KAYTE YOUNG:  From WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana, I'm Kayte Young and this is Earth Eats.

ARIELLA BROWN:  When you think of agriculture, you think of the typical white rural family farm. But there's so many black people that do farm and I would say it's naturally just in our blood.

KAYTE YOUNG:  This week on the show we have a special presentation from the Ohio based Grounded Hope Podcast, about the history, present and future of black farming in the US. And we have a story about Ojibwe wild rice cultivation in Minnesota and harvest public media reports on a new conservation initiative for farmers from the Biden Administration. Plus, mushroom growers talk about meeting increased demand for their product. That's all coming up in the next hour here on Earth Eats. Stay with us.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Thanks for listening to Earth Eats. I'm Kayte Young.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Farmers and ranchers often try to protect their soil and land, sometimes getting paid by the Federal Government to do so. It's called conservation and for decades it's been a pretty humdrum corner of agricultural. That changed when President Joe Biden announced a goal to conserve 30 percent of the country's land by 2030. Now some are opposing conservation and comparing it to government takeover. Harvest Public Media's Elizabeth Rembert takes you to Nebraska where the opposition is boosted by powerful support from the Governor.

ELIZABETH REMBERT:  Let's go back to Earth Day, last April, in Lincoln, Nebraska.

ELIZABETH REMBERT:  Governor Pete Ricketts is taking the stage at a conference but, instead of pushing a typical, "Go Green" message, he's here to talk about the dangers of conservation. He says the Biden Administration is butting in to something his state already does well.

GOVERNOR PETER RICKETTS:  We do the right thing here in Nebraska, we don't need the Federal Government lecturing us about the environment.

ELIZABETH REMBERT:  Nebraska's landowners are interested in conservation. They've historically been at the top of the sign-up list to get paid by the Federal Government for using environmental practices. President Biden praised that in a long document outlining his, "America, The Beautiful" initiative. It's more well known as "30 by 30". It's essentially a goal to conserve 30 percent of the nation's land and water by 2030. The plan is vague with some details. So, a group of republican governors, including Iowa's Kim Reynolds and Oklahoma's Kevin Stitt, sent a letter with questions Ricketts laid out at the Earth Day event.

GOVERNOR PETER RICKETTS:  We want to know what's the definition of conservation? How are you planning to do this? Where is your authority? They don't want to tell you what those answers are.

ELIZABETH REMBERT:  Ricketts has filled in the gaps. To him, it could become a federal land grab. He suggests the government wants land out of agriculture production and will trick land owners if that's what it takes.

JOHN HANSEN:  Americans are now addicted to conspiracy theories.

ELIZABETH REMBERT:  John Hansen leads the Nebraska Farmer's Union and has worked around conservation for almost 50 years. He says, "Up until now, conservation was a meeting place between people across the political spectrum." He thinks Ricketts has changed that.

JOHN HANSEN:  What he has been doing is to create question marks and fears and suspicions where there should be none.

ELIZABETH REMBERT:  Hansen says he's afraid it could chip away at confidence in conservation programs that have been around for decades.

JOHN HANSEN:  If landowners who have traditionally used conservation car share programs and thought about them in an extremely positive way and saying, "Gee, I don't know whether I should or not. Maybe the Federal government and the white press somehow is going to take over my farm."

ELIZABETH REMBERT:  That's never been a worry for Dean Fetty. He and his brother, Wayne, use conservation practices on their farm in Southeast Nebraska. Sitting in lawn chairs, in front of a white farmhouse, the brothers say they aren't nervous about losing ownership; they're in control. Dean looks out at the century old oak trees where songbirds build their nests. He says, "Conservation protects it all."

DEAN FETTY:  There is no land ground, the government is not going to take your farm, they there to help protect that ground. They want to see working farms continue to be working farms. It's just opposite of what's being told.

ELIZABETH REMBERT:  The brothers know their land will always be a farm. They entered a legal agreement, called a Conservation Easement, in 2010. Supporters say Easements are tools to protect farmland, especially as more of it gets paved into parking lots or housing developments. But Governor Ricketts told Harvest Public Media that Easements are a threat to property rights.

GOVERNOR PETER RICKETTS:  You are basically agreeing that you do not have your property rights anymore. You're restricting the use of that land to whatever those covenants mean but, you are giving up the right to be able to use that land in the way you want it and giving up your property rights.

ELIZABETH REMBERT:  He's gone as far as to encourage county authorities to rethink whether to grant Conservation Easements and at least two landowners have had their requests denied. Dean says there wasn't a trace of politics when he and Wayne got their easement a decade ago and he says they have no regrets.

DEAN FETTY:  It's one of the better things we've ever done. This farm will be forever a working farm in perpetuity. This farm is a part of us; it's just an extension of us.

