New Book Showcases Women Farmers Building Alternative Supply Chains

In her new book Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Fixing Our Broken Food System (Melville House, October 2025), author Nancy Matsumoto introduces dozens of women who are forging short, transparent, and direct alternative or “alt food systems” that stand in direct contrast to the long, extractive, and opaque global supply chains of Big Food and Big Agriculture.

Citing a UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report noting that the hidden cost of our global food system in 2020 amounted to $12.7 trillion (from a combination of unhealthy dietary patterns and chronic disease that Big Food promotes, and environmental costs due to food production-related nitrogen emissions and chemical runoff), Matsumoto embarks on a tour of food producers who are showing consumers a different way to produce, process, and distribute food.

Included in the book are an Oregon grass-fed beef rancher; a 37-year-old diversified California organic farm that produces 80 different types of produce, as well as flowers, livestock ,and value-added products; and the women farmers, millers, bakers, and distributors who are re-regionalizing local grainsheds. The stories Matsumoto tells are those of passionate commitment to land, animals, taste, nutrition, and revitalized rural economies. Her subjects are also committed to climate-smart forms of agriculture that are re-building soil, restoring ecosystems, and bringing biodiversity back to land stripped by decades of extractive monocultures.

A chapter on cocoa and coffee profiles direct-trade farmer co-operatives in Belize and Guatemala, and another on regenerative beverages introducers readers to a Minnesota woman brewing beer with the perennial grain Kernza, a pair of Puebla, Mexico distillers of mezcal made with regeneratively grown agave, and a California winemaker who incorporates sheep, ducks and chickens into her organic vineyard. In each chapter we see how the building of the short and direct alt food supply chain contrasts with its Big Food counterpart.

Acknowledging the David-versus-Goliath nature of the fight against Big Food, Matsumoto looks to the early African American mutual aid societies and cooperatives of the post-Civil War Southern U.S., and the 120,000 people of Japanese descent (including the author’s own family) who were imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. In the rural South, cut off from any form of federal aid, crop subsidies, or loans, Black farmers relied on each other, aggregating savings, technical expertise, tools, and machinery to create their own “alt food system.” In the World War II prison camp Manzanar, Japanese American prisoners created the second largest consumer cooperative in the United States. These examples can serve as a road map to today’s alternative food system producers, Matsumoto writes.

The final, hope-instilling chapter introduces readers to diasporic and Indigenous seed keepers  who are locating and saving the open-pollinated seeds and flavors of their ancestral cultures—including Korea, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Palestine—as they fight against the encroachment of global seed companies and their patent-protected varieties.