Madelyn Smith, executive director of the Common Grain Alliance, points to her group’s grain stand program as a successful step in building consumer awareness. The grain stand program is a partnership between Common Grain Alliance and FRESHFARM, a nonprofit organization that works to build a more equitable, sustainable, and resilient food system in the Mid-Atlantic region. The stands offer grain-based goods including flour from 11 local producers at FRESHFARM farmers’ markets in Washington, D.C. She says people are surprised to learn that flour can be different from “a white powder purchased in a 5-pound bag at the grocery store” and once they try it, they come back for more.

Smith is particularly excited about the Alliance’s effort to educate consumers about less familiar grains like buckwheat and millet. Not only can those plants provide delicious flour, she says; they can also be used as cover crops that develop healthy soils.

“By building a market for these small grains, we’re building in economic incentives to have more diversified and sustainable crop rotations,” says Smith. “We’re not just serving the farmers whose products we’re buying and selling; we’re working to raise the profile of the full diversity of local grains that are produced in our agricultural system.”

Seeds and Capital

Demand certainly seems robust at Carolina Ground in Hendersonville. Lapidus, herself a Craft Millers Guild member, moved from a cramped space in nearby Asheville to the roomy warehouse in 2021, bolstered by pandemic-era sales increases. A long storage space next to the milling room is stacked floor to ceiling with shrink-wrapped grain ready for grinding.

But finding local growers who can supply them isn’t easy. The hard wheat preferred for bread flour is a relatively new crop in the Southeast, with regionally adapted varieties only introduced in 2009. Farmers don’t have a lot of information about how best to grow it here, Lapidus says, and those used to focusing on yield alone might not produce grain with the protein levels discerning bakers expect.

Even in places where local grain production is more established, small-scale farmers can find it challenging to get their crop to market. Grain needs to be cleaned and screened before it’s delivered to a miller. It’s expensive to transport. If a small mill can’t take an entire crop at once, the grower must invest in storage facilities, which require refrigeration if winters aren’t cold enough to suppress pests.

The infrastructure costs add up and can discourage all but the most dedicated growers from taking a risk on small-scale grains. Danny Cowan, farmer and co-owner of Red Tail Grains in North Carolina, says he and co-owner George Allen have invested roughly $150,000 in equipment to grow and process grains like Turkey Red winter wheat on about 70 acres. The two have built up that infrastructure over the course of a decade, reinvesting their earnings from the farm and working off-farm jobs to raise further capital.

Machines like dryers and seed cleaners, Cowan says, can each range from the low thousands to nearly $100,000. Red Tail Grains has benefited from a few small local government and nonprofit grants—as well as Allen’s mechanical aptitude, which means he can fix older but more affordable equipment—but that support hasn’t come close to covering the full costs of machinery.

“It’s more challenging than I ever expected,” says Jordan Shockley about building the local-grain supply chain. An agricultural economist with the University of Kentucky, he helped organize the inaugural Southeastern Grain Gathering in 2019 and has since worked to create grain opportunities for farmers.

The challenges aren’t insurmountable, though, says Shockley. For example, he sees promise in the way Kentucky’s bourbon makers are interacting with small-scale rye growers. They guarantee payments to farmers for producing rye on a certain acreage, reducing the risk of loss from crop failure. (Existing crop insurance programs can be complicated to access for small-grain growers and doesn’t always work for smaller, diversified farms.)

It helps the farmers, and it’s a win for the distilleries, who can emphasize the local provenance of their raw materials and command a premium from avid drinkers. “It’s all about the story when it comes to local grains: knowing where the grain came from, promoting the farm, and marketing that it’s a local product,” says Shockley.

Making Waves for Local Grain

The large-scale grain industry has substantial economies of scale, admits Ajamian of the Craft Millers Guild. That translates to a dramatically cheaper product. Carolina Ground sells a four-pound bag of stone-milled all-purpose flour made from Appalachian White Hard White Wheat and Shirley Soft Red Winter Wheat on its website for $17.75; a five-pound bag of unbleached all-purpose commodity flour at a nearby grocery store costs as little as $2.49.

But by galvanizing the many small players doing their part for local grains, Ajamian believes the movement can build a different kind of strength in numbers.

Organizations like her guild, she says, can advocate for policies that can help local millers gain footing and lower production costs. Several U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs, for example, support regional food system infrastructure—including for local grains—under the umbrella of the Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP), and guild members and others could work to ensure that support remains under the Trump administration.

Citing another example of advocacy, Ajamian points to a letter-writing campaign by the Craft Millers Guild asking the USDA to prioritize local sourcing in food assistance programs. The Biden administration subsequently allocated $900 million to create the Local Food Purchase Assistance program to help state, tribal, and territorial governments buy foods produced within 400 miles, including wheat.

That money meant Ohio food banks could afford the premium for locally milled flour, which put fresh, nutritious whole grains in the kitchens of food-insecure people while supporting local farmers. She’s pushing for Congress to make the program permanent as part of negotiations over the upcoming farm bill.

However, a much larger pot of USDA money gets funneled to large-scale wheat growers selling to big grain buyers. In 2021, about 70 million acres of wheat fields were eligible for subsidies through commodity programs. Even if regional grain growers could access those programs, the payments, at about $10 per acre, don’t add up to much unless they’re operating at a massive scale.

The Common Grain Alliance’s Smith adds that expanding crop insurance eligibility and making the program work better for smaller, diversified farms could be a big help for aspiring grain growers.

But for now, she says, education is even more important than policy. “Every community used to have its own grain mill, and it was natural that bakers would bake with the grains that were grown in their local community,” says Smith. “This isn’t a new way of doing things, but so much of that knowledge has been lost. We’re having to work together to rediscover and relearn those systems.”

The post Restoring a Cornerstone of the Local Grain Economy appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/10/29/how-food-and-ag-businesses-pivoted-to-disaster-relief-after-hurricane-helene/ Tue, 29 Oct 2024 09:00:54 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=58742 But as the company’s co-founders made calls to farming contacts beyond their home of Forest City, about 60 miles southeast of Asheville, Beam and Green learned that potable water was much harder to come by elsewhere in the region, especially in rural areas with challenging logistics. So, they sprang into action, bottling and shipping water […]

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A few days after Helene hit Western North Carolina, Stuart Beam and Preston Green of Big Bottom Milk Company took stock of their situation. Their creamery’s infrastructure—including its 70-year-old bottle filler—was intact. They had generator power, clean municipal water, and an ample supply of plastic milk packaging, including gallon jugs.

But as the company’s co-founders made calls to farming contacts beyond their home of Forest City, about 60 miles southeast of Asheville, Beam and Green learned that potable water was much harder to come by elsewhere in the region, especially in rural areas with challenging logistics. So, they sprang into action, bottling and shipping water directly to places in need, all while keeping up their usual milk production.

“We’ve kind of been helping everybody else so we didn’t have to think about our problems. It’s a lot more fun.”

Food and agriculture businesses across Western North Carolina are telling similar stories amid the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Although Helene had weakened into a tropical storm by the time it reached the area, it was still the region’s worst storm since 1916.

Helene killed at least 98 residents in Western North Carolina, knocked out power and water for hundreds of thousands of people, and destroyed countless buildings. Many farmers, occupying low-lying valleys and riversides in the Appalachian Mountains, were especially vulnerable to record levels of flooding.

