this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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I looked it up:
According to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture, there are ~78k producers, ~58k farms, on ~63 million acres.^1^
Specifically in this case, the Cherokee Nation has its own Secretary of Natural Resources and a dedicated Seed Bank program that distributes traditional heirloom seeds (like Cherokee White Eagle Corn) to thousands of tribal citizens every year to maintain food sovereignty.^2,3^ However, Native American agriculture is a multi-billion dollar industry.
It’s not "subsistence" in the 1700s sense; it’s a mix of large-scale ranching, commercial cropping, and traditional community gardens.
Regarding the renaissance I mentioned: There is a massive "Food Sovereignty" movement right now where tribes are reclaiming their health and economies by growing their own traditional foods to combat issues like diabetes and food deserts.^4^ So these traditional methods are very much ongoing and evolving.
Many of these operations work with researchers using traditional methods. There is a lot of experimenting right now.^5,6^
1: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_AmericanIndianANProducers.pdf
2: https://naturalresources.cherokee.org/ethnobiology/seed-bank/
3: https://www.cherokee.gov/our-government/secretary-of-natural-resources-office/
4: https://indigenousfoodandag.com/
5: https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj/article/view/1325
6: https://organicagcentre.ca/cultural-and-indigenous-agricultural-wisdom/why-indigenous-seed-keepers-hold-the-future-of-canadian-agriculture/
REDRAFTING
That’s a common misconception. Three Sisters polyculture can be more "efficient" than monoculture when you measure "efficiency" by nutritional yield and soil health rather than just ease of machine-harvesting.
And while many operations utilize modern machinery, the "efficiency" of monoculture is actively being re-evaluated in the face of climate change. It can produc more protein per acre than corn grown alone, while significantly reducing the need for synthetic nitrogen and irrigation.^7,8^
Large-scale tribal operations are exerimenting using "strip intercropping," which is alternating rows of corn/beans and squash, to allow for modern mechanized harvesting while maintaining the soil-health benefits of the traditional system.^9^
This is resilience-based commercial farming that utilizes what is called Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to survive droughts that kill monocultures.^10,11^
7: Food Yields and Nutrient Analyses of the Three Sisters: A Haudenosaunee Cropping System Ethnobiology Letters, 7(1), 87–98 (2016).
8: A framework to guide future farming research with Indigenous communities (2025)
9: https://eap.mcgill.ca/CSI_1.htm; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397936106_Agricultural_Mechanization_for_Regenerative_Agriculture
10: Why Indigenous Seed Keepers Hold the Future of Agriculture (2026)
11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_ecological_knowledge
Citation 9 is hallucinated.
I fixed it, the AI I used to organise fucked up my link and I am cooking right now lol, sorry about that. Missed it on my edit. I think it tried to grab from the 2025 report below, anyway I added a second link as well and a better source.
My partner and I were looking to try to make an educational game about the Three Sisters a year or two ago, so I was looking into this... Like, we wanted to make a kind of chess board that reacts when you plant things for mobile using the plant databases I have. It ended getting a bit too close to modelling, though, so we set it aside for now.
TEK in general is really cool, and worth looking into and this is new stuff that is not well publicised imo. It's like permaculture but actually more grounded in science. It is quickly becoming a minor special interest of mine, it has a lot of promise.
For contrast, my PhD thesis is basically about how the British carved everything up, so there's no longer really connections between people and place and the ecology suffers for it, while modern western conservation can be more akin to gardening. Here is another book about it that just came out with the same idea. I was a bit jealous when it came out as they beat me to my conclusions. :')
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/23/natures-ghosts-excerpt-sophie-yeo-the-vile-national-trust-aoe
Here is the most recent report: https://indigenousfoodandag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Annual_Report_Web.pdf
A bit more on TEK, though slightly dated. This is a new field and rapidly evolving: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169534721001063
(PS: I know you guys hate AI, but this stuff is worth learning about and I edited everything myself.)