ELIZABETH REMBERT:  But for others in Nebraska, that path to preserving their land might be narrowing. For Harvest Public Media, I'm Elizabeth Rembert.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Harvest Public Media is a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains, including KSUR. They report on food systems, agriculture and rural issues. Find more from this reporting collective at harvestpublicmedia.org.

KAYTE YOUNG:  This is Earth Eats. I'm Kayte Young.

KAYTE YOUNG:  The number of black-owned farms has drastically declined since the 1920s and now make up less than 2 percent of total US farmland. Next up on Earth Eats, we have a special presentation of the Grounded Hope Podcast from Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice in Green County, Ohio. In this episode, host, Renee Wilde talks with one of the organizers of the Black Farming Conference, Beyond 40 Acres and a Mule. We learn how three childhood friends created an urban farm out of an abandoned dumping ground and hear from a first time grower about the joys of eating food that you've poured your essence into. Here's the Grounded Hope Podcast, a special presentation on Earth Eats.

DAJON BROOKMAN:  So, I'm from the city, I'm born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. I've always lived in the city, never really been in the country but, always loved nature. Once I came to Central State, I was kind of lost for a minute and confused on what I wanted to do. The Ag-Ed Department sent me to a conference and I saw those opportunities and I said, "Wow, I can take these, I can change the world, change my community and change myself all in one." And it was just a beautiful cycle.

RENEE WILDE:  That was Dijon Brookman, a senior at Central State University of Wilberforce, Ohio, studying agricultural education with a minor in Sustainability.

RENEE WILDE:  Central State is a historic black college that received Land-grant status in 2014. That status allowed them to expand the college's programming to include agricultural and ag-related studies. The university was also one of the presenters at the Black Farming Conference in Ohio last Fall, that we'll talk about in this episode.

RENEE WILDE:  You're listening to Grounded Hope. I'm the host, Renee Wilde, and in this episode we'll take a look at three friends who turned a dump site in a Cleveland neighborhood into an urban farm where they teach others how to be food activists in their own communities. We'll learn some key history from the Ohio Black Farming Conference last Fall and hear about the job of eating homegrown food from a first time black farmer. And on the way, we'll explore issues and opportunities facing black farmers, including land access, USD support and community growth. From the highways to the hedgerows, we bring you Grounded Hope.

RENEE WILDE:  Black farmers played an important role in developing agriculture. George Washington Carver was a pioneer in the regenerative agriculture movement, advocating for amending the soil with locally available compost materials rather than chemicals and planting diversified crops, both as ecological insurance and as a food source. Carver found that years of growing cotton and tobacco had depleted the nutrients from the soil but, he discovered that by growing nitrogen fixing plants like, peanuts, as part of a crop rotation, it can restore the soil health.

RENEE WILDE:  In 2001 Ohio held the state's first conference for black farmers. The goal was to give the black farming population an opportunity to network and discuss ideas specific to their needs. The last Ohio census had listed only 135 black owned farms. This decline was part of a nationwide trend that saw black farm ownership dramatically decline from 14 percent to 1.4 percent, since the early 1900s. The conference organizers warned that if strategies weren't implemented to address this declining trend, black farmers would become extinct. But despite the dire warnings, when organizers held a black farming conference last year, the number of black farmers in Ohio had risen by only 62 over the last two decades.

ARIELLA BROWN:  We really wanted to make sure that we were celebrating the historical contributions of black farming in America, as well as celebrate what we can accomplish today.

RENEE WILDE:  Ariella Brown was a lead organizer of that second conference, held virtually last Fall at Agraria. It was called Black Farming Beyond 40 Acres and a Mule.

ARIELLA BROWN:  Our keynote speaker was Anna-Lisa Cox and she wrote the book, 'The Bone and the Sinew of the Land' and it focusing on America's black pioneers who settled here and cultivated the land before this region was even state, pre-Civil War.

RENEE WILDE:  The Bone and Sinew of the Land tells the story of the Greers, one of the first black settlers who started occupying frontier land for agriculture in 1818. The Greers are part of what Anna-Lisa Cox calls, "The lost history of the nation's first great migration", black pioneers who were building hundreds of settlements in the northwest territory which are now the present day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan.

RENEE WILDE:  Longtown, Ohio is another example of this first migration. The town, which sits along the Indiana border, was founded in 1818 by a black man named James Clements. The James and Sophia Clements farmstead is now the oldest and last remaining agricultural resource in one of Ohio's earliest black settlements.

ARIELLA BROWN:  So, she really talked about how well these black pioneers were able to be self-sustainable and create a livelihood for themselves that people really didn't know about. It was really empowering to hear that message. It's important to have these conversations because, historically, black people are left out of the conversation and history tells a different story.

RENEE WILDE:  Historically, government and other agencies have been accused of discrimination against black farmers. In 1999, a class action lawsuit was brought against the United States Department of Agriculture. The Pigford v. Glickman case alleged racial discrimination against African American farmers, for farmlands and assistants during the 80s and 90s.

