and rose before sunrise during calving
season to check the pregnant heifers. He taught me almost everything he knows
about farming and ranching, lessons I now consider somewhat dubious because,
if I wrote them down, they’d form a book on how to farm conventionally, which
is also to say industrially.
My dad and I are still pals, don’t get me wrong. We just disagree on almost
everything about agriculture, though we don’t talk much about that. Still, it’s a
significant rift considering my father’s life is the farm. This is not hyperbole. All
my father knows is the ranch; he was in his late fifties before he flew on a
commercial airplane or waded into the ocean. He seldom meets up with fellow
farmers for a beer, and he has not a single hobby. He rarely visits his grown
children in their far-flung city apartments. He reads mostly farm-related news,
and he did not attend college. I respect his salt-of-the-earth personality, his
dedication to his trade, and his strong work ethic, and I know his world is small
because he likes it that way. My father doesn’t do much besides farming because
he simply doesn’t want to. That’s how much he loves it.
So having his daughter call the type of agriculture he practices into question is
