Mighty Sweet Rice: Inland and Garden Rice in the 20th Century

Written by James H. Tuten

Pounding rice in Orangeburg, S.C.

Rice cultivation has an unbroken tradition in small or garden plots around parts of the African Diaspora from Sierra Leone to the hill rice in Trinidad. In the old Rice Kingdom of the United States, however, where Carolina Gold once dominated, an emphasis on commercial production or plantation agriculture obscured the history of garden rice.

Although commercial rice production ended in the late 1920s or very early 1930s, rice growing for personal use is nearly an unbroken tradition here too. After emancipation, when the Gullah faced a choice on whether to grow rice, relocate, or remain in place and grow other crops, many chose to be involved in rice. They maintained a connection to rice as commercial growers and garden plot growers and they sustained tradition through their foodways.

A look at small plot rice growers in South Carolina establishes a connection with that aspect of the African Diaspora not only during the era of the enslavement or plantation production in the half-century or so after emancipation but well into the 20th century. 

At several junctures, especially in the decade that we call Reconstruction in the U.S., from 1865-1876, and again in the 20th century as commercial-scale production concluded on rice plantations, rice growers faced inflection points where they had to decide whether to continue growing rice.

These contingent moments further include both a choice about sticking with commercial growing or to grow rice for home consumption. Gullah people were choosing change or continuity with rice. 

Commercial or Plantation Rice Culture

First we will consider the sustained interest that Gullah people had for sticking with commercial rice cultivation. Two reasons for this were that many of them had pride in place and in rice growing skill. Before we get to those reasons I want to stipulate that people like the way a field of rice looks. Agricultural people, farmers, typically admire the visuals of their crops. Growers and even visitors to the Rice Kingdom openly applauded the look of rice. 

The aesthetics of rice fields under cultivation affected visitors and planters alike. Near the end of the antebellum era T. Addison Richards reported in Harpers magazine on his visit to the Lowcountry. “[F]ew are they who know aught of the graceful grain, living, blossoming, and ripening into golden beauty in its native fields,” he declared. He considered rice to be the “most beautiful ... of the great family of grains.” [T. Addison Richards, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1859) 721-738]

Other visitors noted the visual effect of rice and the plantation fields. During Reconstruction Edward King investigated the region as a journalist and waxed eloquent on what he found.

“Beautiful were the broad and carefully cultivated acres, stretching miles away on either side of the placid, deep, and noble Combahee; picturesque were the granaries … and novel and inspiring the vistas of the long sedge-bordered canals.” [Edward King, The Great South, 436]

Rice fields made a strong impression upon people in part because of the geometric shapes they imposed upon the landscape and the sharp relief that the waterways provided between every cultivated square. Often, too, the terrain and agricultural patterns struck viewers because they were so different from that to which they were accustomed. 

When a crop or commodity is important to a particular society, residents will often have festivals and celebratory events connected to the cultivation cycle. Those who labored through the hot and mercilessly humid summer days enjoyed the brief parties of the harvest season.

Maggie Black recounted such events: “Den when dey ge t’rough, dey hab big supper dere fa aw dem wha’ whip rice. Gi’e em aw de rice en hog head dey is e’er wan’. Man, dey’ud hab de nicest kind uv music dere.” [George P. Rawick, ed, South Carolina Narratives, vol 2 The American Slave: A Composite Biography, 1 and 2, 59]

Rice culture required participants to manipulate land and water in ways not demanded by other crops. Judith Carney captured that well by calling rice culture a “knowledge system.” Planters came to believe that only they could manage such a complex undertaking, which added to their pride of being rice planters. Their specialized knowledge enabled them to look down upon those who grew other crops. Moreover, it added to their sense of uniqueness and led them to consider the aesthetic qualities of their land and crops.

The Last Black Rice Laborers

Elizabeth Alston Pringle and the other Waccamaw Neck planters quit planting commercially as a result of a 1910 storm. However, many African Americans continued to reside on the plantations. They no longer worked at growing rice commercially, but they continued to plant small plots of rice for their own food. On Sandy Island, for example, the all-black community grew rice for domestic consumption and as a trade commodity into the late 1940s. [Vennie Deas Moore, Sandy Island: Nothing is the Same, 2-3 ]

For the African Americans who associated with rice culture either through labor alone or by virtue of both employment and abode, the cessation of planting hastened a process of migration into other employments. Over time this migration eroded many of the plantation communities.

Even so, some plantation communities lasted until after the Second World War. After 1900, with little employment left in phosphates, most black men that remained in the rural areas turned fully to timber, turpentine, or railroad work, employments previously pursued in conjunction with planting rice, cotton, and efforts to raise most of their own food. Others joined the ranks of the cotton tenants and sharecroppers, in some cases on the highlands of the same plantations where they had grown rice.

Those African Americans who remained on the rice plantations until the industry collapsed lost more than a job. Many of them appear to have stayed on the plantation because of a sense of place or an attachment to rice culture.

John Rutledge served as the supervisor of the Cheves Family plantation of Weehaw outside of Georgetown. The Cheves brothers’ focus lay with their other lands, and they allowed the houses and the banks to degrade over time. In January of 1901, traditionally the time of year when rice plantation leases were renewed, Rutledge wrote to Henry Cheves informing him of the disintegration of the plantation and of his own commitment.

"Mr Speights told me that my time is up with him he says that he cannot give me any further orders … so i write to ask you if I must continue to go round the bank to look after them. Also the empty houses the hands is moving off because there is nothing to do. I myself will never leave until I die [John Rutledge to Henry Cheves, January 5, 1901. Cheves Papers, SCHS.]

Rutledge was not a singular case. Historian Charles Joyner made an important point with a quote from Ben Horry, a rice growing man born in slavery: “slavery time people done something!”

They had, as Joyner made clear, a sense of ownership of the land because they knew they and their ancestors grew, cultivated and harvested the rice. Morris, also born into slavery but a man who lived well into the 20th century, told the owner of the land where he lived, Bernard Baruch, “My mammy and Daddy worked de rice fields. Dey’s buried here. De furst ting I remember are dose rice banks. De strength of dese arms and dese legs and of dis old back, Mist’ Bernie is in your rice banks.” He went on to make it clear that his connection to the plantation was such that “de ret of dis body want to be with de strength of de arms and de legs and back dat is already buried in your rice banks.” [Joyner, 42-43]

Rutledge and Morris demonstrate the strong sense of connection to the land, the crop of rice and suggests pride in managing the elegant system that produced it. Large plantations were not the only places of rice production in the Lowcountry, though. 