ARIELLA BROWN:  When you think of agriculture, you think of the typical white rural family farm but, there's so many black people that do farm and I would say it's naturally in our blood.

RENEE WILDE:  Ariella's interest in farming was sparked by her time serving as an agricultural staffer for Congresswoman, Marsha Fudge, in Cleveland.

ARIELLA BROWN:  She would often say, "People wonder why someone who represents a mostly urban district sits on the agriculture committee when most of the funds go to rural agriculture." But she recognized that living in a food insecure district could really support her community.

RENEE WILDE:  The Food Desert is an area or community that lacks access to healthy, nutritious food. In Ohio, hundreds of thousands of people lack accessibility to healthy food, primarily in under-served rural and urban communities, as grocery stores continue in exodus from areas with low income and low population density. Black farmers have been leaders in developing strategies to grow food in small community spaces as an important part of addressing this food insecurity.

ARIELLA BROWN:  We had the opportunity to build something unique in an urban district. She had a vision that she wanted to construct one hundred seasonal high tunnels throughout her district and I was really the person to lead that effort. One of our first high tunnel recipients was a gentleman who owned a church but just loved farming. He was from the south and he gave all of his harvest to his church members. Most people who were applying for these high tunnels were doing it for their community.

ARIELLA BROWN:  I think we, as an American society, are so removed from our food we don't really understand where food comes from and we need to get back to that, as a community, as a society. One of the goals that we really want to accomplish by hosting this conference is to provide resources and to spark the next generation of farmers.

RENEE WILDE:  Mark the date for the next Black Farming Conference hosted at Agraria, which will be held virtually and in person, this coming Fall in September 10th and 11th.

KENNY MOSEBY:  My name is Kenny Moseby.

AMBER JENKINS:  Amber Jenkins.

RENEE WILDE:  What are you doing here?

KENNY MOSEBY:  Trying to gain knowledge. Trying to better myself and pass it down to the next generation.

AMBER JENKINS:  I personally want to get more knowledge on how to grow my food at home and how to maximize and some more of the details of it. It's pretty exciting. In my vision, everybody will have a community garden in their backyard.

RENEE WILDE:  It's the first day of class at the Rid-All Green Partnership urban farm in Kinsman neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. Over the next five months, the people in this class will be provided with practical hands-on training in different types of urban farming practices, combined with education on the social impacts of urban agriculture.

RENEE WILDE:  The urban farm is the dream of three childhood friends who grew up in Cleveland; Keymah Durden, Randy McShepard and Damien Forshe who is now deceased. Along with co-founders Marc White and David Hester, they call themselves The Soil Brothers.

DAVID HESTER:  My name's David Hester, I'm called Dr. Greenhand.

RENEE WILDE:  Dr. Greenhand is a master gardener. He teaches farming practices like aquaponics and composting and also classes on how to create an agribusiness.

DAVID HESTER:  I've been here since day one, since inception. My cousin, Damien Forshe, we actually had this whole idea about 15 years ago. It went from a dream to talking about it to actually putting it into action. So, the very first day that we had the property to do it on was probably my biggest achievement. We had gone all around the city looking for land and we weren't able to get it until we settled down here, went to the land bank, and we got an acre and a third of land.

RENEE WILDE:  The Cuyahoga Land Bank acquires a banded or foreclosed land and returns them to productive use through sales to private owners. The land can be used for rehabilitation, economic development and creative uses such as gardening. The land bank is representative of a larger national conversation around land access and reparations that is exploring strategies to provide opportunities for growers.

RENEE WILDE:  The brothers called this piece of the land the Forgotten Green Triangle. And when the group first got this property in 2011, it had been a dumping ground. Today, the property has two greenhouses, four hoop houses, a composting facility and a 40,000 square foot aquaponics fishery.

MARC WHITE:  This our main greenhouse. We have three 1,500 gallon tanks where we can grow one fish per gallon, up to a pound and a half.

RENEE WILDE:  That's Marc White.

MARC WHITE:  They're very lucrative. So, I can take a Fingerling and grow them out to a full 1.5 lb size fish within five to six months, and sell that fish for $10 a piece, from an initial purchase of maybe 30 or 40 cents.

RENEE WILDE:  He says that by teaching these types of cottages industries, that don't require a lot of space, they are giving people the skills to become entrepreneurs in their own communities, without the need for big investments in land. Land access is a challenge for all farmers but, for black farmers in particular, the ability to put down roots can help heal discrimination and disconnection.

MARC WHITE:  That's the foundation of what we do here; teaching people how to grow relationships between themselves and the natural environments. And you actually provide a very good thing for your community. There are so many things in the community now that are robbing us of life and cheating the people. Something that's going to bring life and add financial substances should be welcomed.

