Millard explains. “The early American Indians that practiced raising crops, they used biochar, digging a slight trench in the earth, piling limbs and leaves on it, and burning it.” Biochar, or carbon-rich material produced from burning organic matter, is thought to increase soil fertility, and it’s just one of the traditionally inspired approaches that the Locklears use. Indigenous Americans taught European settlers how to grow corn, likely burying fish and other organic mat- ter for fertilizer, according to the National Park Service. The Locklears employ a similar practice, relying on fish emulsion, as well as biochar. The land may have been in the family for generations, but in that way, Millard and Connie are making it “new ground” again. “We follow the practices of our ancestors,” Millard


says. “We try to feed the earth for it to feed us.” Part of that means returning heirloom seeds to the soil, like the ones Connie saved in glass jars.


Seeds collected by Connie’s late father bring back childhood memories of watching him tend his land. Years after his death in 1990, she planted some of his butter beans and field peas on her own farm.


by my ancestors. I remember seeing my great- grandfather and great-grandmother here.” For part of his childhood, Millard’s fam-


ily moved to a bigger farm. His father pursued a more commercial route, cultivating 1,000 acres of tobacco, corn, and soybeans. Millard saw what that monoculture approach did to the land. “The earth started just not producing like it was


before,” he says. “We’d seen on this land here [that] my grandfather had made a good crop.” Connie, a retired teacher’s assistant, never


imagined she’d return to farming life. But now she feels a responsibility and urge to preserve some of what’s been lost from previous generations. “We inherited this piece of land from Millard’s


ancestors and let someone else farm it for a couple of years, and my thought was, ‘Do we let someone else farm it and kill it with chemicals, or do we take it and practice regenerative agriculture, as our ancestors did?’” she says. The modern regenerative agriculture move-


ment aims to protect biodiversity and the climate by farming in a way that’s more in sync with nature. Many of its practices have deep roots in Indigenous communities. That includes the Lumbee Tribe, which today is the most populous tribe east of the Mississippi. “American Indians were doing it for years and years, but it was not as well documented or known,”


230 OUR STATE | NOVEMBER 2023


There’s a sentimentality with certain crops, like the sweet potatoes that Millard’s father loved.


“I planted those seeds, they came up, they ger-


minated, and they produced,” she says proudly, adding that the same approach wouldn’t work with commercially available seeds. “These seeds are viable no matter how long they stay in that jar.” Now, they’re raising pumpkins, watermelons,


field peas, butter beans, and other crops that have been in the family for decades. At the beginning of this month, they’ll cut down sugar cane “that’s been in the family for 40-some years,” and then strip it and crush it for syrup around Thanksgiving. If all goes according to plan, the Locklears will also be harvesting sweet potatoes for other North Carolinians’ holiday feasts. There’s a sentimentality with certain crops,


like the sweet potatoes that Millard’s father loved, or the prolific muscadine grapevine that Connie tends, which descended from seeds on the family homestead of famed Lumbee outlaw figure Henry Berry Lowry. But it’s also about preserving a way of life, ancestral wisdom, and the more robust agri- cultural world that sprang from it. “When you buy a tomato, you want to taste that tomato,” Millard says. “I’ll never be raising


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