(Earth Eats theme music, composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey)

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

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: It was about feeding people. Often when we think about farming cooperatives, we think about a very particular type of food, but at the very basic level of what she was trying to do is she was trying to feed people. 

KAYTE YOUNG: This week on our show, Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon talks with Alex Chambers about her research on Fannie Lou Hammer's Freedom Farm, two Houstonians share their power outage cooking hacks, and Josephine McRobbie talks with growers and millers of Heritage Grains. Harvest Public Media has a story on the USDA's efforts to bring justice to black farmers. That's all just ahead in the next hour here on Earth Eats, stay with us.

(Music)

Earth Eats is produced from the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana. We wish to acknowledge and honor the indigenous communities native to this region and recognize that Indiana University is built on indigenous homelands and resources. We recognize the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, and Shawnee people as past, present, and future caretakers of this land. 

Renee Reed has the Earth Eats news. Hi Renee. 

RENEE REED: Hello, Kayte. 

The country's largest union for food and retail workers wants federal and state officials to prioritize essential food workers as they distribute the COVID-19 vaccine. Antonio Jimenez works for meat processor, JBS in Worthington, Minnesota. He says more than half of the workers there got sick with COVID including himself.

ANTONIO JIMENEZ: I have to work. What we do is important, but I don't want anyone else to go through what I went through. Essential workers like us who keep America fed must be vaccinated. 

RENEE REED: Jimenez says things have improved at the plant since he got sick last spring, but he still doesn't feel back to normal. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that states include frontline essential workers in food and manufacturing in the group to get the vaccine after healthcare workers and long-term care residents. Some States have separated this phase into tears with no indication of when essential workers will get the vaccine. 

It's calving season, the time of year when baby cows are born on farms all over the country. As Harvest Public Media as Dana Cronin reports, the bitter cold temperatures we're experiencing can throw complications into the calving process.

DANA CRONIN: When a calf is born, nature takes over. The mom cow, or the dam licks the calf off to get it clean and eventually dry and on its feet. The calf then nurses. It gets really fat, heavy milk from its mom. And next thing you know, within an hour, the calf is up and running around generating its own heat. Ed Garrett is a lecturer at the University of Illinois veterinary teaching hospital. He says, if any of those things don't happen, you can run into problems.

ED GARRETT: It can be a problem any time of year, but it becomes a problem more quickly and it can be more serious with calf being born in the cold weather. 

DANA CRONIN: He says sub-zero temperatures like those we've been experiencing can be dangerous for young calves who are left wet and cold or without enough milk. Garrett says the safest place for them is in a shelter with a roof over their heads. I'm Dana Cronin Harvest Public Media. 

RENEE REED: The city council of Coachella California unanimously approved an emergency ordinance requiring certain agricultural operations, grocery stores, pharmacies, and restaurants to pay their employees an additional $4 per hour for at least the next 120 days. This applies to any employer with more than 300 workers nationally, and more than five employees in the city. It is the first legislation of its kind to include farm workers. Roughly 8,000 farm workers live in the wider Coachella Valley. And the industry has been especially hard hit by COVID-19. The ordinance was opposed by several local agricultural companies and industry trade groups.

While grocery stores have seen record sales and profits during the pandemic, growers have faced challenges as the demand for fresh fruits and vegetables has declined due to a decrease in food service operations. Coachella mayor Steven Hernandez addressed these concerns suggesting that the city would consider tax credits or other means of reducing the financial burden to employers.

Similar legislation requiring additional hazard pay for grocery and pharmacy workers recently passed in several other California cities and is also facing challenges. The California Growers Association sued the cities of Oakland Montebello and Long Beach in federal court over this new legislation.

Trader Joe's announced recently that it would temporarily increase its hazard paid nationwide to an additional $4 per hour. It will however, be canceling mid-year raises, which are typically 65 to 75 cents per hour. 

Thanks to Toby Foster and Harvest Public Media's Katie Peikes and Dana Cronin. For those reports for Earth Eats news, I'm Renee Reed.

(music)

KAYTE YOUNG: This week every night as I went to bed, every morning, when I woke up, I felt waves of gratitude for the furnace kicking on in my basement and the water flowing from my faucets. My friends down in Texas have had it rough this week due to a deadly and uncharacteristic winter storm and cold snap, coupled with statewide power outages and rolling blackouts. 

I spoke with Brooke Barclay and Timo Klisch about their situation in Houston. 

TIMO KLISCH: We are sitting in the parking lot of Walgreens, because we have no water.