And yet those same farmers, as well as people farther up the supply chain in the Asheville area’s vaunted food scene, have been working to support their communities, even as they deal with the fallout themselves. By repurposing equipment, opening space to relief efforts, and organizing donations, they’re helping meet the region’s most important needs. Tested by the storm, the tight-knit community has responded with food, water, and hope that Western North Carolina will pull through together.

Bottling Hope

Green and Beam had expected a normal, albeit rainy, day on the farm when they went to bed the night of September 26. When the two got up the next morning, it became clear the day would be anything but.

Green had to walk each of Big Bottom’s 65 Jersey cows from their pasture to the milking parlor across a road flooded with eight inches of water. Beam’s truck got stuck on his way from the dairy to the creamery; after Green rescued him, he tried again in a tractor, taking over 2 hours to navigate roughly 2 miles amid lashing rain and storm-toppled trees. Once Beam started the facility’s generator, he set out again, struggling for hours to clear side roads in rural Rutherford County.

“There was several times where I was scared of my life,” Beam recalls. “I was shoving trees, trying to hook to somebody’s car and get them out of the ditch to where they could get out of there. And you’re just thinking, ‘The next tree’s going to fall on me.’”

Once the storm had subsided and the worst of the wreckage had been cleared, the two launched into their water bottling effort. Word of mouth and social media posts brought a steady stream of helpers, from children assembling cardboard boxes to an 81-year-old man with a walker feeding the machinery with empty jugs. On the first night of the operation, creamery staff and volunteers stayed up until 3 a.m., packing 40 pallets of water, with each pallet holding 100 to 140 gallons depending on bottle size.

“We’ve kind of been helping everybody else so we didn’t have to think about our problems,” Beam says with a modest smile. He and Green both lost power at their homes for several days, and he had to clear a tree that had fallen on his own house. “It’s a lot more fun.”

The effort grew as Big Bottom’s web of connections sprang into action. Sofia Lilly, a friend at nearby Overmountain Vineyards, spearheaded nearly $50,000 of fundraising to keep the creamery humming. Green tapped his contacts in the packaging world, temporarily buying his suppliers out of gallon and half-gallon jugs. Beam, who co-chairs a Farm Bureau committee for young farmers and ranchers in the region, talked with colleagues across the state to identify the most critical needs and supplement water deliveries with other essentials.

Among those beneficiaries was the Buladean Volunteer Fire Department, roughly 100 miles northwest in Mitchell County. Fire Captain Jeremiah Swann and his crew had spent days cutting fallen trees, clearing the route to the nearby Tennessee border before unblocking residents’ driveways and conducting wellness checks. They were running low on supplies when a truck from Big Bottom showed up, bearing three pallets of water, over 300 gallons of fuel, and a healthy amount of milk.

“It blesses all of us up here to know that people are rallying around, willing to help us and bring us stuff to get us through a hard time like this,” Swann says. “I would travel 2.5 hours to go get their milk—one, because it’s some of the best milk I’ve ever drank, and two, they’re willing to chip in and help us up here.”

Cooking Out of a Storm

“We thought it was going to be more on a vacation basis,” quips Collis, WCK’s chief relief officer.

Instead, McDonald and Bear’s co-owner Cheryl Antoncic partnered with Collis’s team to transform their restaurant into the command center of WCK’s Helene response. Bear’s is closed to the public, but on a sunny Monday morning, its courtyard buzzes with food deliveries, a meal-packing assembly line, and several giant stainless-steel skillets stir-frying vegetables and chicken.

The Bear’s interior is a logistical war room, complete with a massive map outlining deliveries of roughly 30,000 meals per day to more than 160 distribution points. Collis says needs are constantly shifting, but he expects WCK to remain in the region until widespread potable water returns, which could be many weeks away.

The majority of the meals are cooked on site, but many have come from other Asheville restaurants that have shifted operations toward relief, such as Chai Pani, Curate, and Rocky’s Hot Chicken Shack. (WCK pays local restaurants per meal, allowing them to retain staff and be better prepared to serve the public when conditions allow.)

Antoncic is proud of her restaurant’s flexibility and use of local connections in the face of the unexpected. She points to how its freezer capacity saved 1,000 pounds of meat from storm-damaged purveyor Hickory Nut Gap Farms that was distributed through WCK meals.

Just as importantly, Antoncic continues, Bear’s has catalyzed relationships beyond the meals themselves. Through Linked4Life, a mental health nonprofit supported by the restaurant, she’s helped local counselors reach impacted communities at food distribution sites. And she recently held an event where people wrote messages of hope, attached to carabiners symbolizing connection, that will be sent out into the community in the days to come.

“As much as food and water are basic human needs, I really do believe that connection is a basic human need as well,” Antoncic says. “If you do have a crisis, whether it’s in your own personal life or in a community at large, having those support networks is what’s going to get you through it.”

Spreading the Support

Some regular festival vendors lost everything in the storm. The building that housed Asheville Tea Company floated down the Swannanoa River in a video featured on Fox News. Others, including Chamberlain’s own fermented food company, Fermenti, which sells kimchi and sauerkrauts, have been unable to reopen or manufacture products due to the area’s ongoing water problems. All face greatly reduced sales during the normally thriving fall tourist season.

In response, Chamberlain is using the November 3 festival to raise support for both small-scale food businesses and Western North Carolina residents in need. The in-person event is still happening, with its footprint slightly adjusted due to water damage at its location; only one of roughly 40 planned vendors dropped out, even though some have little to sell.

“It’s important right now to anchor a sense of normalcy in the community, because we have been lacking that,” she says. “For our mental health moving forward, it’s going to be important to help create those connections before we’re shuttered away in the winter.”

The festival is also now tied to an online fundraising campaign, which will go toward purchasing products from the festival’s roughly 40 vendors and donating them directly to local food banks. Chamberlain flags Beacon of Hope Services, a food bank in Marshall, as one recipient, noting that this community was hit particularly hard.

Chamberlain notes that while a lot of food, water, and other goods are arriving at distribution centers right now, “a lot of it’s not going to be here in a couple weeks. I’m not a first-wave responder, but I’m a second-wave responder, and I can be here to help do this.”

This kind of locally based effort is crucial for small food businesses, Chamberlain argues, because they’re likely to fall through the cracks of federal and state assistance. On Oct. 15, for example, the federal Small Business Administration announced that its disaster loan program had run out of money, and Republican leaders in Congress have refused to consider further aid until their regularly scheduled return to Washington November 12.

“I would challenge people to make relationships with food producers that they can connect with and look at eye to eye,” she says. “Now is the time.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/02/14/micro-solar-leases-a-new-income-stream-for-black-farmers-in-the-south/ Wed, 14 Feb 2024 09:00:15 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55248 After Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005, Othow explains, she helped to lead nonprofit economic development efforts across the region. She was struck by how many of the area’s jobs involved coal or gas production; Louisiana ships nearly two-thirds of U.S. liquified natural gas exports, for example, and New Orleans is […]

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Rows of photovoltaic panels glimmer placidly in the winter sun amid the fields outside Pendleton, North Carolina, a farming community in the state’s northeast Northampton County. The calming country scene is a far cry from the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But that’s where Ajulo Othow, who developed the solar energy installation through her company EnerWealth Solutions, traces the roots of the project.

After Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005, Othow explains, she helped to lead nonprofit economic development efforts across the region. She was struck by how many of the area’s jobs involved coal or gas production; Louisiana ships nearly two-thirds of U.S. liquified natural gas exports, for example, and New Orleans is the country’s third-busiest port for coal exports.

The carbon emissions from burning those exports, Othow knew, make extreme weather events like Hurricane Katrina more common and more powerful.

“I could see how people’s livelihoods, tied to fossil fuel extraction, basically were contributing to their own vulnerabilities,” she says. “In thinking with communities about what other economic development opportunities they had, I got very interested in renewable energy.”

“There is a lot of opportunity to co-locate electricity production alongside agricultural production. It’s a passive development model that [can give farmers] stable revenue over time.”

Othow went to law school to learn more about the financing and regulation of solar power, and after gaining real-world experience with Strata Clean Energy in Chapel Hill, she struck out on her own with EnerWealth in 2017. Based in Oxford, North Carolina, the company’s goal is to maximize the benefits of the solar boom for rural communities.

That mission drives every facet of EnerWealth’s development approach, starting with site selection. The firm specifically seeks out Black and small-scale landowners in North and South Carolina, including farmers, who want to lease some of their property for solar panels. In return, those landowners receive a consistent stream of income that far exceeds what they would earn by leasing to other farmers.

Although some governmental and nonprofit groups, such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Florida-based Black Farmers’ Collaborative, have worked to bring solar to rural communities of color, EnerWealth may be the Southeast’s only business specifically focused on that goal.

Othow admits that progress has been modest as her projects work their way through permitting and regulatory requirements. EnerWealth aims to start 100 megawatts of capacity in its development pipeline, all in rural areas, through 2024, enough to power roughly 12,000 homes; by comparison, a single solar farm installed in Northampton County to service Meta, the parent company of Facebook, generates 80 megawatts by itself.

Only two EnerWealth installations have so far been constructed, with a total capacity of just half a megawatt. The first conversations on those projects took place in 2019, and they won’t start producing power until later this year. But Othow believes the potential of her model has only begun to be tapped.

A series of slides from an EnerWealth presentation, showing the solar installations and some of the farmers the organization works with. (Photo courtesy of EnerWealth)

“There is a lot of opportunity to co-locate electricity production alongside agricultural production,” says Othow. “It’s a passive development model that can actually help to subsidize agricultural production and the cycles that farmers have to contend with by giving them some stable revenue over time.”

Dependable Harvest

What the EnerWealth model offers rural communities, Othow suggests, is a way to benefit from development while retaining land ownership and agricultural use. Her projects are generally smaller in scale than other agrivoltaics arrays. The Pendleton site, for example, covers just 2.6 acres of a 65-acre property, and the developments she’s seeking to start this year will range from 6 to 30 acres.

Many farming advocates have raised concerns about utility-scale solar, which can require hundreds of acres, displacing current forests and cropland. Othow hopes EnerWealth’s more distributed projects will spread opportunities more broadly while being less disruptive to farming.

Landowners agree to host EnerWealth’s solar panels for at least 35 years, earning annual payments from roughly $500 to $750 per acre. Those rates are about five to seven times higher than the $115 per acre rate that landowners earn for renting Northampton County cropland to farmers, reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2023.

“I’m excited about it, because I’ve never had anything happen to me like this. It’s something new and something different.”

Because they’re locked in a long-term contract, solar lease payments aren’t subject to the ups and downs of the commodity crop market. And because the panels are concentrated in a single part of the farm, rather than integrated with crop production, they don’t require farmers to make big changes to their practices.

By providing a solid foundation for a diversified income portfolio, says Othow, solar leases can help landowners build wealth without having to sell their property. That’s the case for Marion Mitchell, whose family has owned the Pendleton farmland since her grandfather acquired it in the early 1900s. She remembers visiting as a little girl and later moved to live on the land herself.

Mitchell says she and her family had been leasing the property for cotton and soybean farming when the Roanoke Cooperative, the electric distribution company that partnered with EnerWealth on its first projects, approached her about installing solar panels on a small portion. The extra income was very attractive, she says, and will help her family keep the land into the future.

“I’m excited about it, because I’ve never had anything happen to me like this,” Mitchell says. “It’s something new and something different.”

Reliable income is particularly important for Black landowners such as Mitchell, who as a group have seen massive losses of land in North Carolina and across the country.

Black agricultural land ownership in the U.S. peaked in 1910 at about 16 to 19 million acres according to the USDA. But due to racially discriminatory lending practices and legal challenges over property inheritance, many of those landowners were unable to keep their property in the family over the following century. A 2022 study published in the American Economic Association’s Papers and Proceedings reckoned that Black farmers lost about $326 billion in land from 1920 through 1997.

The country’s proportion of Black farmers has also dropped precipitously since the early 20th century. While Black producers made up about 14 percent of all farmers in 1920, more than their share of the U.S. population, they represented just over 1 percent of the total in 2017, the latest year for which data is available. In North Carolina in 2017, less than 3 percent of the state’s roughly 74,000 farmers were Black, compared with over 12 percent of the general population.

Spreading Sunshine with an Electric Cooperative

By letting landowners directly profit from modest solar installations, Othow says, she has been able to overcome the skepticism that rural communities often show toward utility-scale projects, which disrupt the landscape without an obvious immediate gain for those living in the area. Because EnerWealth’s first projects were done in partnership with an electric cooperative, she can point to broader community benefits as well.

Roanoke Cooperative provides about 60 megawatts of power across six rural counties in northeast North Carolina, including Northampton. It’s a minnow compared to the state’s major electric utility, Duke Energy, the power provider for over 4.5 million people in North and South Carolina. But the organization’s size, says President and CEO Marshall Cherry, means that even small solar projects represent meaningful contributions toward its power demands.

“It helps us pretty much guarantee that we will have some level of reliability or capacity to operate during our peak periods.”

And as a co-op, Roanoke is beholden to its customer-members, not shareholders like Duke. That means the dollars it saves by using renewable energy go directly toward reducing electricity bills.

Cherry points to the battery system placed alongside the solar panels at the Pendleton project, able to pump out 500 kilowatts for about two hours when fully charged. By charging the battery when the sun is out, then delivering power during high-demand situations like cold winter mornings, he says Roanoke can avoid buying expensive energy from the wholesale market to meet customer needs. This benefit makes the project economically viable despite its modest footprint.

“It helps us pretty much guarantee that we will have some level of reliability or capacity to operate during our peak periods,” Cherry explains. “That reduces some of our capacity purchases, thus saving dollars.”

If the co-op can reach its goal of six megawatts of battery storage, Cherry estimates the total annual savings to Roanoke’s roughly 12,000 customers at $150,000 to $200,000. With about 30 percent of those customers making less than $25,000 per year, he adds, any reduction to the power bill is welcome.

Solar development also means added jobs. In addition to her work with EnerWealth, Othow chairs the board of the nonprofit B.O.S.S.—Black Owners of Solar Services. Earlier this year, the group received a $6.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to help North Carolina’s minority- and women-owned businesses scale up and tackle renewable energy projects.