RENEE WILDE:  The farm counts over 37 revenue streams but, the foundation of the operation stems from composing, using discarded produce from the Cleveland Food Bank, leftover hops from area breweries, coffee grounds and wood chips from the city's forestry department.

MARC WHITE:  We spent our first year literally growing soil. Black ghost soil is just beaming with life. It is a non-pasteurized growing medium that we produce here. Everything here is produced from the soil that we produce.

RENEE WILDE:  The organization was recently tapped to take over operations for a 60 year old farmer's market in Maple Heights that closed last may due to the pandemic.

MARC WHITE:  People had grown quite dependent upon it. We were able to take things that we grow here and sell there, as well as make connections with local growers and other farmer's markets and bring produce to that area. So, for us, that's a very, very powerful feather in our cap, and that's part of our goal. Our goal was to provide these connections to help alleviate food insecurity and to bring an understanding of nature back to people.

KANISHA ROBINSON:  When I was growing up, I always thought, why is Daddy out there all day? What is he doing? He would get up early in the morning, he would come out here, then he would come back in for lunch and come back out and then he wouldn't be back in until dinner; I'm like, what is he doing? Now I understand. It's a lot to maintain this property and that's what he was doing. Now I'm trying to revitalize it and get it back to it's beauty and how it was before.

RENEE WILDE:  That's Kanisha Robinson. She moved from Chicago back to the Dayton area to help take care of her father who had developed Alzheimer's. When Kanisha was growing up, her father raised hogs and grew vegetables on this family farm.

KANISHA ROBINSON:  I remember my Dad used to grow a lot of things; different types of greens and beans and squashes and all types of things. He really used this land to feed our family. I knew that things grew here before but the property hadn't been used in nearly 20 years.

RENEE WILDE:  Kanisha explains how her new partner got her interested in growing.

KANISHA ROBINSON:  This all came about because of her. She posted something on social media about wanting to buy a farm and wanting to grow vegetables and raise animals and things like that. She was talking about how hard it was for her to find the right property. I said, we have this land here that's not being used, just come and use it.

RENEE WILDE:  Kanisha and her partner broke ground for their first garden in 2020.

KANISHA ROBINSON:  Our goal for this first year was to see what grew, because neither one of us knew anything about what we were going to do. This was completely covered in grass but, we're like, we're going to grow fruits and vegetables this year and we're going to have a garden etc. But we looked at it and we were like, how are we going to do this?

RENEE WILDE:  A friend hooked Kanisha up with someone who had a tractor that came out to the farm and plowed up the garden area. Kanisha and her partner mounded the tilled soil into raised rows where they grew vegetables in the same soil her Dad used to farm.

KANISHA ROBINSON:  The summer garden went extremely well, we grew okra, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, cucumber, cantelope, peppers, greens, herbs and green beans. We then wanted to try our hand at Fall items, and we did some radishes and arugula and they came up. The cabbage got eaten but everything else didn't really produce anything. This year we decided we're not going to do a Fall planting, we're just going to focus on Spring and Summer.

RENEE WILDE:  Kanisha and her partner are quickly learning what works for them and adjusting to fit their needs.

KANISHA ROBINSON:  We had this idea, because there's so many areas here in the Dayton area that are considered food deserts, we wanted to set up a little stand and be able to sell the produce. But since this was our first year we had a lot of learning to do so, we discovered that we probably needed to plant more so we could have the volume to be able to sell. What we did was we gave it away to family and friends.

RENEE WILDE:  Kanisha admits she had to overcome her squeamishness of things like spiders and snakes when she first started.

KANISHA ROBINSON:  Once we started, it just renewed, regenerated, rejuvenated something within me and I love it; I absolutely love it. I love getting my hands dirty. I love touching the dirt. I would have friends some out and they'd be like, "You're not wearing gloves?" I'm like, "No, I want to feel the earth, I want to feel the dirt." When you're planting the seeds it gave me a rush; it gave me such a rush.

RENEE WILDE:  Kanisha and her partner would like to eventually expand the farm to include sheet, honey bees, fruit trees, medicinal herbs and pollinating flowers, creating an agribusiness.

KANISHA ROBINSON:  We want to eventually sell our produce and honey to the community. That's the whole purpose of us wanting to revitalize this property. Eventually I would love to get into teaching people how to do this for themselves. I want to encourage people of color to start growing food. There's something that is so rewarding and satisfying about planting a seed, nurturing that, watching it grow, and then being able to eat that; your energy, your essence is in that food.

KANISHA ROBINSON:  This is a wonderful thing that I've learned, is that anybody can grow, you don't have to have all this land. If you live in an apartment, you can still plant food, you can get a plastic bin from the dollar store, buy some soil, you can plant in that. There's so many ways that you can grow your own food. I really think that people need to get back to that.