BROOKE BARCLAY: Electricity, internet, cell phone coverage

TIMO KLISCH: Or cell phone coverage at home. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: And even if we did have water, we are under a boil water notice right now. So it wouldn't do us any good to have water because we have no electricity...

TIMO KLISCH: To boil it. 

KAYTE YOUNG: When I spoke with them on Wednesday, they had been without power for a few days, and it's been cold in Houston, below freezing, which they aren't really used to. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: It's cold, but we're doing okay. And with our blankets and snuggling up and just it's okay. We can bundle up and stay warm for the most part. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Brooke and Timo, both work in the medical center in Houston. They have a 14-year-old daughter plus a German shepherd mix and at least seven cats. Brooke admitted that there is some part of her that appreciates the chance to slow down, reset and focus on what matters most. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: It's coming from a place of privilege that our walls are well-insulated, we have plenty of blankets. We're resourceful. We're okay.

KAYTE YOUNG: I know Brooke and Timo both liked to cook. So I wanted to hear about what they were eating and how they had managed to prepare food in these limited conditions. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: We were ill prepared for this. And so we didn't go and get any fresh fruits and vegetables or bread or anything like that.

KAYTE YOUNG: But Timo did attempt to make a small Kroger run on the weekend and the place was mobbed with people. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: I sent him a list, a pretty modest list, like some mushrooms, tomatoes, plums, if they had any, just to see what they have like fresh fruits and vegetables and stuff. And he gathered up a small cart of things, turned around to look at some sparkling water and turned back around and his cart was gone. So, I guess I'll have what he's having. 

TIMO KLISCH: And I also took the second to the last mushrooms. So then I went back and took then the last mushroom. Yeah. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Some people are just eating cold foods. Some are using camp stoves. Brooke and Timo have turned to their grill and cast-iron pans. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: Last night, we had some bratwurst and he put those on the grill, along with the mushrooms and like a Worcestershire sauce with sweet onions, and we grilled those of course only by the light of the grill itself, because we also don't have any flashlights. They were a little charred, but they were nice. And I only know that they were charred when I would bite into it because we had dinner and by candlelight also. But I can't say that it was enough that I could actually see what we were eating. It tasted really good though. 

TIMO KLISCH: Yeah. And we had, as a dessert, we made baked apples with cinnamon, and a little bit of butter. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: Butter, salt, cinnamon, brown sugar. Yeah, those are nice. I've been craving roasted or baked apples and we have a lot of cast iron, so we've been able to put that to use on the grill. We have a small little cast iron, like a little sauce pot.

We were able to heat at the sauerkraut in that and had some whole grain mustard and bread, and the bratwurst. It was actually really delicious and nice that something so simple. And yeah, you're German. I mean, it's how you eat bratwurst anyway. 

TIMO KLISCH: Bratwurst is sauerkraut then.

BROOKE BARCLAY: And onions and mushrooms, it was delicious. And then I wanted to get a little bit more creative. We also have some cod and I know that I have coconut milk. We were able to buy a bell pepper, and then in the garden I have a lot of parsley and cilantro, albeit it is frozen, I think I can still go ahead and use it. And so we're going to try to make a cast iron moqueca, which is like a Brazilian fish stew.  And I think it should be fine. We'll probably kind of make the coconut milk with tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro, the bell pepper. Heat that up. 

TIMO KLISCH: Smash it a little bit. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: In one of the cast iron skillets on the grill covered. And then maybe once it gets pretty warm, we'll put in the pieces of cod. We'll see, Kayte. I will let you know, on the other side of this, how this all this works out.

So that's the plan maybe for tonight. And then we have some bread that we'll heat up. We'll roll it in tinfoil and heat that up to dip in this stew. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Brooke also said she was hoping to make a shakshuka on the grill. I asked her to explain. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: So basically crushed tomatoes, onions, garlic...

TIMO KLISCH: Garlic, lots of garlic. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: And I would use the cilantro. You can make a verde shakshuka or a red tomato based one...

TIMO KLISCH: And then we heat that up.

BROOKE BARCLAY: And put that in a cast iron skillet, get that really nice and hot, and then create little divots in the sauce and put a few eggs in it. Drop that right into the hot tomato sauce and let this cook hopefully. 

BROOKE BARCLAY: Yeah, the trick is like not to overcook it but they are cooked, thoroughly. So maybe just a few minutes and then eat. 

TIMO KLISCH: Yeah luckily we have some lids for our cast iron, that way we can really get the egg whites cooked all the way without cooking the yolks. So you get it in there again. We have some bread that we can heat up for dipping that and lots and lots of salsa and chips.