And bringing solar capital investments to rural areas, says Executive Director Matt Abele with the N.C. Sustainable Energy Association, can provide much-needed tax revenue for local governments to serve their residents.

“Solar and other renewable resources are some of the best energy solutions available to reinvest in local communities across our state and region,” Abele says. “EnerWealth Solutions has been a pioneer in developing a model that focuses on community-scale projects that reinvest in the landowners and communities that are so integral to North Carolina’s economic success.”

Clouds and Silver Linings

Although the smaller size of the EnerWealth projects theoretically makes them easier to approve, Othow says some have still run into issues that plague larger facilities. At one pilot site, local land use regulations demanded that solar be installed a substantial distance from the property boundary, a rule that had been put in place to reduce the impacts of big installations on rural communities. Taking that setback into account, there wasn’t enough space left to build the project.

“I think these zoning ordinances are not one-size-fits-all,” says Roanoke’s Cherry. “We still have some room to operate and maybe improve some of the permitting there.”

One difficulty unique to EnerWealth is the complicated landscape of ownership that’s often associated with Black farmland. Because many of the land’s first Black owners died without leaving a will or other plan for their estate, their heirs often took possession of the land without having a clear legal title of who now owned what.

This “heirs’ property” is thought to represent about a third of Black-owned land in the South, including close to $1.9 billion of land in North Carolina. Such situations can make it very difficult to identify the legally correct signer of a lease, says Othow, and when a project needs to be financed, banks often refuse to get involved if the land lacks proven ownership.

“This is a really good time to be in this industry. I’m excited about the opportunities ahead for rural communities, landowners, and farmers in this space.”

And North Carolina’s political leadership has shown some worries about farmland being used for solar power in the first place. Steve Troxler, the state’s Republican commissioner of agriculture and consumer services, says protecting agricultural land from development threats is one of his top priorities.

“As we continue to focus efforts on farmland preservation, the loss of farmland and forestland to solar panel installations remains a concern,” Troxler says. “I support farmers’ rights to do what they want with their land, but I wish we could have a do-over when it comes to solar panels, with more of a strategic placement of these installations on marginal farm and forestlands instead of prime farmland.”

But Othow believes that if landowners can benefit from having smaller solar arrays on a bit of their land, as with the EnerWealth model, they’ll be more likely to keep the rest of it in agriculture rather than sell the whole property to a developer. (She also points to a 2022 study by the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, which found that less than half a percent of the state’s agricultural land hosted solar panels.)

Other political trends have Othow more excited about the future. The federal Inflation Reduction Act provides additional tax credits for solar projects in low-income communities, including the areas EnerWealth is targeting, and establishes a $7 billion “Solar for All” grant fund she hopes to tap with innovative project design.

At the state level, a law signed in 2021 commits North Carolina to cutting its carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production 70 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Othow believes solar has a critical role to play.

“This is a really good time to be in this industry,” she says. “I’m excited about the opportunities ahead for rural communities, landowners, and farmers in this space.”

The post Micro Solar Leases: A New Income Stream for Black Farmers in the South? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/12/19/wild-nuts-are-making-a-comeback-in-southern-appalachia/ https://civileats.com/2023/12/19/wild-nuts-are-making-a-comeback-in-southern-appalachia/#comments Tue, 19 Dec 2023 09:00:57 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=54732 Holt smiles as he turns his hands outward. “They’re going to be brown like this through Christmas,” he says. The rich stain was a natural consequence of how Holt spent his fall: processing thousands of pounds of black walnuts through the Asheville Nuttery. Black walnut trees are a common sight across Western North Carolina and […]

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As Justin Holt comes in for a handshake on a bright morning in early November, it’s hard not to notice the color of his palms. They’re the hue of fine wooden furniture, a warm, ruddy tone that is considerably darker than the wrists that peek out from the long sleeves of his broad-checked flannel shirt.

Holt smiles as he turns his hands outward. “They’re going to be brown like this through Christmas,” he says. The rich stain was a natural consequence of how Holt spent his fall: processing thousands of pounds of black walnuts through the Asheville Nuttery.

Black walnut trees are a common sight across Western North Carolina and much of Southern Appalachia. Their canopies spread tall and broad, with long, pointed leaves that turn a vibrant yellow in the fall. And they’re abundant producers of greenish-yellow fruit, each about the size of a tennis ball and containing a wrinkly brown nut.

Yet for many in the area, black walnuts are more problem than produce. Their hulls cling tenaciously to the nut and, as Holt’s hands attest, stain almost everything they touch. Their shells are harder and thicker than those of the English walnut, the most common commercially cultivated species, and are difficult to separate from the kernel within. Suburbanites with walnut trees often treat the nuts as trash, gathering them up only for disposal to maintain a clear lawn.

Holt and his partners at the Asheville Nuttery, Bill Whipple and Greg Mosser, are trying to shift that perception. Since 2017, the cooperative has been piloting new ways to collect, process, and market tree crops, with the goal of catalyzing a local nut-based economy.

Walnuts are just the beginning, says Holt, as he walks into the Nuttery’s storeroom. The converted garage is chockablock with green and black plastic bins, each holding a bevy of nuts being dried for the future.

“It’s a different feeling to inhabit the landscape in a way where you’re paying attention to what gifts are available right around any corner. It turns your life into an Easter egg hunt—it brings the landscape to life in a way that is pretty thrilling.”

Pin oak and black oak acorns can be pressed to extract a bright orange oil that tastes of caramelized butter. Mockernut and shagbark hickories, when pounded and simmered in water, yield a milk Holt describes as “liquid banana-nut bread.” The Nuttery works with at least a dozen different species, although walnuts are by far the most prevalent by weight.

By encouraging people to see the value in their native trees, the Nuttery hopes to inspire parallel efforts across the region. Creating outlets for community-scale nut crops, Holt suggests, could incentivize landowners to keep their existing trees or plant new ones, agroforestry practices that might help them mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Just as importantly, believes Holt, embracing wild nuts can transform how residents experience their environment. “It’s a very different kind of feeling to inhabit the landscape in a way where you’re paying attention to what gifts are available right around any corner,” he explains. “It feels kind of like it turns your life into an Easter egg hunt—it brings the landscape to life in a way that is pretty thrilling.”

Laying the Groundwork for a New Market

Such a view of nut trees in the South was once much more widespread. The Cherokee people native to the region have historically gathered and eaten a wide variety of wild nuts, including the American chestnut, now all but gone from the forest due to a blight introduced in the late 1800s through imported Japanese chestnuts. European settlers also made use of wild tree crops, particularly black walnuts, and Holt says numerous companies processed and sold them through the middle of the 20th century.

Given their labor-intensive harvest and processing requirements, however, wild nuts largely fell out of favor as the country’s food system became more industrialized and commercial U.S. nut production became concentrated in California. One firm—the Stockton, Missouri-based Hammons Product Company, which still relies on hand-harvested wild black walnuts—is essentially all that’s left of the old nut economy.

Hammons used to collect black walnuts at a station in Western North Carolina, remove the hulls, and ship the nuts to Missouri for further processing. The company pulled out of Appalachia several years ago due to insufficient volumes, says Holt; the nearest of Hammons’ 200-plus collection stations is now in Spring City, Tennessee, well over a three hours’ drive away.