RENEE WILDE:  Small, diversified operations like Rid-All and Kanisha's farm are the wave of the future, creating opportunities close to home. Kanisha Robinson attended the Black Farming Conference last year at Agraria and will be part of the black indigenous and people of color training in regenerative agriculture there this summer.

RENEE WILDE:  Any research on black farming will inevitably bring you to the Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, an African indigenous center community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system. We end this episode with a quote from the book, 'Farming While Black' by Soul Fire co-founder, Leah Penniman.

LEAH PENNIMAN:  "Our great-great grandmothers in Dahomey, West Africa, witnessed the kidnapping and disappearance of members of their community and experienced a rising unease about their own safety. As insurance for an uncertain future, they began the practice of braiding rice, okra, and millet seeds into their hair. While there were no report backs from the other side of the Transatlantic trade slave and rumors abounded that white people were capturing Africans to eat us, they still had the audacity of hope to imagine a future on soil. Once sequestered in the bowels of the slave ships, they continued the practice of seed smuggling, picking up grains from the threshing floor, and hiding the precious kernels in their braids."

RENEE WILDE:  You can join the Black Farming Network and [UNSURE OF WORD] that grew out of last years conference by writing to blackfarmingoh@gmail.com. For more information on black farming, go to our website at groundedhope.org where you'll find educational materials, book recommendations and even recipes that compliment these podcast. And that's all the work of our two humanity scholars who guide this podcast, Beth Bridgeman, an associate professor at Antioch University in Yellow Springs and Rick Livingstone, as associate director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State University in Colombus. They team up with our web master, Rachel Isaacson at Americorps VISTA at Agraria. This podcast is made possible by the people at Community Solutions, Agraria Center for Regenerative Practices, and by a grant from the Ohio Humanities. I'm Renee Wilde and you've been listening to Grounded Hope.

KAYTE YOUNG:  That was an episode from the Grounded Hope Podcast, a special presentation here on Earth Eats. Grounded Hope Podcast is a project of Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice in Green County, Ohio.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Still to come on the show, a story about harvesting wild rice in Minnesota and mushroom cultivation in North Carolina. That's all just ahead. Stay with us.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Kayte Young here. This is Earth Eats. This next story is from 10,000 Fresh Voices, a series produced at KFAI in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

KAYTE YOUNG:  When folks think of Minnesota cuisine, comfort foods like Hotdish and Lefse, the staples of church suppers and potlucks come to mind. But long before Norwegian settlers arrived, native Ojibwe had already perfected the cultivation of a wonder food, manoomin, wild rice. KFAI's Allison Herrera had this story about the mid-west's famous freshwater grain.

ALLISON HERRERA:  This is the sound of wild rice season in Nett Lake, a small village on the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa Reservation, 90 miles south of International Falls. Two people are steering in a canoe while someone beats the stocks growing on the lake. The rice falls in the boat. Leaves are just beginning to change colors as an early Fall breeze rolls across the lake. This lake, Nett Lake, produces some of the best wild rice crop in Minnesota. Many elders who grew up here have been harvesting rice their whole lives. One of those elders is Gene Goodsky.

GENE GOODSKY:  [FOREIGN DIALOGUE], that's my Indian name, my real name. my other name is Gene Goodsky.

ALLISON HERRERA:  Gene is 74 years old and grew up in Orr, a small town not far from Nett Lake. He's riced since he was 12.

GENE GOODSKY:  I was over at my Grandpa's house. This guy came in and he says, "I'm looking for a partner but there's nobody around." Then he looked at me and said, "How about you?" I said, "Yeah, I'll help." He asked everybody and they said, "Yeah, he's good, he's a pretty good paddler."

ALLISON HERRERA:  Ricing takes skill and practice. There are a few key positions when you get out on the boat; a paddler, the poler, the person who steers and looks for the best spots where the rice crop is thick on the lake, and the knocker, the most important position. Gene liked working as a poler but the reason had nothing to do with rice.

ALLISON HERRERA:  So the polers come to scout?

GENE GOODSKY:  Yeah. It was better when you could see where the girls were. [LAUGHS]

ALLISON HERRERA:  "You could see where the girls were." Even now, Gene tries his luck. When I asked about going out on the boat to go ricing, I was told that it's only reserved for Nett Lake villagers and wives of villagers. That's when I got a marriage proposal. He was only kidding but, it gives you an idea of his playful nature.

ALLISON HERRERA:  People like Gene have been harvesting wild rice here for centuries. The food is part of their seven prophecies. Ojibwe people were told thousands of years ago they would settle where food grows on water. Today, many villagers in Nett Lake feel the tradition is declining, as people rely more on store-bought food and less on subsistence. But it still has a significant cultural and social role here.