Upland or Interior Rice

The plantation-scale rice culture has had a number of books written about it. But that is not the only area where rice growers raised the grain. In the Pine Barrens just inland from the tidewater, former slaves and their descendants grew rice as a provision crop into the 1930s. This sparsely settled belt was less productive than the Lowcountry, and it was easier for blacks to buy small plots of land or to find tenant arrangements on largely undeveloped pine tracts. In fact, the Black Belt enjoyed a substantial increase in black population after emancipation. 

Perhaps no better example of both upland rice cultivation or the sustained commitment to rice for the kitchen exists in the Lowcountry than in the vicinity of Mars Bluff, South Carolina. In her wonderful book on the subject, African American at Mars Bluff, author Amelia Wallace Vernon interviewed a number of people in the late 1980s who had learned to cultivate upland rice in garden plots.

Matthew Williamson, for example, grew rice on land that his father and his grandfather had used to cultivate rice. “The rice was a way of life at that particular time, because they made it.” [Amelia Wallace Vernon,  African American at Mars Bluff , 207]

Vernon undertook an oral history project in the Mars Bluff community 50 miles above the known tidal rice cultivation area, but still near one of South Carolina’s great rice rivers, the Pee Dee. There, up to around 1920 African Americans supplemented the sharecropping of cotton with garden plots of rice ranging from about one-third to an acre in size. They planted in low ground, trusting to rain or occasionally turning to irrigation from wells.

Vernon found at least one person who grew rice within the town limits of Florence, a medium size city in the state, all the way up to 1939. [101] Some grew wetland and some dryland rice. All grew it for their own table or to share with friends and family. But in general rice growing declined in the 1920s as a generation died or others moved away as part of the great migration of African Americans out of the South.

While Vernon believes her subjects didn’t eat the rice they grew, I find that unlikely. She does see it as an African Diaspora cultural survival. Rice was perceived as only having marginal cash value and was grown on otherwise unused lands, so a sharecropper could grow some and keep it all. There are signs that rice had been grown as a tertiary provision crop in Mars Bluff during slavery. They ate some and sold some. They kept planting it, because “that skill … had set them off as special and had given them a degree of autonomy…”[125-128]

Though rice growers in the Pine Barrens did not always make the grain central to their foodways, rice did carry some of the same symbolic content that it had in the Lowcountry rice kingdom.

Vernon’s research suggests that whites, more than blacks, maintained a rice kitchen around Mars Bluff. The African Americans in the area that raised rice, but only occasionally ate it, grew it because it conferred status upon them as farmers. 

In other words, African Americans, like white rice planters, gained some degree of self-respect and status from the greater technological and agricultural complexity involved in growing rice as opposed to cotton or corn.  [Vernon, African Americans at Mars Bluff, 127-128]

Another method for getting at the production of rice for home use is the Census of Agriculture. For my purposes here I focused on the data for 1934 and 1939.

The old rice plantation counties still had many small, non-commercial rice growers during the Great Depression, a decade to a quarter century after commercial-scale cultivation ended. For example, Beaufort County had over 400 farms reporting rice on a total of 380 acres. That indicates small plots of an acre or less in. Similarly, Charleston had 379 farms amounting to 323 acres of rice. The figures for broadly uniform for the old coastal counties. 

Rice Production in Rice Kingdom, 1934

Beaufort	Berkeley	Charleston	Colleton	Dorchester	Georgetown	Jasper
407 farms	223	379	324	125	174	433
380 acres	208	323	422	166	329	872
1294 bbl	668	1448	1154	414	2299	2566

Source: U.S. Census of Agriculture 1940

What the Agriculture Census also shows is a precipitous decline in the garden plot rice during the Great Depression. Five years later, in 1939, the number of rice farmers, acres and barrels grown had fallen by half or more in each county. 

As important for us to notice, though, is the inland rice production by small farmers. The chart on inland counties reveals that in 1934 Orangeburg County, pretty far inland, grew more rice than two of the counties in the rice kingdom. These were mostly small-scale growers continuing a tradition of inland production in the pine belt that had existed at least since Reconstruction. Research by Coclanis and Marlow shows that the rice growers were nearly evenly divided between black and white rice growers. 

Although the agricultural census quit recording such small non-commercial levels of production in 1940, that is not positive evidence that no one grew rice anymore. A broad and concerted effort to document inland garden crops of rice just might reveal but a short break in rice growing. For example, to my surprise I recently learned that African-American farmer Snowden Buckner routinely planted a quarter acre of rice along the Salkehatchie Highway in Hampton County into the middle 1950s. [Henry Tuten interview, 1-29-17]

Regardless of race, the dominant place of rice eating — the rice kitchen— and rice growing re-shaped society so that after emancipation both members of the African diaspora and white South Carolinians had rice as part of their agricultural and culinary heritage. That is why they kept growing it for another 70 years or more. 

Rice Production Inland Counties, 1934

Bamberg	Clarendon	Hampton	Horry	Lee	Orangeburg	Williamsburg
29 farms	69	124	76	52	334	129
38 acres	78	215	68	46	519	97
73 bbl	164	563	210	102	1012	237

Source: U.S. Census of Agriculture 1940

Over the years between 1865 and 1940, one-time rice growers repeatedly asked themselves whether their economic interests, the lack of civil rights, and the allure of cities in the South or the North amounted to enough of an invitation to migrate from country to town and out of the region altogether. 

Migration certainly meant an end to personal rice production.

A second choice was whether to keep or to let go of the rice kitchen. For those who moved to New York, Chicago, Detroit, or Los Angeles, some chose to let go of some elements of that rural past and other Americans, white and black, denigrated migrants’ dialects and culinary cultures and encouraged conformity to mass culture. Emory Campbell wrote of the “masking of Gullah culture” both outside the South and even among fellow African Americans when in Savannah.

In some cases shame of being rural in a society promoting urban superiority, a desire to embrace modern lifestyles and move away from the past led to abandonment of rice eating" as some of us will tend to divorce ourselves from rice meals,” Campbell observed, “except an occasional Chinese rice dinner.” [Campbell, 287]

It seems that most African American families in the Lowcountry, however, did keep a rice kitchen and continued to rely on rice as their staple food up to the present day. While a corn-based diet predominated in much of the cotton South, Ben Horry stated that on the plantation where he labored as a slave they “never have much grits…have fine rice.” [Rawick, Supplement, Series 1, Volume 11, 197.]