So we've also done kind of like almost like a TexMex shakshuka where you used for tortilla chips in that as well. So it's like a cross between a chili chilaquiles and a shakshuka. Okay. Works for me.

KAYTE YOUNG: That was Brooke Barclay and Timo Klisch in Houston Texas making the best of a bad situation, cooking on their backyard grill during the great Texas winter power outage of 2021. We've got pictures on our website, Earth Eats dot org. 

(Music)

Next producer Alex Chambers brings us an interview from 2018 with Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: I'm talking today with Priscilla McCutcheon, assistant professor of Pan-African studies and geography geosciences at the University of Louisville. Her research is about African American farmers and food communities in the U.S. south.  She's published articles on Muhammad Farms - a 1500-acre farm in Georgia, owned and run by the nation of Islam, and a program at a black protestant church in Atlanta that provides what she calls emergency soul food. 

Her current research is about the great civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm Cooperative she started in 1969, in Sunflower County Mississippi. 

[To Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon] Thanks again, for being here. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: [To Alex] Of course, thank you for having me. 

KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] First a little background on Fannie Lou Hamer. She's known for her voting rights activism in the south in the 1960's. She led the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, which was dedicated to gaining the right to vote for African Americans. Hamer leads the party to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in New Jersey, with the goal of integrating the all-white democratic party. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: There were a lot of conversations about how this should be done, but Fannie Lou Hamer, being the person that she was, she decided to really take matters into her own hands, and she took the floor. 

KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] The live television feed cut away at that point. But the cameras kept rolling and her entire speech was recorded. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: And so what Fannie Lou Hamer's really known for is the words "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." And she's talking the conditions of African Americans in Mississippi, and that the world, and really the country is not paying any attention to. And so that kind of catapulted her into the national scene, but she was already doing a lot of work really in the rural south and across the nation.

KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] Some of the conditions that Hamer was witnessing around her and experiencing herself were malnutrition and hunger. Hamer herself suffered from diseases associated with poor nutrition such as diabetes and hypertension. And she lacked access to healthcare in her community due to segregation. Hamer's response to these conditions was to organize and to act. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: She attempted herself along with other activists to go and gain the right to vote. And there were a few instances where not only was there pushback, but there was an instance where her bus was stopped from returning from going to vote. They were arrested until she and other activists were arrested, she was taken to jail, she was beaten in jail, she was sexually assaulted in jail, and so all of that stuff kind of influenced her to really keep pushing, none of it stopped her. If anything, it just made her push harder for that purpose. She saw voting, I think, as really central to livelihood and so when you think about things like access to land, that couldn't really happen without African Americans have this sustained right to vote. 

KAYTE YOUNG: That's Priscilla McCutcheon talking to Alex Chambers about Fanny Lou Hamer. In just a moment we'll return to our conversation and learn about Hamer's efforts to put African Americans in charge of their own food security. 

(Music)

If you're just joining us, our guest today is Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon. She's been talking with Alex Chambers about the work of Fanny Lou Hamer. In addition to her voting rights activism which she's well known for, Hamer also started the freedom farm cooperative. Dr. McCutcheon current research focuses specifically on this aspect of Hamer's work. 

Alex asked her to explain. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: So, it was about beating people. Often when we think about a farming cooperative, especially in the sustainable AG movement, we think about a very particular type of food. But at the very basic level of what she was trying to do is she was trying to feed people, because she saw hungry people and malnourished people, directly around her and she was one of those people herself. 

And so, she also saw that land being in some ways a way to build economic development around black people as a hole in that area. And so, she had subsistence agriculture as a part of that land. She gave people insight into how to apply for agricultural loans, so it’s kind of this multi layered projects, where feeding people was a part of it, but I think really at the basis of it was economic development among black people as a whole. 

So, it consisted of land for agriculture and so typical things like okra, melons, any type of food that people would need for those purposes. It also had a pig-bank. And so, the pig bank became a way to produce other pigs for slaughter and these pigs would really last families if they were processed and stored correctly for a year. And so, the pig bank to me was one of the more interesting parts of it because we don't think about how long really one pig could last if it's stored and processed correctly. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: Yeah, I think the pig bank is really interesting too. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: Yeah, me too. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: (laughs) I don't think it’s something really think about very much. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: Yeah. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: But I guess it was important and sort of this really interesting innovation because it was way that families could feed themselves cheaply. And since pigs are pretty omnivorous its relatively cheap to feed them. And...