The Asheville Nuttery aims to process at least 20,000 pounds of black walnuts this year, along with thousands of pounds of other species. That scale would fill the gap between the national reach of Hammons, which expects to purchase over 15 million pounds of walnuts this year, and someone processing a few nuts from their backyard for a cake.

But without a model to follow or ready-made tools to purchase, trying to make that scale economical has meant a lot of trial and error. Holt, who also works as an independent permaculture consultant and a guide for the foraging tour company No Taste Like Home, says the cooperative’s members haven’t yet paid themselves from Nuttery activities.

Justin Holt shows off a handful of hickory nuts, which he says yield a milk similar to “liquid banana-nut bread.” (Photo credit: Daniel Walton)

The Nuttery recently invested in an optical sorter to speed up tasks like sifting caps and shell fragments away from cracked acorns. And it made a major leap forward in efficiency by developing its own commercial-scale walnut huller, supported by a $10,000 grant from a regional foundation. Holt says he chanced upon an expired 1958 patent by inventor Clovis Packwood, which provided the basic design, then tweaked and iterated with the help of local fabricator Dan Hettinger.

The resulting contraption consists of a big green metal drum, which is fed a constant stream of walnuts from a conveyer belt. “There’s a shaft that runs through the middle with chains welded on in a spiral pattern,” Holt explains. “The chains advance the nuts down the chamber, all the while kind of spanking the hulls off.”

Roughly 500 pounds of hulled walnuts emerge from the machine every hour at full capacity, nearly quadruple the rate of the Nuttery’s previous process. Holt hopes to further refine the design before making plans available to other community-scale groups or producing more hullers for sale, but he’s happy to share what he’s learned so far.

Zev Friedman, whose nonprofit Cooperate WNC served as the fiscal sponsor for the walnut huller grant, says the Nuttery’s efforts are laying critical groundwork for processors to come. “They’re creating new equipment, new processing methods and food types,” he says. “They’ve done a huge amount of research and development, most of which is open-source.”

Suppliers and Demands

As the Nuttery solves its processing challenges, it’s also working to restore the cultural perception of wild nuts as food—both among foragers who can harvest raw materials and customers who can buy finished products. There have been successes on each front.

Like Hammons, the Nuttery doesn’t gather its own nuts but buys them from anyone interested in collecting them. Foragers earn at least 20 cents per pound for black walnuts, with bonuses for higher volumes; the smaller and more finicky acorns can fetch up to $2 per pound. Holt says roughly 100 people from across the region are now contributing nuts, more than double the number of those involved at the project’s start.

One recent recruit is Mitzi Aoyagi, an Asheville-based massage therapist. Although she is a longtime forager of mushrooms and medicinal plants, she says she knew next to nothing about oaks until she started to gather acorns for the Nuttery this fall. She stuffed her pockets to bursting several times a day as she walked her dogs beneath her neighborhood trees.

“I didn’t even think of acorns as nuts before,” she says with a laugh. “Now, there are bowls of acorns all over my house!”

Instead of cash, Aoyagi is trading her acorns for the promise of cooking and baking supplies at the end of the season. She’s excited by the potential of wild nuts to yield locally sourced oil and high-protein flour. “For me, it’s like making treasure out of what other people consider trash, and I love that,” she says.

To help spread that excitement about new ingredients, the Nuttery has been turning to restaurateurs and bakeries. Nashville-based, James Beard award-winning chef Sean Brock has helped introduce many people to acorn and black walnut products, says Holt, as has Asheville’s OWL Bakery.

Once people get a taste, they’re eager to buy more: The Nuttery has sold about $8,000 in shares of its “TreeSA,” a community-supported agriculture program for nut products that it launched this fall, and Holt says it’s on pace to break $10,000 by year’s end.

Another strategy, as employed by Nuttery partner Whipple, is incorporating nuts into existing culinary products. He points to the pancake and cornbread mixes he’s producing with Virginia-based Deep Roots Milling, each of which contains about 20 percent foraged acorn flour.

While customers might not know how to cook with acorn flour alone, Whipple explains, the mixes give them an easy introduction to its flavor. Perhaps ironically, the mixes have sold best not in rural Virginia but at markets in Washington, D.C.

“They’re in the suburbs or in townhouses, and they need to take in some wildness,” he suggests of those customers. “Acorn is a wildness supplement—Vitamin W.”

A Resilience-Building Crop

If the Asheville Nuttery can establish an economically viable model for local nut processing, its partners imagine a network of similar facilities throughout Appalachia. Whipple has been evangelizing about that vision through his Acornucopia Project since before the Nuttery was even founded.

The yields of wild nuts can vary considerably between places and seasons, Whipple points out. Some years a region’s trees put out a bumper crop, a phenomenon known as mast seeding, while other years can see very little production. While weather and available nutrients are thought to play a role, scientists still don’t completely understand what triggers mast.

Justin Holt stands by the commercial-scale walnut huller the Asheville Nuttery developed with help from local fabricator Dan Hettinger. (Photo credit: Daniel Walton)

Processors located in different regions could help each other smooth out the vagaries of these cycles by trading nuts and products. “With how decentralized mast is, and it’s meant to be that way, it necessitates community,” Whipple says.

Robust processing capacity could also encourage those who own land to establish new orchards planted with under-appreciated species. The same team behind the Nuttery set up the Nutty Buddy Collective to coordinate and support new plantings, with landowners signing long-term leases in exchange for a share of the yields. Whipple suggests the model could be a good fit for land under conservation easements, offering owners an income stream that doesn’t require felling trees for timber or annual crop fields.

And in existing forests, the economic support created by a nut market could help shape more resilient management practices. The region’s woods have historically been dominated by oaks and hickories, Holt says, a legacy of careful Indigenous land management. But 20th century attitudes toward fire suppression led to greater competition from shade-tolerant, lower-value species.

Clearing those trees through controlled burns and other methods and replanting nut crops, he believes, would lead to a healthier landscape. Actively regenerating forests sequester more carbon and can help communities better resist large wildfires, which are likely to become more common throughout the Southeast as the climate changes. Like eating wild nuts itself, Holt says, such an approach to forestry would represent a return to older patterns of life.

“I think it’s important for us to get back to that place,” he says. “Not just from the perspective of what is morally or ethically correct, but in terms of what has worked to support human survival and thriving.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2023/12/19/wild-nuts-are-making-a-comeback-in-southern-appalachia/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2023/08/29/can-agroforestry-breathe-new-life-into-carbon-markets/ https://civileats.com/2023/08/29/can-agroforestry-breathe-new-life-into-carbon-markets/#comments Tue, 29 Aug 2023 08:00:04 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=53131 Before RiCharde and his wife, Anna, took over Good Wheel Farm outside of Asheville in 2019, he managed the livestock operations for another farm in Western North Carolina. He used a conventional approach: He diligently mowed his animals’ pastures to control weeds, added lime to make the soil less acidic, and applied fertilizer to boost […]

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The Michael RiCharde of several years ago might be a little confused by the Michael RiCharde of today.

Before RiCharde and his wife, Anna, took over Good Wheel Farm outside of Asheville in 2019, he managed the livestock operations for another farm in Western North Carolina. He used a conventional approach: He diligently mowed his animals’ pastures to control weeds, added lime to make the soil less acidic, and applied fertilizer to boost productivity.