Likewise, for Gabriel Washington, born into slavery on a rice plantation, gardening included rice that he ate every evening as late as 1939. [Charles Von Ohsen, “Gabriel Washington: Life History” South Carolina Writer’s Project (c-10 SC, Box 2)] Maggie Black, another interviewee, noted the difference between the brown rice pounded on the plantation and the bleached rice she bought in the 1930s, remembering “it wuz mighty sweet rice, honey, mighty sweet rice.” [Rawick, SC 1&2, 59]

Many black families such as Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s maintained their culinary traditions despite migrating out of the Lowcountry. Smart-Gosvenor, born in the Lowcountry, wrote as recently as 1970, “And speaking of rice. I was 16 years old before I knew that everyone didn’t eat rice every day. Us being Geechees, we had rice everyday. When you said what you were eating for dinner, you always assumed that rice was there.” Today the South continues to be a major market for rice and most of the major rice markets are east of the Mississippi River. White families that left the area also kept this link to their heritage. [Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, Second ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992). 6,7-10.] 

Similarly, Emory Campbell, born and raised on Hilton Head and long-time leader of Penn Center recalled of growing up that to be Gullah meant he assumed he would always have “an affinity for rice dishes; rice was a part of every dinner meal (…) sometime eaten with okra, ‘matoes, and prawns.” [Emory Campbell in Phillip Morgan, African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry, 283-4] Alexander Small put his attachment to a rice kitchen in this context: 

Since daddy was a Geechee in the truest sense, no meal could be served without fluffy Carolina long grain rice. (I’d seen him leave the table, refusing to come back, until my mother, who was trying to break the habit, made him some.) [Alexander Smalls and Hettie Jones, Grace the Table: Stories and Recipes From My Southern Revival 3.]

The Great Depression and World War brought many changes — and here I speculate — that the decline in rice cultivation in the 1930s is attributable to multiple causes including seed rice becoming harder to attain, land ownership loss during the depression, the disruption of the war and the economic boom afterward with lots of cheap rice. 

I suspect these factors worked together to bring about the decline. Today though, small rice growing has begun a rebound thanks in no small part to the work of David Shields and the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, and chefs such as BJ Dennis who value local and heritage ingredients and from whom many others of us take our cues about food. 

Two brothers who saved the Lowcountry's favorite meal corn — Sea Island White Flint

written by david shields

The Walterboro S.C. Press and Standard has an article about Thomas Brothers and Ted Chewning, who grew the landrace White Flint, a variety grown from NC into Florida. The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation has in its seed collection at Clemson's CREC two Florida strains —one deriving from the Creek Nation (Muskogee) preserved in Driscoll County, another used as a forage corn by Cracker Cattle breeders further south. But we didn't have any with a South Carolina pedigree, despite the fact the much of the written record for the corn concerns sea island white flint grown for provision here. 

In 1862 a reporter in the Beaufort district described White Flint Corn as very nutritious and white as snow when cooked, he even went as far as claiming this corn much superior to the common varieties (“Beaufort District: Past, Present, and Future,” The Continental Monthly 1 (1862), p. 383-84.)

According to the Royal Horticultural Society, by the 1860s, White Flint Corn was considered the most delicate for table use and the most valuable in every respect. It was recorded being perfectly ripe at the end of September (Journal of Horticulture and Practical Gardening 19 (1870), p. 511). Ears came into Europe in the mid-19th century, winning prizes at the Paris Exposition, and entering into cultivation schemes in southern France and Italy. in the U.S. Census Report of 1880 the sea island white flint was described as “the finest, as food for man, of all the known varieties.”

It ceased to be widely grown in the second decade of the 20th century — when many other of the field and provision crops of the Lowcountry began to be supplanted. But the Thomas brothers kept it intact — and here is their story. Thank you, and thank you Ted Chewning. 

Sea Island White Flint corn is on the global Slow Food Ark of Taste, a register of the most delicious, historically resonant, and imperiled foods.

Thomas brothers help create heirloom seed project

THE PRESS AND STANDARD | August 26, 2016 5:00 AM

By GEORGE SALSBERRY
gsalsberry@lowcountry.com

Two Smoaks area brothers have fed Ted Chewning’s constant craving for heirloom crops.
Chewning, the Colleton County Farmers Market Manager who recently decided to resign that post, wants to spend more time working his farm and playing a role in resurrecting heirloom seeds. He plans to spend more time building up his collection of seeds from the Thomas Brothers Collection.

Read more

Part 3 — Orton Plantation Rice Production: Heirloom Rice Foodways, Farming, and Cultural Notes

Written By Glenn Roberts, David S. Shields, & B. Merle Shepard

Originally Published in the Rice Paper Newsletter, Spring 2012

Heirloom Rice Foodways, Farming, and Cultural Notes

Carolina Gold rice market farming created a unique set of foods that eventually evolved into a complete cuisine. Sweet potatoes, brassicas, oats, barley, buckwheat, benne, emmer, bread rye, wheats, maize, cowpeas, broad beans, etc. were involved at the height of 19th century science supported market farming in an elegant sequence of mixed crop rotation prior to industrialization. We have completely lost these combinations and rotations in modern times. These rice crop rotation crops formed the cuisine associated with our market farming and eventually attained stature in Europe and on our tables. 

There is renewed interest in our rice cuisine, known today as the Carolina Rice Kitchen, and all of the plants and systems that once vaulted it onto the global stage. Dr. Shields is about to publish a definitive work on the plants and foods of our 19th century market farming. There has been explosive media interest in Carolina (including North and South) rice cuisine in the last 18 months since Dr. Shepard, Dr. Khush, and Dr. McClung released their new rice “Charleston Gold.”

We are witnessing our youth becoming aware of their own food legacies and we see them returning by the tens of thousands to their local tables nationally. This phenomenon is moving ahead with alacrity and is constant in homes, farmers markets, food kiosks, and restaurants. Everyone in the “older” generation in our major urban centers where these food systems are beginning to take hold economically, is adapting or being left behind. In the South, particularly the Virginia to Southern Georgia region, there is renewed global interest in our local food heritage beyond urban gardening and hobby cropping for the first time since the mid-nineteenth century. There are growing clusters of nascent heritage food farmers encircling our larger cities. 

The latest Southern entry onto the world stage sourcing quality ingredients from this movement is Husk Restaurant in Charleston and Husk’s Chef Sean Brock. Brock is equally a farmer and a chef and has been featured in major media here, in Europe and in Asia more than any other American chef over the last year. Brock’s food philosophy, garnered from his time with Dr. Shields, marries local food history and Brock’s modern locale. Brock is reviving lost foods at a rapid clip. Husk restaurant is living the Carolina Rice Kitchen and they are booked solid 30 days in advance right now. Brock is unabashedly drawing Carolina Rice and its companion foods back into the Southern pantry while the world watches.

