The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (43 page)

“I knew we had to try it,” Glenn said. “We grew the Red May, milled it nice and coarse, and made graham flour for biscuits. It was friggin’ extraordinary.”

I
ARRIVED
IN
C
HARLESTON
,
South Carolina, on a warm and muggy morning in early July. Glenn picked me up just outside the terminal in a small rental car. “It’s all I do, rental cars,” he told me, “I’ll drive it for a few days and then run in and change cars.”

Glenn is an oddity, even in a place like the Lowcountry, where eccentrics grow like beautiful weeds. He is tall and silver-haired, with an expression forever on the brink of enthusiasm. On this particular day, he wore khakis and a short-sleeved white polo shirt, looking very much like a man on the way to a Sunday outing at the yacht club. To be fair, we were on our way to Clemson University’s Coastal Research and Education Center, which for Glenn is a little like a weekend getaway. Anson Mills donates money to the university, and, in return, the university provides land for Glenn’s crop experiments.

As we drove, he excitedly outlined the day’s itinerary, and I was quickly reminded of his habit of dispensing information in rapid-fire bursts of arcane facts and dizzying non sequiturs. Glenn drops names and historical events as though you should know them, but shrugging as he does it, as if he doesn’t mean any harm. And he doesn’t. He delights in surprising people. His thirst for knowledge is matched only by his desire to show it off. He can tell you about water-driven machinery (he worked for a time as a doffer in a twine factory), topology (his major in college), the diaspora (not the Jewish
one, but the Abenaki Native American one), and his recent interest in John Letts (a British archaeobotanist who documents the history of cereals). A conversation with Glenn can feel like an airplane flight interrupted by fierce, inexplicable episodes of turbulence.

A simple question, like the one I asked soon after I got into the car—“
Since I’m in Charleston, would it be possible to visit that family who helped you get started growing your corn
?”—led to Glenn mentioning something called the ATF, followed by a short history of South Carolina market farming in the 1820s, the observations of Harder, and then suddenly to an extended arm and a
“By the way, if we were to follow this road here, the destination would bring us to Doc Pasaventos’s olive trees on Folly Island.”

ATF? Harder? Doc Pasaventos? I picked one. “Harder?” I asked.

“Jules Harder,” he said. “Which is what I meant by the reference to the Bradshaw collection.”

“I don’t know Jules Harder,” I said (but wondered about the meaning of the Bradshaw collection, which he had never mentioned before).

“Harder was the chef of Delmonico’s,” Glenn said, in the way of a gentle reminder. “In the early 1870s.”

Clarity remained a far-off cousin to whatever exchange we were having. I tried to climb my way back to where I started. “What about visiting the farm family of yours . . .”

“That’s what I’m saying: not a good idea to discuss, the ATF notwithstanding.”

We arrived in front of a large padlocked gate. I asked what ATF stood for. “Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,” he said, referring to the fact that the family had an illegal moonshine operation—not to the place we had just arrived.

I shook off the exchange as Glenn tapped the steering wheel and smiled broadly at the large, open fields on either side of us. “Welcome to the second-oldest farming research center established after the revolution,” he said. “Way cool.”

Glenn sped along one of the enormous fields and spoke excitedly, if not altogether clearly, about an ongoing experiment with cowpeas. “We’ve got fourteen varieties of peas doing allelopathic suppression and fertility,” he said. “We mix up the varieties, which is mass population genetics. This is all prep for wheat. No clover, that’s the goal. Because we’re gonna do total legume wheat.”

I unraveled this to mean Glenn was experimenting with intermixed varieties of cowpeas, an animal-feed crop, and evaluating the plants’ ability to resist pests (“allelopathic suppression”). He was also measuring the benefits to the soil that would come from planting a leguminous crop before wheat. The tradition in organic farming, as Klaas illustrated with his rotations, is to precede crops like wheat and corn with clover, a legendary nitrogen fixer, but Glenn had a hunch that cowpeas would be just as beneficial. More important, he suspected that cowpeas would make the wheat taste better.

The research site was surrounded by large, manicured fields and high-tech greenhouses with commercial plant-breeding experiments. Thriving in between were Glenn’s chaotic experimental plots—the cowpeas, various inter-plantings with rye, and patches here and there of ancient varieties of wheat. These wheat experiments, in particular, stood out in striking relief: varieties like emmer, so old they’re referenced in the Bible, allowed—actually, encouraged—to express their unique traits next to university-controlled seed varieties so new they hadn’t yet been named and grown under a regime of strict uniformity and control.

“They’re doing their thing, and I’m doing mine,” Glenn said. “Which is celebrating landrace farming and honoring a tradition of seed saving and seed improvement that reaches back into prehistory.”

By “landrace,” Glenn meant a kind of farming that encourages variation in the field, with less distinct and less uniform varieties. He wasn’t overstating
it. Though the first breeze of the morning made the hodgepodge of ancient varieties sway and rustle in unison, nothing about it suggested cohesion or uniformity. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it looked a little all over the place. Which is the point, really, of landrace farming. Glenn’s not bothered by the diversity. In fact, he’s banking on it.