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: Exactly, yeah. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: So, that's really interesting. That's very cool. So, the Freedom Farm itself, had she invited families, or families would find out about this and then they would get a house? 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: Yeah, and so in some places they got a house, everyone who benefited from the agriculture did not live on the land. But in many cases, they were able to have their own house or and in some cases first house on this land.

People applied, everyone knew, especially in that area who Fanny Lou Hamer was. And so, people applied to live on the land, and most people were pretty excited about the program. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: People didn't have to necessarily pay to live there? 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: No, she knew that the families that she aimed to work with, did not have the capital, and were not able to afford to pay to live there. And so, in some cases families did pay small amounts, but in most cases, there was no buy-in in terms of capital to live there. But they still provided labor. So, the people living on the farms were the people that were living on the land. It was local food and really the truest sense. But it wasn't often that fancy sustainable AG food that we think about. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: So, you're doing this research on Fanny Lou Hamer, and she's very... I think it's very exciting to sort of be reminded of especially the ways that she was involved with land and farming and food politics. Not just voting rights. I found this quote, this thing she once said that food, quote, "allows the sick one a chance for healing, the silent ones a chance to speak, the unlearned ones a chance to learn, and the dying ones a chance to live." 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: That says it all. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: Right. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: Yeah. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: So, I'm thinking about why is... and this is in regard to her work at the time, but also sort of ongoing. Why is access to food important beyond sort of what we think of as sort of like just health, and not being hungry? Why is it important sort of in a bigger political sense? 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: Well I think that some of it is about having power and so the power to be able to control what's going in your body and control your livelihood. I think without food like there's so many different things, and so kind of going back to that quote you're just not able to do, or do to the best of your ability, and so thinking about school children, who go into school hungry, they're not able to learn in a way that they should in part because they just... they're hungry at the same time, and so I mean I think with just on a daily basis there are things that having access to food does, but I think maybe on a broader sociopolitical basis that you're talking about, access to land, access to land for the purpose of growing food, in some ways equals power and really self-determination so maybe that's a better word to use. That you're controlling your livelihood and also the livelihood of your family in a way that maybe you haven't. You haven't had access to. 

If you think about, something in about like a 1969 text called Let Them Eat Promises. And so, it's one of the, it was one of my first introductions into hunger literature. And so, it's about Marian Wright, Marian Wright Edelman, and Robert Kennedy, she takes Robert Kennedy down to Mississippi Delta to show him some of the conditions. And so, at that time one of the things that comes from the book is that it almost seems as though people are really systematically being denied food for the purpose of or really for the purpose of oppression. And so, when I think when you think about food denial, it's not really on an individual basis, but what does it do to a community of people when you don't have access to really safe and healthy food? And so, the question of safety, that seems I guess, kind of odd, when you're talking about food, but really controlling your own food sources I think is important. And really Hammer saw it as important. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: And do you see that, how does that continue to play out, today? 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: I mean when you think about communities, and so not just urban communities of color, but rural communities of color, what types of grocery stores in these communities, what types of fast-food restaurants are in these communities, and communities really just wanting healthy food, and not having access it to it. And so, having entire urban communities without grocery stores, and having really even, and it goes really across geographic boundaries, but urban and rural communities that in some cases when they do have grocery stores, they're not having produce that anyone would want to buy. And so, I think when you think about, like how it plays out today, like you think urban agriculture is a big part of it, and so having land to grow food on. Rural agriculture is a big part of it, but people should also be able to walk into the grocery store and get something that's healthy and affordable, like a lot of us can do in the neighborhoods that we live in. Like you don't have that type of access now. 

KAYTE YOUNG:  At this point Alex asked Dr. McCutcheon what she would like to say to the food movement today. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: I mean there's a lot that I would want to say to the food movement. I think that at its very basis to push for safe, healthy and local food is something that we all should be striving for. And so, I think in general the food movement is trying to go in the right direction. But I think just focusing on food without focusing on structural inequalities that influence why people eat certain foods, and like what types of foods are located in certain neighborhoods, I think that doesn't work. And so, if you're just addressing healthy food, but you're not addressing like segregation and housing or poverty and housing or not having well-funded schools, I don't think you can address schools really in an isolated manner if that makes sense. And so, I think this idea of safe and healthy food, there's some people possibly outside the food movement who look at it as a problem that's maybe secondary to problems that as more central to certain neighborhoods. And so, I think for the food movement if they maybe look at that problem as a part of these large structural issues, there might be more buy-in. And there's also a level of people maybe knowing it all?  In the food movement about what people should eat, and how people should eat, that can be a little... that can turn people off a little. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: So, can you, I mean I feel like part of this is like, racism. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: Yeah. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: Would you say? 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: Yeah, definitely. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: I mean certainly class is an issue as well. PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: Yeah but the intersection of racism and classism but...
ALEX CHAMBERS: How does that play out? Can you give an example? 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: So maybe not even thinking about food that's culturally appropriate to certain groups, and so I've been in certain spaces in the food movement without naming them, where there'll be this outright assault on things like pork. And so, this idea that pork is bad for your health, no one should eat it. And even that approach, like nutritionally is not totally nuanced. But in some cases, you're telling cultures of people that everything they're doing is bad and we know the right way to do it. And that's not always the case. And so, I think that's, that's one of the ways that I see it. That I see it play out. 

