When one of the elders in the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska asked if he could keep bees on the reservation, Tim Rhodd’s answer was straightforward: “Absolutely.”

Soon, the bees started buzzing in the alfalfa fields. Then they started pollinating.

Then they all died.

“Once we started looking into it, we found there was a chemical (class) called neonicotinoid that caused the death of these bees,” said Rhodd, the tribe’s chairperson. “That was the very, very first part of what I had seen that we were doing things wrong.”

Facing the reality that their soil was contaminated—and the realization that the same harmful insecticides that killed the bees would be bad for them, too—the Ioway started questioning their farming practices.

After receiving a grant in 2019, the tribe switched its farming operations from monocropping—growing one plant in the same soil, year after year—to regenerative agriculture, a process designed to promote biodiversity and soil health by minimizing disturbances and maintaining living roots as much as possible.

By caring for a rotation of diverse crops throughout the year—rather than controlling the soil year-round for just one seasonal crop—farmers eliminate the need for herbicides and pesticides.

Moving away from monocropping is as much a challenge to standard practice as it is a physical feat. The so-called Green Revolution in the 1960s changed industrial farming to address food shortages by ushering in the extensive use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Working to improve the yield of a single crop became the norm, thanks in part to profitability and operational efficiency.

But monocropping has been shown to damage soil health, and farmers’ reliance on pesticides and herbicides can harm pollinators and water supplies while insects and weeds rapidly develop resistance to the chemicals.

“Just monocropping, eventually you use up all of your nutrients,” said Olivia Brien, tribe member and its director of communications. “And what happens is that you run out of the nutrients to grow good food, so then you’d have a desert. It becomes a desert.”

The tribe’s Ioway Farms operation has implemented regenerative practices and indigenous methods across 2,400 acres of row crop production and 2,500 acres of pastureland in rural northeast Kansas, near White Cloud. The tribe runs Ioway Farms along with several other ventures—including a bee farm, a seed company, a hemp farm and an orchard that includes pears, peaches, plums and apples.

The farm generates vital revenue for the tribe and helps the Ioway, also known as the Báxoje, reconnect with their culture—and the land. The tribe found historical evidence that diverse irrigation processes mimicking a more natural system had been in place on the land within the past 200 years.

“Holism is about everything being parts of the whole,” said Lance Foster, tribal historic preservation officer and former vice chair of the tribe. “You cannot have health without the land. You cannot have good food without the land. The Ioway don’t have a word for wilderness, because to us, it wasn’t wild. It was our home.”

The tribe also started practicing adaptive multi-paddock grazing, a system of managing livestock to mimic the constantly moving herds that once roamed the prairies so that their grazing patterns encourage more biodiversity in the soil.

“Once we have our healthy soils, we’ll be able to have healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy humans,” Rhodd said.

That includes the bees. A 2019 study in the journal Global Change Biology found the United States is among the countries where the increasing number of pollinator-dependent crops—such as soybean—has far outpaced the diversity of crops that bloom at different times, giving bees a year-round habitat.

At Ioway Farms, flowering plants line the border of crops.

“Nature hates one crop; it hates a monoculture,” said Eric Fuchs, a consultant with Understanding Ag, a regenerative agriculture consulting company that works with the tribe to implement regenerative practices.

“So, we want to see diversity. A lot of the fields, we’ll have pollinator strips around the edge, and we’ll have multi-species cover crops planted. There is living root in the soil at all times. There will always be something when you come to the Iowa tribe that will be green.”

The decision to move away from monocropping was an easy one, tribal leaders say, even if the work involved has been difficult. The Ioway believe making their land more diverse and productive year-round is the key to solving challenges from sustainability to food security to soil health.

“There are a lot of different definitions of regenerative,” Fuchs said. “From my perspective, it’s leaving things better than they started out. A lot of things in agriculture over the last 100 years or more, it seems like it’s a ‘take, take, take’ agriculture. We do things … that actually improve the soil for future generations.”

They’re seeing signs of success already. Improvements in the quality of the tribe’s soybean yield have paved the way for valuable business with tofu producers, for example.