“I’m trying to figure out what it looks like to be wedded to a place with more of a conservation mindset while still producing food.”

“You can tell I just don’t care about that anymore,” RiCharde says with a laugh.

He’s still in the livestock business—cows, chickens, and goats all graze across Good Wheel’s 42 acres. But in mid-June, as RiCharde strolled the grounds with Charlie and Ingrid, two of his massive white sheepdogs, he tromped through tall grasses and chicory flowers instead of neatly maintained pasture.

And everywhere he looked, trees had leafed out. Mulberry and persimmon seedlings stood out from a low-lying field. American chinquapins, a native dwarf chestnut, dotted the hillside below the RiChardes’ farmhouse. A wetland was full of young willow cuttings.

“I’m trying to figure out what it looks like to be wedded to a place with more of a conservation mindset while still producing food. That’s where the tree projects felt natural, because the place wants to grow trees,” RiCharde says, gazing at the forested Appalachian foothills that surround the farm.

His vision has gotten a jump start through a partnership with Carbon Harvest. The Asheville-based initiative seeks to mitigate climate change by helping farmers establish, monitor, and verify carbon sequestration through tactics like agroforestry in the Southern Appalachians, in hopes of creating the country’s first regional carbon market.

As part of a $20 million project led by the Kentucky-based nonprofit Accelerating Appalachia, Carbon Harvest will receive roughly $200,000 over two years to conduct research on the potential for a regional offset market. “The point of this work is to investigate whether alternative markets can be developed with integrity at a different scale and based on updated values,” says Meredith Leigh, one of the initiative’s three partners.

Michael RiCharde herds sheep down a slope on Good Wheel Farm in North Carolina, part of the Carbon Harvest carbon market. (Photo courtesy of Good Wheel Farm)

In the meantime, the Carbon Harvest team—which consists of Mari Stuart and Laura Lengnick in addition to Leigh—has been helping farmers establish carbon-capturing practices on their properties, with the goal of setting them up to receive payments in the market once that opportunity comes online.

They have spent the past several years evangelizing about the benefits of agroforestry through workshops and presentations across the region. Trees, they say, can protect farm animals from wind and sun, prevent erosion, stabilize streambanks, and yield marketable products like fruit and nuts.

Earlier this year, the Carbon Harvest partners wrapped up an agroforestry pilot program that helped four local farms, including Good Wheel, integrate trees with their crops and livestock. With the initiative’s help, RiCharde and three other growers were able to map their properties and develop detailed conceptual plans for agroforestry.

The Carbon Harvest team also knows that, by drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into trees and soils, agroforestry can help address the effects of the climate crisis. In the future, they hope to see Appalachian farmers like RiCharde get paid for providing that service—in ways that avoid many of the problems they see with today’s markets for carbon removal.

Traditional Carbon Offset Programs

The concept of compensating people for carbon removal isn’t new. Many companies and governments want to claim that their operations are emissions-free. But rather than reduce fossil fuel use directly in their supply chains, some choose to offset their pollution by buying “carbon credits” designed to reflect greenhouse gasses taken out of the air elsewhere.

It’s a potentially lucrative opportunity. The nonprofit Forest Trends estimated that the global market for voluntary carbon credits—those bought by organizations to meet their own climate pledges—was roughly $2 billion in 2021. By 2030, according to the consulting firm McKinsey, that market could exceed $50 billion.

But as Lengnick with Carbon Harvest points out, small farmers intensively stewarding their land are all but shut out of existing offset programs. For one, those markets are generally designed to reward new projects, rather than farms with regenerative practices already in place. They also cater to big companies that want to buy credits for millions of tons of emissions, and therefore focus on supporting industrial-scale projects.

In many offset programs, that means protecting or planting large tracts of forests; over 85 percent of the 1.5 million tons of offsets purchased by Microsoft in fiscal year 2021–22, for example, were tied to forestry initiatives. (A recent study found that carbon offsets are much less likely to reduce deforestation than they were originally thought to be.) Increasingly, it also means projects that work with very large farms to implement practices such as cover cropping and reduced tillage on tens of thousands of acres of Midwestern corn and soy.

“It’s a very specific kind of farming operation that is going to benefit from those big international carbon market programs,” Lengnick explains. “They’re going to be much larger-scale than the average farm, and they need to have very simple cropping systems.”

Such systems are relatively easy to manage, but their potential for capturing carbon is still in question.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s COMET-Farm tool, which estimates the effects of agricultural practices on greenhouse gasses, projects that adding legume cover crops to annual crop fields sequesters about a ton of CO2 per acre per year, for instance. On the other hand, COMET shows that planting trees or shrubs in grazed pasture, like RiCharde is doing at Good Wheel, draws down more than four times as much carbon.

Meanwhile, buyers of carbon credits and the general public are becoming more wary of big projects due to questions about their impact. An analysis published this year by The Guardian found that over 90 percent of rainforest protection offsets approved by Verra, the largest certifier of carbon credits, didn’t actually reduce emissions. While the offsets were described as necessary to prevent deforestation, the journalists determined that many areas would likely have stayed forested without the offset projects.

Meanwhile, a 2019 ProPublica investigation found that other offsets in Brazil and Cambodia had failed to prevent trees from being cut.

Chickens roam on Good Wheel Farm in North Carolina. (Photo courtesy of Good Wheel Farm)

The Carbon Harvest Vision

Instead of a global market backed by questionable offsets, Carbon Harvest imagines a system where companies in the Southern Appalachians would buy their carbon credits from local farmers putting proven agroforestry techniques into practice. Beyond being more effective at capturing CO2, argues Stuart, these projects would also be more accountable.

“A ton of carbon in one place is not the same as a ton of carbon in another place,” Stuart says. “You could drive down the road to a farm to see [the practices] in action and eat fruit from those trees. That transparency, traceability, and relationality are really at the heart of what Carbon Harvest is.”

“The companies who are going to be your biggest customers for these carbon offsets are always going to be exerting pressure to get your prices down and your volumes up.”

While all carbon comes out of the same atmosphere, Stuart continues, offsets for agroforestry work would fund a bevy of other local ecosystem services. By reducing soil runoff and absorbing excess nutrients, trees on farms also improve water quality for everyone downstream. The habitat and food they can provide enriches bird biodiversity at the landscape scale.

And in many cases, agroforestry projects can build resilience to the climate impacts they’re meant to mitigate. RiCharde says his mulberry and persimmon grove was flooded with more than three feet of water during Tropical Storm Fred, an extreme weather event in 2021 that researchers say was made more intense by climate change. While other area farmers lost much of their crop, he says, the trees emerged unscathed.

The Carbon Harvest team isn’t aware of a local agricultural carbon credit market being developed anywhere else in the country. (The most similar effort, says Stuart, is the California-based Zero Foodprint, which awards grants to farms and ranches working to draw down carbon using donations from restaurants and other food businesses.) Their work through the Accelerating Appalachia grant, adds Lengnick, will provide the nation’s first region-specific estimates of potential carbon credit supply and demand.