Also, this push for getting everyone back to the land, and so one of the things that I always try to do in my talks is make a caveat that everyone doesn't want to farm. And they shouldn’t' have to. And so like, you should be able to go into stores and get food that's healthy, you shouldn't have to go out on the land and farm. It's something I like to do but everyone doesn’t like to, and urban agriculture is not going to solve the problems of the world in my opinion. But it seems like some people in the food movement maybe think that. 

KAYTE YOUNG:  I jumped in to ask Dr. McCutcheon about specialty health food stores, and how those spaces might not feel familiar or comfortable to everyone. What if we could just have a high-quality healthy food available at the regular grocery store? 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: So, a lot of these specialty stores, which are stores that you know I go to if I get the chance to, but they're very (sighs) white spaces, and they can sometimes be unwelcoming. And so even if you know your way around these spaces you still feel as though it's just this kind of weird feeling of not belonging when you walk into these spaces. And so, I would agree with you that having healthy produce at just a regular store, and so a Kroger, and in some communities even you know a corner store is necessary. And not just at specialty stores. 

And so not only can they be exclusive based on race, but they're also not inclusive based on income. And so, a lot of people just can't afford to do their daily shopping at a lot of these stores. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: What can the food movement learn from this history, that you're working on about Fanny Lou Hamer? 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: I think a part of it is that there are African Americans, and in particular African American women that bring some level of expertise to the food movement, in terms of local agriculture and also cooperative farming movements. And so, this idea that African Americans sometimes we limit their experiences to slavery and sharecropping and don't understand that even within those experiences there's a level of expertise that they had to have to make this actually... for farms to actually function. And so, I think that that's one thing that we can learn from these historic farming developments, that African Americans have always done this work, and so we're not in the food movement introduction African Americans to really... much for a lack of better words. That there's a culture history of this work, that's already... that's always been done. And you can see that in some cases, so when you look at urban agriculture in places like Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, a lot of people, African Americans are pointing to rural roots of this agriculture and so always being done in their families and really them passing it on for generations. 

It's a different way to maybe think about cooperatives. And so how do we create buy-in maybe for communities or for individuals who may not have the capital to buy in but maybe have other resources that they can contribute and also and sustain food movements based off of these resources. 

I think something else if you think about Hamer's movement, she wasn't just growing food that voting rights, grants, scholarships, became a large part of it. And so, when you think about these isolated examples of food movements where people are just growing food, which is incredibly important, but again how do we think about other issues that come alongside it? And she was in many ways trying to solve larger structural issues and food became... she understood that feeding people was an important part of that. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: Yeah it was part of a bigger thing about people having access to all kinds of different resources. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: Yeah, exactly. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: And so, putting those in the same place was really important. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: No one has the time to figure out how that's, to get to all these different resources and she's doing it literally in one geographic space. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: Yeah, I think that's a really great and fascinating and essential and powerful things. 

PRISCILLA MCCUTCHEON: yeah, me too, she's a great woman, or was a great woman. 

(Sweet Honey in the Rock, sings about fanny Lou Hamer) 

KAYTE YOUNG:  That was Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon of the University of Louisville. We have links on our website to a recording of the speech Hamer delivered at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. 

(Choir: We're sick and tired of being sick and tired, that's what the lady yell)

KAYTE YOUNG:  Plus, more information about Hamer's Freedom Farm cooperative. Find that and more at Earth Eats dot org. 

(Trying to vote, she was thrown in jail, Fanny Lou Hamer x1,2)

(Music)

Growing food commercially, even on a small scale can be a high risk and hugely complicated undertaking. Producer Josephine McRobbie visits a farm where these steep learning curves are the norm, even after almost a decade.  