“We’re actually developing new markets that we’ve never had before,” Rhodd said. “I’m very proud to say that the farm team has had 100% food production across all of our acres. That’s been one of our goals, and we met that goal.”

In the fall, Ioway farmers harvest the crop they planted the previous year and follow directly behind the combine harvester with a seeder, planting cover crops such as rye, along with turnip or radish. The cover crops grow through the winter, and in the spring, the Ioway flatten them to keep the ground temperature lower, control weeds and provide nutrients for the next layer of soybean or corn.

“It makes you feel pretty good when you’re driving around in December and stuff is green—not dead,” said Kyle Rhodd, the manager of Ioway Farms and brother of the tribe’s chairperson. “It’s pretty amazing to see.”

Kyle said the move to regenerative agriculture has been transformational for the tribe. And it’s changed the way he sees the soil.

“I honestly didn’t look at the soil as a living thing,” Kyle said. “I just looked at it as dirt. Going along on this journey, it makes you realize there is so much more than just dirt on the ground. … There are living organisms down there that are getting taken away from all the chemicals being used.

“With a biology in the soil, making that all mesh—it’s already there. Why do that synthetically when you can let nature take its course?”

The Ioway have seen the benefits of caring for the soil in the quality of their produce.

“After one year of regenerative principles, the Ioway came back and said their tofu beans had a better, nuttier flavor and yielded better,” Fuchs said.

“What we’re seeing is what’s happening in the soil—healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy food. … We have seen changes that impact all over the country. The way we grow food—the health of our food, the nutrient density of our food—it’s a broken system.

“This type of agriculture is a learning curve, but it can be done.”

A review of research, published in 2017 in the journal Nutrition Reviews, found diversifying crops may improve diets and nutrition outcomes in people living in low- and middle-income countries.

The Ioway believe that’s what regenerative agriculture will do for them. They say providing fresh, nutrient-rich produce for local tribal members and neighbors in their rural area of northeast Kansas—where access to healthy food is limited—will help them take ownership of their own health and reconnect to their land.

“All of us are indigenous to somewhere,” Brien said. “All of our ancestors understood that you have to live in balance, and we aren’t currently living in balance. That change is going to be difficult, but it’s for the best. It’s wonderful. It’s a beautiful thing.”

WICHITA, Kan. (KWCH) – Meteorologist Jake Dunne says aside from some patchy fog, it is a quiet Friday morning with wake-up temperatures in the 50s. Mainly sunny skies will lead us to a warmer afternoon as temperatures top-out in the lower 80s.

Expect even warmer (hotter?) conditions on Saturday as highs climb into the upper 80s and lower 90s. A weak cold front will sweep across Kansas on Saturday night, and while few, if any showers or storms are expected with its passage, temperatures will trend cooler on Sunday.

The frontal boundary will stall, or slowly move north setting the stage for showers and storms to erupt on Sunday. While the exact timing is uncertain, some of the storms will (most likely) be severe, producing large hail and damaging wind.

Looking ahead… the boundary may linger around the state on Monday, possibly producing another round of showers and storms before moving south on Tuesday ending the storm chances and ushering in cooler temperatures.

WICHITA AREA FORECAST:

Today: Mostly sunny and warmer. Wind: W/S 5-10. High: 82.

Tonight: Becoming clear. Wind: S 5-10. Low: 60.

Tomorrow: Mostly sunny and hot. Wind: S 5-15. High: 90.

Sun: Low: 63. High: 88. Partly cloudy; afternoon/evening storms.

Mon: Low: 65. High: 90. Partly cloudy and hot.

Tue: Low: 67. High: 79. Partly cloudy, breezy, and cooler.

Wed: Low: 55. High: 76. Mostly sunny.

Thu: Low: 58. High: 79. Partly cloudy; afternoon/evening storm chances.

Copyright 2024 KWCH. All rights reserved. To report a correction or typo, please email news@kwch.com

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Over the last two years, the KSHB 41 I-Team has investigated the MMIP (Missing and Murdered Indigenous People) crisis in our community.

It’s a national movement that highlights how Indigenous people, particularly women, face much higher rates of violence, including assault, rape, murder, and trafficking.