Orton should be a major presence in this grand movement toward sense of place and local identity. Simply, there is deep cultural meaning in repatriating North Carolina rice for the people of North Carolina. Our rices were always Carolina rices. They were the legacy of the Lowcountry without cultural borders.

Comment on Landrace Genetics and Farming

Most modern breeders are focusing upon nano and GMO seed improvement and many of our young geneticists are no longer working in the public realm. It would be folly to deny that we must address carrying capacity and the rising challenge to feed a growing global population. This is a given within our pursuits.

But we are aware of adaptive weaknesses in these modern systems. The CGRF set out at our inception to explore our mission scientifically and apply the results to modern rice agriculture systems. We know that landrace cereals regress in small populations and can exhibit more vigor and new traits in large populations. We are also aware that large cereal populations increase frequency of beneficial mutation and sporting in unintuitive ways. We know that there is little chance for this genetic expression in a seed bank replication plot, especially when the stated purpose of the plot is true type replication.

Our position on landrace farming is that we should all keep focused upon the mission to feed the world while leaving scientific and practical breathing room to support and study landrace plant systems that have been adapting to pest pressure and climate change in larger populations for centuries and many times millennia. 

The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation is following this mission to the letter. Dr. Shepard, Dr. Khush, and Dr. McClung cooperated, pro bono, to develop Charleston Gold Rice, an effort stretching nearly a decade and a half. Last year, 100 acres of commercial Charleston Gold Rice came to harvest. This year, over 300 acres of Charleston Gold rice will go in and interest is growing. We expect over 500 acres for 2013.

Landrace plant systems are based upon survival through vigor and flavor. Dr. Shepard, et al, have certainly imbued Charleston Gold Rice with the best flavor traits of Carolina Gold Rice while improving its vigor and field performance four fold.

One last comment. Drayton recorded over 100 varieties of landrace rices grown in the Carolinas by 1800. All of our efforts should be focused upon obtaining local landrace rice food security by diversifying beyond the two rices we have in production now.

Interpretation — Heirloom Rice Agriculture and Culture

The cultural interpretation of rice husbandry at Drayton Hall, Magnolia Plantation, Middleton Place, and Brookgreen Gardens is impressive and enjoys international presence and respect. But none have working fields. Middleton Place stands alone in interpretation of Antebellum rice husbandry with a small plot of Carolina Gold rice below the butterfly ponds. The Middleton Place staff employs only authentic manual tillage with period implements, heel and toe manual planting, and manual harvest, threshing, pounding and winnowing... all with authentic implements. Middleton also engages authentic rice art and crafts, elite and common rice music and architecture within its interpretive programs. All of these historic plantation interpretive programs present and reflect upon the historic social justice issues and interpretive aspects of slavery as well.

But there are no scaled up interpretation fields of heirloom Carolina Gold Rice in America and no interpretation program focuses upon the importance of separate seed protocols in landrace rice husbandry. There is a growing awareness that the massive contributions and tribulations of slavery will not be embraced with respect to Antebellum rice production until a true vista of a working Antebellum rice field in scale can be part of our national experience. Orton Plantation, of all the Antebellum rice plantations, possesses this vista if her rice fields return to their original purpose, Carolina Gold Rice seed research and production. Orton’s facility and potential presence of scale are unmatched with respect to our surviving collection of Antebellum rice field landmarks.

Landrace Rice Seed — Demonstration of Need

The rapid increase of local food gardening and farming continues unabated across America. This movement is driving the establishment of mid-scale local and regional food hubs and is accelerating demand for local niche rices here in the South and elsewhere in America. In South Carolina and Georgia, these food hubs have lacked mid-scale cereal post-harvest handling and processing capabilities and there is no infra- structure for rice seed processing. In North Carolina, a similar deficit has impeded local cereal production. The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation helped develop a mid-scale heirloom rice seed cleaning, processing, and storage facility located in central South Carolina beginning in 2010.This facility is now operational.

We’re not aware that there is a local fully equipped facility for heirloom rice seed or production processing in North Carolina or Georgia at this time. There is a color sorter in the 2013 budget of the central South Carolina seed facility which will bring it fully online for quality seed (a dedicated color sorter is essential for rice seed quality and weedy rice prevention management, especially in landrace rice seed systems).

Regarding landrace rice seed production: There is no certified foundation rice seed production facility in North Carolina, South Carolina, or Georgia at this time, even though we have access to sufficient breeder seed stock to support at least one now. We envision the need for mid-scale certified foundation rice seed and rice production, processing and storage facilities in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia by 2015 based upon current growth rates and the unpredictability of rice seed supply in the United States.

Orton Plantation is strategically and geographically situated to maximize rice seed and production security (if it is in production) against catastrophic loss due to storms in South Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. This was Orton Plantation’s strategic role during the first half of the 19th century as well. Without Orton, we cannot achieve rice seed and production continuity in our region in the future.

Landrace Rice Seed Market — Demonstration of Need

The growth of acreage planted to Carolina Gold and Charleston Gold production rice is about 10 percent per year over the last four years as the market for heirloom niche rices accelerates nationally. Landrace (heirloom) Carolina Gold Rice seed and Charleston Gold Rice seed, produced in head row, breeder, and certified foundation protocols has been produced only in one facility in the USA, the Texas Rice Improvement Association in Beaumont, Texas.

As of January this year, head row and breeder Carolina Gold and Charleston Gold Rice seed stock will be grown out at Dale Bumpers Institute in Stuttgart, Ark., only. TRIA will continue to produce certified foundation seed from DPI breeder. The CGRF asked TRIA to produce 300 cwt each of 2011 Certified Foundation Carolina Gold Rice seed and Charleston Gold Rice seed to serve niche landrace rice growers in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas. The CGRF produces an additional 300 cwt VNS rice seed per year to assist in seed availability and act as reserve against catastrophic loss.

The niche rice market is growing rapidly and this season, record acreage of Carolina Gold Rice and Charleston Gold Rice will be planted in the aforementioned Southern states. These acreages are split evenly between conventional and organic rice production management. TRIA will reach their maximum security allocation for Carolina Gold and Charleston Gold certified foundation seed production in 2014. We estimate this at 500/cwt for each rice. The CGRF has capability of producing another 500 cwt VNS as a backup. Although we may have additional VNS capability for these rices, we will need additional sources for certified foundation heirloom rice seed thereafter.