ALLISON HERRERA:  Still, a lot of people go out, not just on Nett Lake, but nearby Pelican Lake and Big Rice Lake. The knocker makes or breaks the whole operation. Once the knocker hits the rice with the pole, the rice falls to the bottom of the boat. But the knocker must be careful not to break the stalk otherwise it kills that plant and rice won't grow anymore. Marybelle Isham, another Bois Forte elder, remembers how hard it was being out on the boat, paddling with her Dad.

MARYBELLE ISHAM:  So they started us pretty young and he kept us out there mostly all day. I used to cry while I was paddling. [LAUGHS]

ALLISON HERRERA:  How come? Why?

MARYBELLE ISHAM:  It's hard work.

ALLISON HERRERA:  Yeah, hard on your arms?

MARYBELLE ISHAM:  Oh, it's hard on everything and the bugs and the heat. But that was the beginning of my ricing.

ALLISON HERRERA:  Both Gene and Marybelle also remember the process after the rice is hauled in from the boat. That's where a lot of the hard work is done. At Gene Goodsky's camp on Pelican Lake, boats, canoes and equipment compete for space. Off to the side, near a makeshift dock, is his kettle and all the other equipment needed to prepare the rice.

GENE GOODSKY:  I've got about 5 lbs of green rice in here. And you just turn it.

ALLISON HERRERA:  Would there be a little fire underneath?

GENE GOODSKY:  Oh, definitely. There has to be a fire. You've got to have two to three people to keep everything going. We're setting up our pastures. There's two ways that we parch.

ALLISON HERRERA:  This season, Spring and Summer storms made it hard for the rice to grow. That didn't stop camps of men, women, elders and children setting off in boats to harvest the food that's sustained them since the beginning. At harvesting people gather at the Mii Gwetch Manomin Pow Wow. They dance and pray for the rice to come back next year.

ALLISON HERRERA:  For KFAI I'm Allison Herrera.

KAYTE YOUNG:  That story was produced by Allison Herrera with 10,000 Fresh Voices, local arts, culture, history and environmental features, made possible by the Minnesota Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund. It comes to us from KFAI in Minneapolis through PRX, Public Radio Exchange.

KAYTE YOUNG:  When a food or ingredient is trending, what exactly does that mean for those who work with that food on a local level? Producer, Josephine McRobbie, spoke with North Carolina chefs, farmers and forages about the mushrooming demand for their product.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  In January, The New York Times named edible mushrooms the culinary ingredient for 2022. Among lab engineered faux chicken and 80s style cocktails, mushrooms might not seem that exciting but, according to wild food expert, Frank Hyman, they've been trending for quite a while.

FRANK HYMAN:  I can think of five times in the last ten years where some publication has said, "Mushrooms are the IT food for this year." Martha Stewart declared them the IT food for 2019, the same year that there were three movies in which mushrooms played a role as a tool of assassination. [LAUGHS]

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  The mystery and excitement surrounding mushrooms even inspired Frank to write a book.

FRANK HYMAN:  My book is called 'How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying'. You talk about mushrooms and people step back and go, "Oh, you could die from eating mushrooms. You better be careful out there, Frank. Mushrooms are even tricky, even experts can't tell them apart." Which is just not true but, people believe this.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  One of his first rules for mushroom hunters is to avoid, what he calls, LBMs.

FRANK HYMAN:  That stands for little brown mushrooms. Anybody who's a birdwatcher is familiar with the term LBJs, little brown jobs, because there's a bazillion little brown birds and there's a similar dynamic with mushrooms. There is a boatload of little brown mushrooms and 99.9PER CENTof them are not edible or interesting in anyway. If you're leading a mushroom hike, or a foré, and you get sucked into spending a lot of time identifying mushrooms that are not interesting and not edible, that's time you're not spending getting further down the trail, into the woods, finding the equivalent of the painting buntings of the mushroom world, which is Chicken of the Woods and Lion's Mane and Boletus and Lobster mushrooms, things that are colorful and beautiful and delicious.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  He says, in general, wild mushrooms should be cooked before eating.

FRANK HYMAN:  Two of the most commonly eaten mushrooms; Chanterelles and Morels, if you eat them raw you will be hugging the toilet, because when they're raw they have chemicals in them that will make you throw up. Therefore you have to cook them to denature those chemicals, and then they're totally safe to eat. Another reason is that it's wise to think of mushrooms as being more equivalent to meat than to vegetables in the sense that they could have bacteria on them out in the woods.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  One type that can be eaten raw is the Beefsteak mushroom.

FRANK HYMAN:  It's the shape of a big wide tongue. It looks like there's a cow inside the tree and it's sticking it's tongue out at you. The interior of the mushroom looks marbled like steak. It smells lemony which is the clue. It has citric acid in it which suppresses bacteria therefore it comes with it's own preservative, making it free of bacteria, free of chemicals that would make you sick from eating it raw; it actually tastes better raw.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  He says that one of the one of the selling points for wild mushrooms is their ability to imitate other foods.