The I-Team covered the disappearance of Quana Big Spring, a Belton teenager, and the Independence cold case murder of Lakota Renville.

Those are two examples of how the crisis is playing out in the Kansas City area.

This is a place the public may not think is part of this nationwide epidemic.

During our investigation, we also learned Kansas lawmakers passed a bill in 2021 that offers free training to law enforcement officers on how to investigate MMIP cases, as they have certain cultural and jurisdictional aspects that set them apart.

“It was Kansas’ first step for MMIP,” Kansas Representative Christina Haswood said, a Democrat from Lawrence who co-sponsored the bill and helped it pass.

The I-Team wanted to find out just how many law enforcement agencies actually took that step.

We reached out to every one of them, more than 300 police departments and sheriff’s offices across the state. We asked how many were aware of the MMIP training and had taken the class.

The class is voluntary, not mandatory.

37 agencies responded. 27 of those were aware of the training and nine agencies had already taken it, which is 3%.

Our findings shocked and disappointed Haswood, who is one of the only Native American lawmakers in the state.

“And you said you reached out to everyone?” Haswood said when we handed her our findings. The data was compiled onto a spreadsheet.

“That really gets me fired up because we can see with your findings that there’s such a big gap of communication and education, that there’s definitely work that needs to be done,” she said.

Fighting for this training is personal to her. Many of her constituents in Lawrence are Native and represent tribal nations across the country.

“It really angers me that we come together, and we say, ‘Here are the resources that you ask [for] and can hopefully get you elevated on your knowledge,’” Haswood said. “But when it’s given voluntarily, the resources are not being used.”

Haswood says there’s a perception at the statehouse that Native Americans don’t exist. She says she has spent a lot of time explaining to other lawmakers that Native Americans don’t just live on reservations and that Native issues are still relevant today.

Another perception the I-Team noticed was multiple law enforcement agencies saying the MMIP training isn’t a high priority because they’re not close to a reservation or they don’t know of any MMIP cases.

“This is an issue that even though you might not see every day with your own eyes, it is happening, and if we continue to operate like this, when it does happen, that we don’t have a system that’s robust enough to help Indigenous peoples,” Haswood said.

Kansas is home to four tribal nations: Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, and Sac and Fox Nation of Missouri in Kansas and Nebraska.

Although MMIP cases don’t happen as frequently in Kansas as in other part of the U.S., the issue still hits close to home for many families.

We met some of those families last spring when we visited the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation for a MMIW walk and ceremony.

“The MMIW movement is new, but the issues are not,” one speaker said.

Much of the movement focuses on Indigenous women, which is what the “W” stands for, though it was expanded to include all Indigenous people.

We talked to sisters Jessi and Rachelle Blacksmith, who run the MMIP chapter of northeast Kansas. They’re advocating for their brother, Willie Blacksmith, who was murdered in July 2022.

“We’re trying to make something good out of what happened to our brother to help others,” Rachelle said.

They learned about the state’s MMIP training and took it themselves. They say it would be beneficial to all police agencies.

“What are you supposed to do if a murder happens? This tells you what to do, this goes through the steps [of] what to do,” Jessi said.

Haswood says its about livelihoods and knowing that government systems have their back.

She hopes she can add more teeth to the training by making sure all agencies are aware of the training and set aside an hour to take it, and make it mandatory, instead of voluntary.

“I’ll continue to fight for this issue,” Haswood said.

Only one law enforcement agency, the Galena police department, out of the 325 in the state, said they’d make the training mandatory.

Several agencies said they’d take it or would consider taking it after we reached out.

The Gardner police department took the training the day we called.

During our investigation, we contacted Salina police about the training and a 2019 MMIP case in their jurisdiction. We later received a call from one of the department’s detectives, who told us he spent four hours investigating that 2019 case after we reached out. He discovered the missing man was an unclaimed body in Columbia, Missouri.

Although it’s a sad ending, the man’s daughter, who had spent years contacting morgues across the country, told us she was grateful to have closure and finally know what happened to her dad.

We shared that story with Haswood, who said the training is “literally helping people.”

Anyone can take the online training by going to the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center page.