The Challenges of Developing Small-Scale Carbon Markets

The three Carbon Harvest partners acknowledge they’re still a ways off from selling their first offset, with no public timeline estimated for an initial offering. While their group has spoken with large local businesses eager to buy more meaningful carbon credits and invest in the region, none have made a purchasing commitment.

“There’s a matryoshka of questions that we’re unpacking at the rate we have capacity to address them,” says Leigh.

How they will structure the cost of the credits is one of those questions. Agroforestry projects are labor-intensive to establish and trees take years to mature; they capture carbon over long timescales, but carbon credits generally reflect emissions captured over one year.

For these reasons, the investment to catalyze agroforestry is heavily weighted on the front end. If the entire expense of planting trees along a streambank had to be covered by carbon credits in its first year, Leigh explains, they would have to cost as much as $500 per ton. But if the expense could be averaged over the project’s lifetime offset potential, the cost would go down to $13-$26 per ton. (Voluntary offsets on the global market currently average about $2-$11 per ton.)

Verification is another challenge. Tools like COMET can estimate the carbon benefits of a project, but they’re less accurate on small farms like Good Wheel, which have a mosaic of different soils and agricultural practices. Other tools measure carbon sequestration, but they come with their own costs. One 2021 estimate from the Environmental Defense Fund estimated carbon measurement at about $13 per acre, potentially adding more expense to Carbon Harvest’s credits.

Tying carbon sequestration to the marketplace at all, suggests Larry Lohmann, comes with its own problems, regardless of scale or the type of work being funded. He has studied carbon credits for over two decades as a co-director of The Corner House, a British environmental and social justice research group.

“The companies who are going to be your biggest customers for these carbon offsets are always going to be exerting pressure to get your prices down and your volumes up,” Lohmann says. “Once [farmers] enter into that kind of contract, they’re going to be vulnerable to this constant messing with their work.”

More importantly, Lohmann continues, offsets fail to address the root causes of climate change. He argues that any carbon credit, however well-intentioned, is essentially an accounting trick that legitimizes an unsustainable economy.

“Through neoliberal ingenuity, they offer a way to continue extracting and using fossil fuels,” he says of offsets. “The people who need them are the people who want to continue using fossil fuels because they’re cheap and energy-dense.”

Growing a Regional Market

Leigh says the Carbon Harvest team shares Lohmann’s concerns. “The direction of the market at present points to the fact that regenerative, nature-based credits are priced artificially low and that valuing mitigation projects based solely on their supposed carbon benefit is neither the proper vehicle to drive drawdown nor to finance better land management,” she acknowledges.

“There’s this concept of ‘carbon tunnel vision,’ where a laser focus on carbon alone leads you to lose sight of all else that matters, like the water cycle, biodiversity, air pollution, and the social and economic well-being of farmers.”

Yet Leigh and her colleagues still believe local offsets are worth exploring. Even as society pressures companies to eliminate their emissions at the source, she argues, some aspects of business will remain almost impossible to decarbonize; to address those residual emissions, she continues, “the smartest corporate leaders will be those who are investing from the ground up in high-integrity, smaller-scale projects.”

If some offsetting is inevitable, Carbon Harvest suggests, its proceeds should be harnessed to boost the growth of sustainable agriculture in places like Southern Appalachia. And agroforestry has broad ecological positives that aren’t necessarily reflected in the raw accounting of carbon offsets.

“There’s this concept of ‘carbon tunnel vision,’ where a laser focus on carbon alone leads you to lose sight of all else that matters, like the water cycle, biodiversity, air pollution, and the social and economic well-being of farmers,” said co-founder Stuart. “I would say all along while harvesting carbon, we have been harvesting all of these other benefits as well.”

The group won’t have to answer all its unresolved questions alone. The Accelerating Appalachia grant, of which Carbon Harvest is a part, is supported through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities” program. The massive initiative was launched last year and has allocated more than $3 billion dollars to over 140 projects across the country in an effort to reduce emissions and sequester carbon. Grant recipients include many large agribusinesses, including the likes of the National Corn Growers Association, Cargill, and PepsiCo, as well as some smaller players. One of the larger grants is specifically designed to expand agroforestry, and a group of nonprofits in the eastern half of the U.S. will begin working with farmers on the effort in the coming years.

Agroforestry currently represents less than 1 percent of U.S. agriculture. The Nature Conservancy’s Expanding Agroforestry Production and Markets Program, funded by the USDA’s Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry Partnership Initiative, aims to create 30,000 acres of new agroforestry plantings over the next five years. (Courtesy of The Nature Conservancy)

One of the goals of the USDA’s investment, says Lengnick, “is to stimulate innovation in this space and figure out how we make carbon credits work for farmers, because for most farmers in the U.S., it doesn’t work.”

That’s currently true for RiCharde at Good Wheel Farm; he says he’d need a group like Carbon Harvest to work out the intricacies of calculating and monetizing the carbon he is drawing down. For now, he’s focused on telling the story of his work through meat sales at farmers’ markets and events on the farm.

As he waits for a local carbon market to come online, RiCharde is looking forward to the day when his trees bear fruit in the hope of future jams and wine. Moving into agroforestry, he says, has come with deep lessons in the value of patience.

“There’s a lot of talk in regenerative agriculture about how can we sequester as much carbon as possible now. I get the urgency, but also, that’s not how nature functions, to shove it down its throat,” RiCharde says. “We need to observe and pay attention and take our time. And that’s hard work in a capitalist world.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2023/08/29/can-agroforestry-breathe-new-life-into-carbon-markets/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2023/04/18/a-radical-seed-breeding-project-could-help-southern-farmers-adapt-to-climate-change/ https://civileats.com/2023/04/18/a-radical-seed-breeding-project-could-help-southern-farmers-adapt-to-climate-change/#comments Tue, 18 Apr 2023 08:00:37 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=51549 On a chilly, overcast morning in early March, as Smith’s farm assistant, Leeza Regensburger, wrestles with an antiquated weed whacker, the most elaborate technology visible on his half-acre field is a sheet of black plastic weed barrier. Yet there’s something conceptually similar between superconducting quadrupole electromagnets and the work going on here. Just as the […]

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At first glance, Chris Smith’s modest farm plot outside Asheville, North Carolina, has nothing in common with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the powerful particle collider located on the border of France and Switzerland.

On a chilly, overcast morning in early March, as Smith’s farm assistant, Leeza Regensburger, wrestles with an antiquated weed whacker, the most elaborate technology visible on his half-acre field is a sheet of black plastic weed barrier.

Yet there’s something conceptually similar between superconducting quadrupole electromagnets and the work going on here. Just as the LHC bashes together particles in the hope of strange and exciting results, Smith and his nonprofit Utopian Seed Project (USP) are making genetic collisions that result in new diversity for crop plants.

“The whole reason we’re exploring diversity is to have climate-resilient food systems, which really translates to food security in a climate-uncertain future.”

The USP farm is a living laboratory for agricultural diversity. Through its crop research and other efforts, the nonprofit seeks to promote “a resilient, delicious, and equitable food and farming system” across the South.

The most recent experiment to emerge from the farm is Ultracross Okra. In 2021, Smith planted 100 different types of the mucilaginous vegetable in the same plot, everything from Clemson Spineless, the most popular okra in the United States, to rare heirloom cultivars such as Mr. Bill’s Big. As those plants grew out their showy, hibiscus-like flowers, swarms of pollinators darted between them to cross everything with everything else, an okra supercollider at work.

