“Vastly underrepresented both in this book and in conversations about regenerative agriculture are the contributions of indigenous populations – the people who employed the stewardship model of soil management for thousands of years before being dispossessed of their lands or shipped across the ocean and enslaved.

I firmly believe we owe it to the indigenous and Black populations to avoid claiming their style of agriculture as our invention. No individual alive today is the originator of concepts and practices such as land stewardship, living soil, permaculture, conservation agriculture, or mulching… We are simply discovering what indigenous populations knew intuitively for thousands of years: that our role is not to force anything in nature, but to listen to it, to steward it. In that way, agriculture that focuses on living soil is not an innovation, it’s an apologetic response to the many wrongs forced upon the land and for the attendant harm and loss suffered by many people” – from the Living Soil Handbook, by Jesse Frost