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Roommates Danny Cowan and George Allen were sitting around the kitchen one day in 2011. They were talking about the basic building blocks of meals. The two were local food aficionados. Since meeting at Oberlin college years ago, Danny had opened his own bakery and George had worked on vegetable farms, even learning about maintaining farming equipment. They lived in the foodie farmland around Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and yet something was missing from their plates.

DANNY COWAN: Something that fit into like kind of the bulk of everyone's diet, I'm kind of questioning why that wasn't something that was being addressed and have the more local food economy. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: This was the beginning of Red Tail Grains where they now farm and process whole and milled grains. 

DANNY COWAN: Our vision is to produce staple crops for the local food economy.

That's kind of where we got our start and then we emphasize a soil health. I kind of moved towards regenerative agriculture. Neither of us grew up in farming families. And in terms of this type of agriculture, of growing grains and machinery involved, and the fact that you generally only get one crop per year has just made both the learning curve just very steep and high risk. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Red Tail grows a number of heritage, corns, wheat, spelts, and ryes. They're varieties that have long histories and complex flavors. They haven't been selected for yield in the same way as commercial grains, and as a result, they take a lot of work to farm. So it took a village to get Red Tail off the ground.

DANNY COWAN: And then it was just a series of kind of awesome events that all started unfolding and people with their generosity and their knowledge and access to land and equipment, everything just kind of came together, and this area and its communities just like provided. So we had another friend who offered us some land to grow on for free.

We went to talk to some old timers in the area and everyone seemed to be just excited that young people were interested and were just incredibly generous and sold us the equipment we needed to get started for really cheap. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: One mentor and early supporter was a local bakery owner named Abraham Palmer.

GEORGE ALLEN: He was a baker, really pushing to find people to grow some grain for his bread that he made. 

DANNY COWAN: And he gave us some seed for us to plant kind of free of charge.

GEORGE ALLEN: Red fife

DANNY COWAN: Yeah red fife, an heirloom variety of hard wheat. And he said that if we grew it then he would buy it from us at a high price. And so that really allowed for us to experiment. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Red Tail grows corn varieties that can be sold as kernels milled into a rough polenta or ground further into a powdery corn meal. One of their favorites is called bloody butcher. 

DANNY COWAN: It's a white dent, corn that has a red outside and it's this dark red and it gets its name because I think somebody, at some point said that it looked like when you ground it up, it looked like blood on an apron. But that variety has been grown up in the mountains all over Appalachia for a long time. And kind of a story of a family farms just passing it down generation to generation and using it for pretty much everything, whether it was grits or corn meal, or even distilling. And it's a delicious and sought-after variety. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: They received the seed for another corn called cateto orange from a baker friend living in the mountains. He had raved about using the corn for polenta. 

DANNY COWAN: Not many people are we're growing it and not many people are growing it. And that's partly because it gets very low yields, it's difficult to grow. But we tried it out for him cause he was one of our mentors and one of our buyers. And we fell in love with the flavor of it and the color of it.

When I tried to look up its story, I kind of had to piece together little scraps and pieces of information that I could find and eventually kind of crafted this story. That I was unsure how accurate it was. So I ended up just posting it on our website and just like a little disclaimer at the bottom that said, this is the best kind of amalgamation of the history that I can do but I would love if anyone had any more information about it.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Danny was eventually contacted by a professor associated with Anson Mills, and heirloom grain company and preservation project. 

DANNY COWAN: He corroborated a lot of that story, which I was delighted and surprised by. That corn began in South America eventually made its way to Cuba, where it blended with some other indigenous corns and became known as meyas especial. But it didn't yield very well. So it demanded a pretty high price and people loved it for its flavor. And then eventually made its way to the United States where the cateto genetics are in a lot of the corns here. And also it made its way to Italy where it became part of, kind of polenta culture there. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: In choosing grain varieties, Danny and George are interested in multiple factors. Does it grow well in their region of North Carolina with organic or organic-ish techniques? Are commercial and home bakers interested in it? Is it nutritious? And of course, does it taste good? I asked if any crops have been particularly hard to grow.

DANNY COWAN: (Laughs) Everything's been difficult. 

GEORGE ALLEN: You just learned so much from that first couple of plantings and plowings, like what soil is like, what the seed bank of weeds is like. We've had fields that we've broke just a couple of weeks before we planted a cash crop and that's turned out really poorly. We've had fields that we've planted wheat or rye two years in a row and that's came out really poorly. And fields that we lost track of in the summer and came back to bite us next summer.

DANNY COWAN: Dealing with weeds is kind of a constant challenge. And when you are doing conventional and you have access to herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, that can be that can be another tool in the toolbox. But since we don't do that, we have to figure out how to combat the weeds in other ways or keep them at bay. So smothering weeds is one aspect and the rotations kind of creating different environments and different nutrients for the crops. But then I think our primary means of dealing with that is tillage.