Plants in a landrace system are different, but only slightly so. As opposed to a modern field of wheat (or corn, or really any cultivated variety)—all the plants identical in size, shape, and growth patterns—a landrace crop’s in-built diversity allows it to thrive under a variety of circumstances. It’s a natural insurance policy for the population, ensuring that, while some of the crop may succumb to a disease or a natural disaster, some of it will not. In periods of drought, for example, most of the wheat will fail, but the plants with greater drought tolerance will survive and pass their advantage on to future generations.

I once heard a lecture given by Abdullah Jaradat, a USDA agronomist, to a group of grain enthusiasts. “When you domesticate a plant like wheat, you spoil it,” he said. “You have to provide it with all its needs; otherwise it will not produce what you expect.”

Glenn’s old-world, chaotic plots were exactly that—unspoiled. And they offered a glimpse into what had been, until recently, the only farming system possible.

From the beginning, which is to say from around 8000
B
.
C
.
, when agriculture is thought to have begun, farmers knew to save at least a small portion of their seeds to plant for future harvests. By the time agriculture replaced hunting and gathering as humanity’s primary source of food, seed saving had emerged as one of the community’s most important responsibilities. With each community preserving and selecting its own seeds, thousands of locally adapted landrace varieties evolved across the globe. These varieties were not
static. They adapted and changed depending on the environment and the preferences of the culture, producing the characteristics most likely to thrive under the circumstances. It was a rich reservoir of diversity that came to a very sudden end.

At the start of the twentieth century,
plant breeders discovered a way to farm more efficiently. They learned that two distinct lines of corn could be crossed with each other to create a new genetically uniform generation imbued with “hybrid vigor”—making it faster-growing and more robust than plants left to pollinate naturally (the same idea that led to the foie gras industry’s Moulard duck). The vigor would last only a year; subsequent plantings would not be as successful. So farmers bought new hybridized seeds every year to maximize their yields and turned away from the ancient practice of seed saving. Commercial seed companies came to dominate the market for corn and then, as the trend toward hybrid seeds continued, for most other grains, fruits, and vegetables as well.

In some ways, wheat was an exception. Bread wheat is a hexaploid, which means it has six sets of chromosomes (and therefore six copies of each gene), whereas corn and most vegetables—and even human beings—possess only two. So it doesn’t open itself up to easy manipulation. It is also self-pollinating, each wheat plant containing both male and female parts. Since the plants fertilize themselves, crosses between different varieties are less likely to occur, either naturally or through deliberate intervention. Saving seeds is always possible, without any loss of genetic integrity.

Which isn’t to say that farmers continued to do so. As breeders began to develop new and improved varieties (albeit without the staggering success of hybrid corn), more farmers began buying their wheat seed. Why engage in the laborious ritual of saving seeds when a better-yielding, more consistent crop was now readily available for purchase? Genetic uniformity became the status quo.

In Glenn’s landrace system, by contrast, every grain of wheat contains a germ with a distinct destiny. It’s impossible to know exactly what the wheat
will be like until you cast the seed on the ground and see what grows. Most of it will look quite uniform; a good percentage might even remind you of a monoculture. But there will be the inevitable wild cards, the offshoots—called “sports”—and they provide not only an insurance policy for the crop but also the potential for new flavors.

“Going sportin’,” which means venturing out into the fields to find these irregular plants, re-creates what farmers did throughout history—seek out the one plant in the crop that doesn’t look like the others, the ugly duckling of the bunch, and celebrate it for its distinctiveness. Should that offshoot turn out to taste good and be encouraged by the farmer, the entire crop and cuisine might change, at least slightly, to include this distinctive first cousin.

Sporting is also, one could argue, the most democratic of farming practices, because it allows recessive traits (those qualities we all have hidden in us somewhere) to express themselves. No one knows why certain genes lie dormant for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. But landrace farming leaves open the possibility that an unexpected trait might reveal itself at any time. An environmental event, such as a heat wave or even a sprinkle of rain at the right moment, can trigger a genetic awakening.

Glenn’s goal is not efficiency. What if, he asks, instead of forcing nature to go in a particular direction, we allowed nature to dictate how the seeds should evolve, and then adapted to those changes? It would mean more variation in each crop, which would, in turn, cause there to be slightly different ripening times and different kernel sizes. Without identical characteristics, our plants would have better disease and pest resistance, more vigor, and greater resilience in the long run. It might also mean the discovery of a superior flavor, a concept I had always found a little abstract, until Glenn told me that the Eight Row Flint corn Jack had managed to cultivate so successfully at Stone Barns had come from a landrace farming system—generations of farmers selecting ears by hand and tasting them.

“This is what farmers have always done. Throughout the ages they managed to broaden the genetic base and deliver a very rich source of variation,”
Glenn said. “You’re not just looking for change,” he added. “You’re celebrating change.”

But this rich source of variation, cultivated over thousands of years and supported by countless generations, changed irrevocably in the middle of the twentieth century. Wheat was transformed on a global scale, and practically overnight. It was a revolution that began, improbably, with a dwarf.

No one was looking to grow short wheat—not at first. The beginning of
the Green Revolution, that period of agricultural modernization and massive productivity gains across the globe, is often traced to dwarf wheat, but dwarf wheat actually came out of an impromptu visit by an American to the hillsides of Mexico.