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.

Photo by Don Kates

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