This overview does not account for our new variety research programs for Carolina Long Rice, a black Tribute rice and the Italian cultivar associated with first rices at Caw Caw wilderness south of Charlestowne by Italian growers in the late 1600s, tall straw Italian heirloom rices including Vialone Nano.

Having only one certified foundation seed production facility for the growing number of Carolina Gold and Charleston Gold rice farmers in the South is an increasing security risk. A hurricane in Beaumont could easily wipe out a year’s seed production. Weather completely wiped out our seed crops at TRIA once in the last decade and took down half of our seed crop two years ago.

The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation is funding the establishment of 50 acres of seed protocol fields off the Savannah River fed by well system and protected from coastal storm systems to a fair degree.

We need Orton rice seed production for strategic security against catastrophic loss as a landrace seed facility at the very least. We also project demand for local rice in North Carolina will grow vertically, once available. We advocate for the restoration of Orton Plantation’s full array of fields for rice seed production and, especially, Orton’s larger fields because they can be deployed for scale-up field trials to be able to assess genetic stability in landrace rice seed.

Part 2 — Orton Plantation Rice Production: Golden Seed Rice History

Written By Glenn Roberts, David S. Shields, & B. Merle Shepard

Originally Published in the Rice Paper Newsletter, Spring 2012

Although rice was planted as a market crop in the Carolina Lowcountry near Charlestowne by 1685 and proliferated North and South rapidly along the Carolina and Georgia coasts over the next century to become a major pre-revolutionary commodity export, rice did not become a distinctive American export crop with respect to its morphology, taxonomy, and unique identity until after our revolution. 

Dr. David Shields writes extensively about the genesis of Carolina rice in his introduction to The Golden Seed. “Some time before the Revolutionary War, the ‘Gold Seed’ rice was introduced (from what precise quarter, and how, has not been accurately ascertained) which, owing to its superiority, soon entirely superseded the white.” Dr. Shield notes that “more precise commentators pinpoint its (Carolina Gold rice) introduction to the period after the cessation of hostilities between the United States and Great Britain form 1783-1785.

Even though we cannot state with certainty the origins of Carolina Gold Rice, we can site planter-naturalists of the era who presented the first informal characteristic description of Carolina Gold rice: “The ordinary crop rice most highly esteemed and therefore universally cultivated, an oblong grain 3/8ths of an inch in length, slightly flattened on two sides, of a deep yellow or golden color, awn short; when the husk and inner coat are removed, the grain presents a beautiful pearly-white appearance — an ellipsoid in figure, and somewhat translucent.”

The meteoric rise in acreage devoted to Carolina Gold rice after our revolution followed the trajectory of improved practices characterized today as the scientific agricultural movement. Over 100,000 acres of ricelands were in production and those acres demanded pure seed. Scientific farmer/breeders moved aggressively to develop vigorous pure Carolina Gold seed to combat the increasing incidence of weedy red rice in Carolina Gold production fields. Their routines against foreign variety and weedy contamination were extensively researched and trialed after 1800. R. F. W. Allston, E. T. Heriot, and Joshua John Ward rose as South Carolina scientific breeders whose seed rices were legendary for purity and vigor in their regions. 

It is no small coincidence that Dr. Frederick Jones Hill, Orton’s owner from 1826 to 1854, worked closely with his South Carolina colleagues and was equally respected with regard to his research, weedy rice suppression protocols, seed selection, and market production. In short, Orton was one of only five great rice research stations strung along the Carolinas and Georgia devoted to breeding and horticultural science during that era. Orton’s many rice fields were used to develop and trial Carolina Gold rice in any scale from small isolated 100 sq. ft. rice plots to massive field trials on hundreds of acres for production.

Golden Seed Rice History at Orton Plantation

Orton Plantation, under Dr. F. J. Hill, became the vital Northern supplier of pure Carolina Gold Rice seed to support the vast market rice production across all ricelands extending deep into Louisiana beginning in 1830. Orton’s reputation for pure seed was legendary and critical to national rice horticultural advances between 1830 and the Civil War.

Dr. Shields writes of Orton’s rice seed history:

“During the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, Orton Plantation was the northernmost producer of Carolina Gold rice seed, replenishing the production stock of planters nationally. The plantation’s owner during this period, Dr. Fred J. Hill, belonged to the rigorous network of planters extending from the Santee River to the Cape Fear who exchanged seed stock and policed seed purity. The entire Southern rice planting system depended upon seed produced by these breeders. Careful planters as far away as Louisiana improved their rice plantings with an infusion of “northern seed” [the 19th-century designation for production from this area north of the Santee and PeeDee] on a three-year cycle; less careful, on a six year cycle.

Hill embodied the experimentalist spirit that enlivened the most successful southern planters during the second quarter of the 19th century. Because of a fire that destroyed Orton’s mill and grain processing infrastructure in 1824 during the Governor Benjamin Smith’s final years of residence, Dr. Hill, when he took possession in 1826, rebuilt with state of the art engineering the finest rice hulling and milling factory in the region. He installed gates on the water system, and created a fully functional tidal irrigation scheme on the S.C. model. He sought seed partnerships with important rice breeders in South Carolina — R. F. W. Allston, E. T. Heriot, and Joshua John Ward — to secure the best available seed stock. As the most learned of the Cape Fear Planters, he became the resource for the growers at Belvidere, Buchoi, Clarendon, Lilliput, Kendal, Hilton, and Sans Souci Plantations in Brunswick County, providing advice on insect infestation, red rice pollution of fields, and declining field production.

The heyday of rice production ceased with the Civil War. Orton was declared abandoned by the Federal authorities and briefly turned over to occupancy by freedmen. The lands lay abandoned for 15 years. When K. M. Murchison secured ownership of Orton in the final quarter of the 19th century, the expense of rice planting in Carolina made in noncompetitive with high-yielding Honduran white rice planted in the Southwest. Even John F. Garrell, the greatest agricultural savant of the region after the War, could not make Sans Souci plantation’s rice (despite its superior taste, mouth-feel, and appearance on the plate) compete in the commodity market against rice from Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana.