FRANK HYMAN:  I think of them as a good food, a good alternative for vegetarians who are nostalgic. If you grew up eating meat and seafood and you've become vegetarian but you miss that texture and those flavors, mushrooms can help you bridge that gap.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  One of Frank's favorites is known as the Cauliflower mushroom but, he calls it something else.

FRANK HYMAN:  It looks like egg noodles. It looks like somebody had a big bowl of egg noodles, tripped over a root and spilled it on the ground and then went home. The texture is close to the texture of al-dente egg noodles.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  He's been doing a bit of PR for this type.

FRANK HYMAN:  This is one of the mushrooms and one of the preparations I use when I'm dealing with people who swear that they don't like mushrooms. It's partly the name because that's a part of the whole eating experience, it's how it tastes, it's how it looks, how it smells, just how it's described.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  And for the really adventurous, there's the Indigo Milky, a mushroom that bleeds a kind of blue milk.

FRANK HYMAN:  The milk, it just tastes like the mushroom so, it's not like a different flavor or a bad flavor. The blue milk will dry out if you leave it in the fridge too long. If you find some Blue Milkys, bring them home, clean them up, cook them straightaway, cook up some scrambled eggs and then put the Blue Milkys in that and it will turn the yellow of the eggs into a greenish color. If you grew up with Dr. Seuss and you like green eggs and ham, here is your chance to do that, although I've never talked to anyone who's done it more than once.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Frank say that with more people exploring the outdoors over the past couple of years, the treasure hunting quality of wild mushrooms has help to booster their popularity.

FRANK HYMAN:  When people first go out mushroom hunting, either by themselves or with an expert or friends, you're not going to find exciting mushrooms every time; it's a little bit of a lottery. Mostly 95 percent of the time you will find something and 60 percent of the time you'll be super happy with what you find. But even a bad day of foraging is still a great day outdoors, you've got out of the house, out of the office, you're out with friends, it's gourmet food for free, for being outdoors.

LAURA STEWART:  In the beginning we were the weird crop at the farmer's market.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Laura Stewart is the owner of Haw River Mushrooms. Her farm has doubled in size, every year, since it opened in 2012.

LAURA STEWART:  I used to have to explain how to cook even Oysters, and definitely things like Lion's Mane, to almost every customer. And now I have quite a few who come in and they know exactly what they want. They're happy to listen to my spiel but they don't really need it. So the general education level of customers around mushrooms has gone way up. It's a little hard to know how much is that our business has gotten bigger and we're getting better at what we do but business has definitely grown steadily and I would attribute that, in part, to the US hitting its stride around mushroom consumption.

LAURA STEWART:  That sound is our misters kicking on; they are on a timer. We're are trying to keep it at 90 percent humidity which keeps these guys happy.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Laura is showing me through Haw River's foggy and humid grow room. With rack after rack of erupting mushroom pods, it feels like something out of a science-fiction movie.

LAURA STEWART:  A lot of times we'll talk about Lion's Mane as being like crab meat. Black Pearl mushrooms, which are cultivated for their stems and they taste like sea scallops.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Earlier in the process, fungal spores are inoculated in a sterilized substrate mix of sawdust and soy bean hulls. They sit in thick plastic bags in a refrigerated trailer to begin growing and then they're moved to this warmer room when they're ready to fruit. Laura's team makes their way through this room, twice a day, to pick ripe mushrooms.

LAURA STEWART:  Our Blue Oyster mushrooms double in size every 24 hours during their main growth stage. By tomorrow, they're probably going to be a little further than we would want them to be. Today they are a little younger than we want them to be so, even harvesting twice a day, we can't catch all of them at that perfect moment. It's wild. There were times when we were starting that we wouldn't have quite as many mushrooms that we would want to bring to market and I would do a second harvest right before I left. I'd pack everything and then go back in because in that hour things had gotten a little bit bigger.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  The Oysters are a mainstay at Haw River Mushrooms.

LAURA STEWART:  Chefs love Oyster mushrooms. We'll grow, what we call, Blue Oysters, year round. In the winter we have this completely white mushroom, we call the Snow Oyster, and then this brown, meaty chewy Oyster we call the Italian Oyster. And in the Summer those take a rest and we start growing Golden Oysters which are this radiant yellow and Pink Oysters which are this pretty awesome pink.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Laura and her husband started Haw River as a vegetable farm. Mushrooms were just one of many crops.

LAURA STEWART:  We just thought we'll add mushrooms to our line-up. We'll lettuce and broccoli and we'll throw in some mushrooms as another variety, and got the bug and realized there's a lot more diversity that we could explore if we focused on it.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  They've since moved from working out of their home to managing a 17 acre farm with this huge warehouse and some outbuildings and they're in the process of building a commercial kitchen. Along with the CSA, Haw River sells at eight farmer's markets. They make mushroom jerky and tinctures and they even sell mushroom growing kits. Wholesale to restaurants is a cornerstone of their steady income, it's part of why they grow indoors rather than outside on logs.