Smith saved the resulting seeds and distributed them to growers across the country [including the author] last year through the Experimental Farm Network and Ujamaa Seeds. And when those seeds came up in garden plots across the U.S., the plants were a kaleidoscope of okra expression: stems from short to towering, leaves from smooth to spiny, pods from stubby thumbs of pale green to long fingers of deep crimson.

Okra varieties grown during one Okra Ultracross planting season. (Photo courtesy of Chris Smith)

Smith is now developing similar plans for other crops with cultural importance to the South, such as sorghum and cowpeas. The idea of these ultracrosses, Smith explains, is to shuffle the genetic deck of existing varieties, creating combinations of traits that haven’t been seen before. Working from those new foundations, farmers and gardeners might develop plants that are better adapted, both to their geographic regions and to the changing climate.

“The whole reason we’re exploring diversity is to have climate-resilient food systems, which really translates to food security in a climate-uncertain future,” Smith says. “The method of the ultracross creates the diverse populations that can be rapidly adapted to climate change, but the goal is to use those populations to feed a whole bunch of people.”

A Utopian Vision for Climate-Resilient Agriculture

Smith isn’t formally trained as a plant breeder or crop scientist; his education is in accounting and creative writing. And by his own admission, he wasn’t particularly interested in growing plants as a child. Although his family had a substantial home plot in his native United Kingdom, he says his most vivid gardening memory is getting soaked by an unwieldy watering can while tending to his mother’s hanging baskets.

After moving to the U.S. a decade ago, Smith took up gardening again as a response to his concerns about his new home’s food system. (“Simple things, like what the hell is high-fructose corn syrup and why is it in everything?” he jokes.) He also landed a marketing gig with Asheville-based gardening company Sow True Seed, which gave him a deep familiarity with growing heirloom varieties and saving seeds.

Over time, however, Smith began to question whether those skills were enough amid the impending challenges of climate change. Seed saving could preserve the best heirloom varieties developed in the past, but those plants wouldn’t necessarily have the characteristics needed to thrive in the future. Heirlooms are also heavily inbred; while that keeps varieties looking and behaving similarly from generation to generation, it limits their genetic potential to adapt under new circumstances.

In late 2018, with the backing of Sow True Seed, Smith established the USP  as a way to work specifically on climate-resilient crops. He stepped into the executive director role full-time in 2020, supported by a diverse mix of family foundations, research grants, and Patreon supporters.

Part of the USP’s mission involves creating enthusiasm about the diversity that already exists in the regional crops of the South, such as sweet potatoes and collard greens. While Southern farmers and gardeners historically grew dozens of cultivars of each crop, each adapted for different regional conditions or culinary preferences, many fell out of production as agriculture became more standardized and industrialized. Without people to grow those plants or save their seeds, a heritage of cultural and genetic variety risks being lost.

The nonprofit spreads the word about these cultivars through its “Crop Stories” project, which takes deep dives into specific crops through magazine, podcast, and video content. It also hosts events such as the “Trial to Table” series, where local chefs craft bites using unique varieties. One event held during the pandemic saw Ashleigh Shanti, who later competed on Bravo’s Top Chef, present a Zoom cooking demonstration with “Tabitha Dykes,” a collard cultivar known for its sweetness.

Other projects explore the potential of crops that aren’t yet widely grown in the U.S. Smith is especially intrigued by what he calls “temperate tropicals”—plants like the tuber-forming African potato mint and bambara groundnut, a bean that grows seeds underground like a peanut. Both are native to West Africa but might perform well in the South as conditions grow hotter and drier.

In many cases, Smith says, that exploration is as simple as planting a few varieties of a new crop and observing how they perform. If a plant shows promise, more rigorous work follows: Last year, the USP received a $20,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program to conduct scientific trials on taro, a root crop that is a staple in places like Hawaii and the Philippines.

Modern agriculture, Smith argues, tends to assume that the environment can be modified to match the needs of a crop through inputs like irrigation or fertilizer. Those assumptions might not hold in a system that regularly experiences climate disruptions like extreme heat or drought.

“I think we’re going to have to drop back on the crops that can really tough it out in these challenging environments,” he says.

Okra, Remixed

Smith acknowledges that the concept isn’t entirely new: Crop scientists use the terms “composite cross” or “evolutionary plant breeding” for similar recombinations of many different distinct varieties at the same time. (The ultracross name, he says, was coined by Washington-based farmer Melony Edwards during a 2020 trial of diverse collard greens.)

Yet those  traditional crop science approaches, Smith suggests, are  typically designed to meet a specific goal.  The end result, he says, is “a variety that meets the distinct, uniform, stable criteria of modern agriculture so that we can then give it a name and sell it, or maybe patent it and sell it.”

In contrast, Smith’s goal is to generate and maintain diversity as an end in and of itself. While he plans to weed out particularly tall plants, which can be challenging for farmers to harvest, he otherwise wants to grow generation after generation of okra from the initial ultracross, letting the genetics of the original 100 parents intermix indefinitely.

Future farmers could then return to the ultracross offspring as a base for breeding whatever varieties changing circumstances call for. “By actively maintaining that diversity, you basically have a dynamic population that can react to environmental pressures over time,” Smith explains.

In the present day, the freedom that the ultracross offers can be unfamiliar territory. Many of the hundreds of people who have received okra seed packets ask what they’re supposed to be selecting for, Smith says.

His go-to response is, “Whatever you want.” By offering growers a rich source of diversity, Smith explains, he’s encouraging them to think of crops as mutable, and of themselves as participants in change.

Creating the Future Story

The Ujamaa Seeds online store lists well over 200 seed varieties that are “culturally meaningful.” Its collection includes everything from the California Blackeye African pea, brought to the U.S. as part of the transatlantic slave trade, to the yaupon holly, a caffeinated shrub used by Indigenous Americans to brew a ritual “black drink.”

The Ujamaa store also offers Ultracross Okra. Though the ultracross only came into existence two years ago, it still offers connection to the past: Like the African pea, okra arrived in the country via enslaved people, and it has been a key part of Southern gardens for centuries.

Adeeb has played an integral role in promoting the ultracross, helping place the okra in demonstration plots from Berea College in Kentucky to Princeton University. To see a riot of diversity erupting from a single packet of seed, she says, can reawaken the skills that people used to create heirloom cultivars in the first place.

“We can use the same strategies that our ancestors used to develop varieties. They didn’t genetically modify things. They observed and they crossed things,” she says. “The ultracross is a way individuals and communities can learn seed breeding using traditional practices: observing various characteristics in the plant, keeping notes, and making decisions that suit their needs.”

And on a broader scale, Adeeb hopes the ultracross can help people embrace the value of diversity. She compares the mix of okra to the human family, which also spread to the world from Africa.

“In that pool of genes lies the future,” she says of both okra and mankind. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to adapt to all the things that Mother Nature throws at us because of our misbehavior. She’s thinking about drop-kicking us the way she did the dinosaurs, but maybe we can make amends and show her that we really do respect her.”

The post A Radical Seed-Breeding Project Could Help Southern Farmers Adapt to Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

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