And that's something that the more we learn about soil health and the structure of the soil, we struggle with that balance of not wanting to spray herbicides but also not wanting to really disrupt the soil through tilling.

GEORGE ALLEN: And then there's the whole side of processing and storing and drying.

And then if you're going to mill it into flour, that's a whole 'nother investment. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: I meet George out at Red Tail Grains on a sunny day in January. Along with growing fields, Red Tail includes a large barn with farm machinery and an office grain bins, a temperature-controlled storage building, and a small building where they do milling and packaging.

Corn is harvested and stripped from the cob using a combine, a piece of machinery so named because of the multiple operations it can perform. When the corn is dry, it moves to the barn and to a 20-foot-tall seed cleaner from the 50's. 

[Sound of large machine whirring]

DANNY COWAN: And we're running it through the seed cleaner to kind of get out all the pieces of chaff and husk, and corn cob and weed seeds, and grasshopper legs and all sorts of things, whatever it comes through the combine. And then it's bagged up and then put in the shipping container. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: The corn is inserted in the top of the cleaner, the machine then shakes and rattles the kernels through three big horizontal metal screens that are punched with hundreds of perforated holes. Vacuum tubes, puff air through each level and suck out the finished product at the bottom.

DANNY COWAN: And you can adjust the flow rate of air across it. So the lightest things blow out and have your things fall down. And then that's the good stuff.

So what needs to happen is this auger trough needs to come down. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: George and Ari, a Red Tail employee are vacuuming out the remnants of some bloody butcher corn. They're getting ready to clean the cateto orange, which is a smaller and harder variety. The holes in the sifting sheets might be in the shape of wheat, corn, or even tiny pinprick sifters for clover, which is used as a cover crop.

George is up on a ladder rifling through the 30 or so screens in storage. They're about four foot long and made of steel requiring extreme care as he maneuvers them back down to the ground.

We walk across the farm to another building. Working among packages of pastry and buckwheat flour is Izzy, another farm employee. She works three days a week overseeing the mill room we're in, and one day at a local farmer's market. 

IZZY: I'm just sifting some corn that we milled earlier this morning. So we have like a sifter that just kind of separates the different products. So we have like corn meal and grits and this machine just sort of like divides it by the size. And then I just like back it up. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: The sifter is actually a modified seed cleaner, a mini version of the one outside. It's taken some time to get it to do what George and Danny want, but now it works pretty well. Izzy who has worked on vegetable farms for years is new to Red Tail and still getting to know the sifters personality and quirks. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Making these mistakes and learning how to correct them on the machines and stuff like that has been sort of just like a fun brain game. Pretty powerful to like work around all these like big loud things in a weird way. 

I think that George and Danny have like tinkered with things for so long that luckily I don't have to be that frustrated. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Following George around the farm. I gained some understanding of the complexities of running Red Tail. It's both a big complex operation and a small scrappy local business.

DANNY COWAN: Yeah, it's been a fun journey. It's a little stressful just because it's a lot of stuff, a lot of risk, I guess is the word. Yeah, really complex systems and there's a lot of unknowns that are hard to like keep track of it, unless you had like a ton of money to keep track of every aspect of it. And it's just a lot to learn, I guess. I dunno how to give it full description of why it's so hard. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: [Interviewing] Is it partially because it's like you're using sort of more environmentally friendly techniques and also you're working with grains that aren't as commercial or aren't as common?

DANNY COWAN: I think that's, I mean, to some degree, yes. But not because it's necessarily harder that way, but just because the knowledge bank of people doing it that way is less. So it's harder to get access to good information, but I don't think the actual, like skills or techniques are harder. There's just as much skill in growing conventional agriculture as there is an organic, it's just a different set of skills and what's available to you to learn from other people is I think just less sometimes, especially at our scale, which is like bigger than like a vegetable farm, but smaller than most grain farms. And so kind of these little... like no one has a grain bin, this small. They're all maybe four or five times bigger than that. And so to kind of like figure out how to scale it to where we're at is at the amount of resources that we have is a challenge, I think. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Prior to the pandemic Danny and George mostly sold whole grains, wholesale to bakeries, but now with a greater interest in home baking and local foods, Red Tail Grains has pivoted the retail of milled grains straight to consumers who have big baking and cooking ambitions. Financially, it's been a successful time for the two farmers, and it's also served as a reminder of why they got into this kind of agriculture. 