LAURA STEWART:  In order to run our operation, we knew that we needed to be able to provide mushrooms year-round and regardless of the weather and a lot of our chefs will put us on their seasonal menu. And our unspoken contract to them is that if we don't deliver those mushrooms, they're going to have to 86 the dish and we would probably lose that account and the chef would lose revenue.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  And Laura wants to keep this part of her business thriving for local chefs.

LAURA STEWART:  We're definitely seeing a lot of innovation with mushrooms and how they're such a unique protein that can feed the world and be produced on such a limited footprint.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  One of Haw River's wholesale clients is Eddy Pub. The Eddy is also located in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. It's a former mill town outside Chapel Hill that's cultivated a reputation as a quirky arts and food getaway. I'm sitting at the bar at the Eddy trying their pickled mushroom conserve and a very decadent mushroom toast.

ISAIAH ALLEN:  That's sautéed in butter with shallots and a little bit of wine wine and then cream and goat cheese.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Isaiah Allen is the Eddy's executive chef and co-owner. He's also a farmer and invested in seasonal produce.

ISAIAH ALLEN:  January's great for the winter, as delicious as it is, once we start hitting April, end of March, early April and the days start getting into the 70s and 80s, it's time to pull it because it's a heavy app.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Moving to a table, he tells me about the Eddy's sustainability activities.

ISAIAH ALLEN:  Minimizing waste is a huge part of what we do so, even when I create dishes and think about how to source, I also think about that.

ARIELLA BROWN:  Chef Allen made today's dishes with so-called B-grade mushrooms from Haw River, a less pretty mix of Cinnamon Caps, Lion's Mane and Oyster mushrooms.

ISAIAH ALLEN:  There's certain chefs that want this pristine product that comes to them at top dollar and everything has to be perfectly sized and shaped. Having the Ag side of that as well, I know how difficult that could be, and I think as I've developed as a chef I've veered away from that a little bit. If I'm going to chop up mushrooms and sauté them in a pan, I don't need them to look all the same so, it benefits me and our customers because I can put it on the menu at a lower price point to buy their B-grade. Honestly, their B-grade are fantastic quality. If they weren't then it would probably be a different story.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  The Eddy receives mushrooms from Haw River in the substrate grow bags that I saw over at Laura's farm.

ISAIAH ALLEN:  We don't waste that either. We'll take a paring knife and just trim off the sawdust and then grind the mushroom stems and make mushroom stock. Once we've extracted everything that we could possibly get out of it, then it goes into the buckets to compost.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  The sawdust stumps of the mushrooms end up at Chef Allen's Rocky Run Farm.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  We compost every single food scrap, whether it's meat, bone, dairy, vegetable, it all goes to our farm. We take their spent mushroom mycelium bags by the truckload and bring them to the farm, and I add the spent mushroom mycelium to the entire pile. I got this light-bulb moment one day, realizing that I had all these wood-chips lined up and understanding what mushrooms do to wood, and how they feed on the sugars in wood, you can look at my compost pile from the front side where the food is at, the nitrogen source, and it just steams like crazy in the winter.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Laura from Haw River Mushrooms has also figured out some novel uses for this used substrate.

LAURA STEWART:  Being in the farming community we realize what a privilege it is to have a product that it's by-product just builds soil. We've also used some of our spent substrate for, what we call, micro-remediation projects. We have a river that runs through our property that had a lot of erosion downstream and we took those bags and put them in coffee bags and it helped slow the erosion and also as the water went through there it would get some natural filtration.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  So mushrooms are versatile as a food but, Laura says that uses like this make them even more powerful and yes, keep them trending.

LAURA STEWART:  I think that's where it's like, yeah, we could definitely do this our whole lives and we're not going to run out of things to learn. It's exciting. I feel like it's one of the last remaining frontiers. There's still so much to explore and learn.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  For WFIU Earth Eats, I'm Josephine McRobbie.

KAYTE YOUNG:  That's it for our show this week. Thanks for listening to Earth Eats. We'll see you next time.

RENEE REED:  Stay connected. Subscribe to the Earth Eats Digest. It's a bi-weekly email with food stories, updates on the show and recipes from the Earth Eats archive. Go to eartheats.org to sign up.

RENEE REED:  Earth Eats is produced and edited by Kayte Young with help from Eoban Binder, Alex Chambers, Mark Chilla, Abraham Hill, Daniella Richardson, Payton Whaley, Harvest Public Media and me, Renee Reed.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Special thanks this week to Renee Wilde, The Grounded Hope Podcast, Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice, Allison Herrera, 10,000 Fresh Voices, KFAI and Josephine McRobbie.

RENEE REED:  Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey. Additional music on the show comes to us from the artists at Universal Production Music. Our executive producer is John Bailey.