In 1911, the USDA in 1911 funded the draining of wetland ricefields at Orton Plantation to determine whether they could be converted to dry field agriculture. This attempt at secondary usage failed. A hurricane later in the year effectually brought an end to commercial rice production in the Carolinas until its revival in the 21st century. [Annual Report of the U. S. Department of Agriculture 1911, p. 762]

The Summers Brothers: Imagining the Sustainable Plantation

written By David S. Shields

originally published in the rice paper newsletter, Spring 2012

Because any attempt to resuscitate a cuisine requires reviving the agricultural system that gave rise to it, a task before us is to research the best practices of the planters of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Because of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation’s (CGRF) interest in the Lowcountry’s rice-based cuisine, we have tended to look to the writings of a half-dozen experimental rice planters of the antebellum period: James Hamilton Couper and Thomas Spalding of the Georgia Sea Islands and Joshua John Ward, R. F. W. Allston, William Washington, and J. Bryan from South Carolina. Their writings, for all their information about the management of Carolina Gold Rice and other field crops, did not speak to important dimensions of plantation food production. They provided little about livestock needed for meat production or the role of orchards and kitchen gardens in the market production of fruits and vegetables. 

To understand how the production of pork, beef, poultry, fruit, and vegetables connected with the cultivation of grains and field crops on a plantation we have to turn to the writings of planters from the sandhills skirting the Lowcountry. We have to turn to the greatest theoreticians of sustainable planting in the antebellum south: the Summer Brothers, chemist Thomas Summer, Col. Adam G. Summer of Ravenscroft Plantation, and William Summer of Pomaria Plantation in South Carolina.

Farming in the Newberry district of the Carolina sandhills, the Summer Brothers during the 1840s and ’50s put into place diversified farming systems. A visitor “would see, even in the winter, fields green with grass, winter oats, barley, wheat and turnips (ruta baga).”2 

One field of Egyptian winter oats pastured 30 Southdowns sheep who manured the three acres. In March this and other fields were deep plowed with a Remington Steel Plow and fertilized for cotton or corn. Cattle, pigs, horses, mules, and sheep supplied the plantation’s fertilizer. 

In the south the Summer Brothers pioneered the stabling of livestock. In 1859 S. B. Buckley observed, “This is the first and only instance I have seen of cows and cattle being stabled at the South.” Imitating the dairy-farming regimens of northern experimentalists such as Jesse Buel, the Summer Brothers maintained extensive pasturage, growing red clover and alfalfa for grazing, corn and oats for fodder, and root vegetables (rutabaga, sweet potato, and Jerusalem artichoke) for winter stall feeding.

Book farmers of the best sort, plugged into the major horticultural, agricultural, and pomological networks, the brothers jumped on every promising novelty. The experimental introduction of sorghum from France in 1853 had Adam Summer growing 20 acres of “sugar millet” for fodder. He fed cattle both millet and leaves.3

Thomas Summer, who studied chemistry in Germany under Justus Liebig, had begun the renovation of the midlands’ soil with Red Clover. Having read of the experiments in Pennsylvania of Judge Peters during the Revolutionary period with the red clover and gypsum, Summer showed that countering the acidity of the soil with an alkaline manure could enable this nutritious and soil-building cover to grow in the deep south.4 His findings on clover culture and his writings on the soil chemistry of cotton growing won him fame in southern agricultural circles despite his death while still in his twenties. 

Col. Adam Summer

His brothers William and Adam took up his research and extended the experiments to include the fall planting of Bremen Oats, rye, barley, and buckwheat for winter grazing. William Summer thought a September planting of rye requisite for the pasturing of lambs and calves born in February.5 Because of rye’s tenacious root system, it holds up well to grazing, withstanding being trodden down or pulled. 

Rye first captured the attention of agriculturists in the 1830s. Jesse Buel may have been the first American to grow it in his experimental farm near Albany. A Charlestonian noted in 1840 that it was not grown in the South, but that seeds for both “Italian Rye Grass” and “Baily’s Rye” were readily available from European sources.6 The Summers were apparently the first to make systematic experiments with it in the early 1840s, growing the Italian Rye Grass and supplying well publicized progress reports to the Newberry Agricultural Society. 

In contrast to rye, barley did not lend itself to grazing. But because it was a “certain” crop, reliable in cold weather, and because it was nutritious, the Summer brothers grew it, scythed it, and employed it in stall feeding (known then as “soiling”) horses and cattle. Barley only became important in winter feeding with the establishment of livestock stables.

William Summer favored mixing root vegetables with grain and silage when stall feeding animals. Visitors remarked his use of the rutabaga, the Swedish turnip that vied with mangel wurtzel as the favorite feed root of progressive northern herdsmen. But Summer was more fascinated with the benefits of two other roots: the sweet potato and the Jerusalem artichoke. Sweet potatoes because of “the fine effect which they given when fed to milch cows” imparting sweetness and character to milk and butter, became a fixture in the planting scheme.7 The plant’s immense productivity (“no crop can be planted which will yield more to the acre”) particularly recommended it. 

Summer grew the Bermuda as an early crop, the white West Indian yam, the yellow yam, and the black Spanish variety. The potatoes were cured, chopped and mixed with silage before being offered to cattle. Unlike many sweet potato growers, Summer did not strip the leaves during the growing period to use as feed. Summer also tried using Jerusalem artichoke for stall feeding, but found that pigs preferred uprooting them in the field. Because the Jerusalem artichoke was perennial, prolific, and grew abundantly in stressed conditions, it was a forage crop singularly suited to waste areas on a property.

Several acres were planted in a peach orchard in Pomaria, S.C., last year, and under all the disadvantages of dense shade, drought, and exhausted soil, they produced quite a fine crop; and its adaptation as food for swine has been fully tested. A number of sows and pigs are now running on this last-mentioned lot and keep fat on what they glean from the field, which has been partially dug over, without a particle of other food. It is a great promoter of milk in all animals, and fully sustains the opinion ... concerning its being good food for cows and sheep.8

The Summer Brothers became famous early in the 1840s for their livestock by importing the best breeding stock available. Adam Summer purchased the award-winning Hereford bull calf “Pomaria” and the heifer “Marie” from the north’s premier breeders, Corning & Lotman, of Albany. His Southdowns Sheep came from John Ellman of Glynde, U.K. His flock of Cotswold Sheep (another long wooled breed) came from Sotham, a New York breeder.9 Col. Wade Hampton of Columbia, SC, bred his Blakewell Sheep, for which he won a premium in the 1846 State Agricultural Convention. For milk, he also secured a herd of Devon Cows from Lewis G. Morris of Maryland.10 From the same breeder he obtained a number of extraordinary Black Essex Pigs. For a decade he may have been the only breeder of Berkshire Hogs in the South Carolina.11 And he loved the Suffolk breed so much, he wrote a prose poem in their praise in the pages of the Southern Agriculturist.12 Only he and Richard Peters of Atlanta bred them pure in the south during 1850s. He loved the taste of their flesh, particularly after they had fed on fallen fruit in the plantation orchards.