GEORGE ALLEN: We really, for the first time, I feel like, could be a provider of grain for the regional economy, especially with all of the grain shortages that were happening everywhere. It was cool to like really feel like we were kind of living out a little bit closer to our mission. So yeah, just the whole process has been a lot of trial and error. And it's been hard, it's been hard. But it's also an incredibly rewarding to actually reap the benefits of that process over the course of these eight to nine years. 

KAYTE YOUNG: That was Earth Eats Producer Josephine McRobbie. Find more at Earth Eats dot org.

More than 20 years ago, black farmers across the country won discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Today advocates and experts are saying more is needed to repair the decades of discrimination. Harvest Public Media's Seth Bodine reports on the efforts by the government to help black farmers. 

SETH BODINE: It's a cold February afternoon and Alvin Lee's cows are hungry. He says he has to put three or four bales of hay every other day. And he only has about 10 left. 

ALVIN LEE: If this keeps up, I got to scrape up some money for some more hay. 

SETH BODINE: Lee used to work in construction. But because of injuries from his time in the Marine Corps, he had to stop working. He moved out to Milwaukee, Oklahoma 25 years ago and bought 160 acres of land, which he hopes is his legacy. 

ALVIN LE: I always thought that when a person dies, he's supposed to leave more than the birth certificate and a  death certificate.

SETH BODINE: But ranching hasn't been easy. Building a house, maintaining the land, buying hay, updating equipment, it all adds up pretty quick. And while he tried to get aid from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he says he never gets enough help. 

ALVIN LEE: Twenty-five years of this, and I haven't made a profit off of it yet. 

SETH BODINE: Lee isn't alone, Willard Tillman is the executive director of the Oklahoma Black Historical Research Project. He says the biggest challenge for black farmers comes down to two things, land and money. 

WILLARD TILLMAN: If you got capital, you can basically purchase land, but we have a lot of people who want to do agriculture, business side ventures, but don't have the capital. 

SETH BODINE: Black farmers won a more than $1 billion discrimination lawsuit against the USDA in the 90's. Because of decades of discrimination, many farmers lost their land. Dania Francis is working to calculate the value of land loss by black farmers and communities. 

DANIA FRANCIS: We get estimates anywhere from around $40 billion, if we calculate the land being loss over that course of time and brought forward with interest occurring on it. SETH BODINE: That $40 billion is actually on the low end. It's gotten as high as $250 billion. Now with the transition to a Democrat controlled congress, there's renewed efforts to rectify years of racism. In the senate the justice for black farmers act were provide more financial assistance and even 168 acres of land. It also provides debt relief for farmers who didn't receive it as part of the settlement with the USDA. Tillman says that was one of the most important parts of a lawsuit.

WILLARD TILLMAN: A lot of people still did not get that particular part of it and now, still in debt. 

SETH BODINE: One of the biggest changes proposed by the bill is providing more oversight to protect civil rights at the USDA. Valerie Grim is a professor at Indiana University Bloomington. She says the discrimination lawsuit didn't address one important issue. 

VALERIE GRIM: There was really no punishment for the folks who have been engaged in systemic discrimination for decades in terms of the local offices and how they were being managed and how policies were being implemented. 

SETH BODINE: Tillman says he thinks the bill is a good start but needs changes. He says there needs to be more feedback from groups like his about how to best support black farmers. Also the bill doesn't only provide help to black farmers, it also applies to socially disadvantaged farmers. He says this is too broad. 

WILLARD TILLMAN: I want to see everybody that's out there, whether you are Hispanic, whether you're Asian or whatever. I want to see them get treated the same. But with this bill, they're talking about justice for black farmers.

SETH BODINE: Besides the Senate bill, there has been other efforts to help black farmers this year. The house agriculture committee has approved $4 billion in debt relief for black farmers and other minority groups, which was inserted into a coronavirus relief bill. Whether that will help Alvin Lee is still up in the air.

Seth Bodine Harvest Public Media. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Find more from this reporting collective at Harvest Public Media dot org. 

That's all we have time for today. Thanks for listening, we'll see you next week.

RENEE REED: The Earth Eats team includes Eobon Binder, Spencer Bowman, Mark Chilla, Toby Foster, Abraham Hill, Payton Knobeloch, Josephine McRobbie, Harvest Public Media and me, Renee Reed. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Special thanks this week to Brooke Barclay, Timo Klisch, Alex Chambers and Priscilla McCutcheon. 
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 artist at Universal Productions Music. Earth Eats is produced and edited by Kayte Young and our executive producer is John Bailey.