Both William and Adam were avid pomologists. At William Summer’s plantation, Pomaria, an extensive orchard grew. Indeed, the plantings of fruit trees were so extensive that William operated the orchard as a nursery (the only one in the state) supplying the region with apple cuttings (Carolina Red June, Aromatic Carolina, Augustine, Epting’s Premium, Epting’s Red Winter, Lever, Maverick’s Sweet, Cook’s Red Winter, Hoover, Hammond, Ferdinand, and three of his own creations, the Greening Pomaria, the Fixlin, and Susannah),13 crab apples (Gore, Champagne Crab, and White Crab), Peaches (the Aremie, the white-fleshed Christiana, the Poinsett, Mrs. Poinsett, and Amelia varieties)14, Pears (Julienne, Sekel, Bartlett, Doynne Blanc, Duchesse d’Angouleme, B. Capiaumont, Fulton, Croft Castle, Dearborn, Upper Crust, Hebe)15 Adam’s plantation, Ravenscroft, possessed orchards of plums, apricots, and nectarines. 

By keeping a flock of chickens in the orchards, Col. Summer completely countered the depredations of the insect, curculio. “It takes more than a dozen hens and a gouty old cock to keep a few acres of these delicate trees clear of their enemies. A flock of a hundred is not too many: I find them a valuable auxiliary in manuring, as I consider domestic hen guano, properly tempered down, a good manure for trees the second year of their growth in the orchard.”16 

We know from premiums awarded at various fairs that Col. Summer excelled at breeding Dorking Fowl and Hong Kong Geese.17 The white five-toed Dorking fowl hailed from Surrey in England and won a reputation in England as the finest of yard birds for laying and for meat. While Summer ran his chickens through the orchard in Spring and Summer, in autumn he brought in his swine.

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2 S. B. Buckley, “Visit to a South Carolina Plantation,” The Cultivator 7, 5 (May 1859) p. 146.

3 “Statement of A. G. Summer,” Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1857 Agriculture (Washington, D. C. James B. Steedman, 1858), p. 220.

4 Isaac Croom, “The Clovers and Grasses of the South,” The Cultivator 13, 8 (August 1855).

5 “Cultivation of Spring Grain at the South,” The Cultivator 1, 12 (Dec. 1844), p. 390.

6 “I doubt whether the Italian rye grass has ever been seen in the southern states and scarcely in America, although I have a faint recollection of seeing a few plants, some years ago, on the farm of Judge Buel, nearly Albany in New York.” “Notes on European Agriculture: The Grasses,” The Farmer’s Register 8 (1840), pp. 361-63.

7 William Summer, “The Culture of the Sweet Potatoe,” The Cultivator 2, 2 (Feb. 1845), pp. 65- 67.

8 “Jerusalem Artichoke,” The Monthly Journal of Agriculture 1, 11 (May 1846), p. 537.

9 “Hereford Cattle, Cotswold and South Down Sheep,” Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture 4, 12 (Dec. 21, 1844), p. 1. For A. G. Summer’s assessment of the breed, see “Hereford Cattle,” The Southern Cultivator 4, 11 (November 1844), p. 171. “Stock for the South,” The American Agriculturist 4, 12 (December 1845), p. 382.

10 “North Devons—the Proper Cattle for the South,” Southern Cultivator 16, 4 (April 1858), p. 117. “The Great Cattle Sale of Lewis G. Morris,” The American Farmer (August 1, 1856), p. 59.

11 “The December 1854 Agricultural Fair,” The Southern Cultivator 13, 1 (January 1855), p. 25. 

12 “Suffolk Pig—Again,” Southern Agriculturist (March 1853), p. 80.

13 “Apples for the South,” Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste 23, 267 (September 1868), pp. 273-74.

14 William Summer, “New Fruits of South Carolina,” Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste 4, 6 (Dec. 1849), p. 276.

15 “Report from South Carolina by William Summer,” Proceedings of the National Convention of Fruit Growers 1848 (New York: Van Norden & Amerman, for the American Pomological Society, 1848), p. 113; “Hebe Pear,” The Rural Carolinian 1, 1 (1870), p. 27.

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Notes from the Land Where Pigweed is King

Written By David S. Shields

Originally Published in the Rice Paper Newsletter, Spring 2012

An edible plant is stalking the south, muscling in on soybean and cotton fields, invading corn plantings and sweet potato beds. Designated Amaranthus palmeri by botanists, farmers with increasing dread use an uglier name — pigweed. It has become many a Southern planter’s worst nightmare.

The fact that the leaves, stems, and abundant seeds are edible, indeed extremely nutritious, matters little. Aside from health food devotees, Palmer amaranth seeds have no market in North America. The leaves concentrate too much nitrogen as nitrate to be safe as animal fodder. So the Southern farmer reckons it a weed. More than a weed — a super plant, indigenous to southern soil and climate, that has evolved into an extremely prolific reproducer, generating massive seed heads. A single plant in a cultivated field produces over 150,000 seeds; with no competition, 1.5 million seeds. Its vitality and profusion enable it to take over a field in two seasons.

Sometime in the last six years it developed resistance to the commonest chemical herbicide in use, Monsanto’s RoundUp. It would appear that the warnings of the critics of conventional agriculture have come true. Exclusive reliance on a single herbicide year after year has produced mutations in Amarantahus palmeri so that since 2005 Glysophate, the active agent in RoundUp no longer inhibits the growth of pigweed. Calls for rotation of herbicides in a field each year to prevent the development of resistant species went unheeded, in part because salesmen touted RoundUp as a never-fail herbicide. 

The season of regret has arrived. Farmers are forced to resort to a stop-gap: manual removal of young pigweed stalks by hired labor gangs. Unfortunately labor is not always available in season. Unfortunately the overlooking of a single stalk when clearing is enough to put a field in peril.

On one level, it is odd that the world does not welcome a food source that has become so vital that it has decided to plant itself in all the fields we have prepared for the convenient culture of produce. Yet the United States seems to lack a 21st century George Washington Carver who can teach the present generation to find favor in amaranth. So we seem fated to relive recent history with agricultural chemists concocting new cocktails of plant toxins (Dual, Valor, Authority MTZ, Envive) to spread on soil before planting.

One hopes that exploration of rotations is undertaken. Pigweed’s efficiency pulling nitrogen out of the soil bodes ill for its prolonged colonization of an area, since its own vitality is taxed by the nutriment exhaustion with each successive year. Pigweed thrives when fields are cultivated with the same crop in succession. Weed scientists Bob Scott and Ken Smith of the University of Arkansas have noted that regular crop rotation inhibits pigweed’s consolidation: “Although Palmer amaranth plants produce a tremendous number of seed, the seed do not live long in the soil. One to two years of an alternate crop that can be kept Palmer amaranth-free will significantly reduce the population level of pigweeds.”

What will happen next? When Science magazine in 1977 proclaimed Amaranth the “plant of the future” it thought that its contribution to world nutrition would make it needful in areas where population stress and degraded soil prevailed. It hardly imagined it would become the scourge of American farmers. Yet all its promise remains as well as all its peril. 

One thing is sure, the plant will receive a scrutiny it has never heretofore endured, and from this careful examination, knowledge will surely arise of its potential for improvement, its natural limitations, and the vulnerabilities that will enable its spread to be controlled. For many Southern farmers this knowledge can’t come too quickly.

A Visit to Rodger Winn’s Tomato Paradise

Written By David S. Shields

Originally Published in the Rice Paper Newsletter, Spring 2012

Mention the words heirloom and vegetable in the same sentence, and the average listener will conjure the image of a tomato. The general interest in the heirloom tomato can be attributed to the general distaste for the common grocery store tomato. Thick-walled, mealy, taut-skinned, and reliably roundish, the tomato of commerce appeals to the eye, because of its pronounced red hue particularly in winter months, but not to the tongue. 

Those available in season in the east, come from Florida, Beaufort, S.C., or the eastern shore of Virginia, picked by migrant labor from leased fields doused with insecticide and fertilizer, sheeted in black plastic and harvested on a date determined by labor contract, not the ripeness of the produce. 

The commercial tomato is a product of convenience not an object of gastronomic regard. It is the null backdrop upon which the memory of tomatoes from old family gardens or vacation roadside stands shines. The heirloom tomato, whether a juicy gigantic beefsteak, a sugary black sandwich tomato, a mellow heirloom orange, or an acid and fresh Arkansas Traveler, commands attention for taste, configuration, and color.

All of the heirlooms date from after 1840, that moment when the tomato seized the palate of American diners, and the old landraces attracted the attention of horticulturists and seed brokers. Breeding for new tastes, shapes, and colors became a nationwide agricultural practice. From mid-century on, not a year passed when a new introduction captured the public fancy, making heirloom tomatoes one of the most ample and rich troves of vegetable/fruit creations of the past two centuries.

Many of the star tomatoes of past decades have disappeared entirely, supplanted by “improved” versions, or abandoned because of vulnerabilities to disease or insect depredation. Many varieties that went out of commercial seed production lived on, however, because of the preference of some local grower for its taste, look, or productivity. 

In the past decade a concerted effort by seed savers and botanical antiquarians have collected many of the surviving cultivars. One of the greatest conservators of the heirloom tomato is Rodger Winn of Little Mountain, S.C.

For a little over a decade, Rodger Winn, a retired nuclear engineer, has devoted his farm to the organic cultivation of landrace and heirloom legumes, grains, and vegetables. He became a seedsman performing grow-outs and trials of dozens of varieties for the likes of Baker Seeds, Southern Exposure Seeds, Fedco Seeds, and Heavenly Seeds. Like one of the great experimental planters of the 19th century, Winn grows an extraordinary range of items: honey drip sorghum, the Stone Mountain watermelon, the old long purple eggplant, brown cotton. But the rows of tomato plants and the poles of bean vines are the pride of his plantings.

Every year in late July/early August, during the week when the majority of his tomatoes achieve ripeness, Winn invites “those in the know” to his “Tomato Splat,” a tasting of his heirlooms on the lawns of his house. Long tables festooned with china plates, each filled with a variety of tomato identified by hand-lettered sign, provide the 100 or so guests with an instant education on the range of heirloom types. Visitors bring their own bread and condiments. Rodger Winn supplies the entertainment (a bluegrass band) and the tomatoes. At the invitation of Jim Kibler, scion of an old Carolina planting family whose land is near Whitmire, we attended the 2011 Splat. Protecting sandwiches from free-range chickens, we sampled an extraordinary range of tomatoes— at least 30 of the multitude of offerings. 

Winn’s tomatoes varieties serve a range of functions— some were bred originally as paste tomatoes (The Amish Paste deserves particular notice), some for drying, some for pickling. Of the salad and sandwich tomatoes we consumed, most concurred that the Black Tom and Cherokee Purple had special merit. Steve Kresovich thought the Heirloom Orange particularly piquant.

In order to offer such a panoply of varieties, one must have inspired a great deal of trust and done a fair amount of trading in the community of people that cherish old garden cultivars.

While tomatoes were the reason for coming to Little Mountain, I was particularly interested in seeing Winn’s legendary plantings of field peas and beans. The beds did not disappoint. Besides the southern standbys — Greasy Beans (from the Bradshaw Collection) and the Red Cranberry — there were rare family varieties like the Epting Bean and the Grandma Roberts Purple Pole Bean. The Limas and Sieva beans thrived in the hot muggy clime of the Carolina Piedmont. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen more variety in a single landscape. Because beans and field peas operated in the rotation plantings with the traditional southern landrace grains, ascertaining their qualities and agricultural effects is an important component of the restoration of fields and food in our region.

To view the seeds Rodger Winn makes available annually to the public, consult his website: http://www.rodgersheirlooms.com/index.html

Bringing Gold to Charleston

Written By Jimmy Hagood

Originally Published in the Rice Paper Newsletter, Spring 2012

 

Here are some of my thoughts from the experiences the Hagood Family had with the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, Charleston Gold Rice, and working with David Shields, Glenn Roberts, and Merle Shepard. 

We began speaking with Glenn in March 2008. I have known Glenn for the past 10 years, through the Southern Foodways Alliance and Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. He has always been so encouraging and helpful by assisting our family with the various aspects of planting, harvesting, milling, and reaching the market with a finished product. In our discussion in the early years, we were hesitant to begin the process. My father, Ben Hagood, was very concerned about committing our inland ricefields for rice harvest. Over the past 15 years we have reclaimed these historic fields for growing corn and millet and then flooding to support the wood duck and teal population. Our upper field is used as a reservoir especially in drought years. This would have been the field designated for growing CGR.

Beginning in 2011 our discussions resumed and what became apparent was the new strain, Charleston Gold Rice, would be well suited to plant in our lower field, the field that we drain each year after duck season and then plant with corn in the spring and flood in the fall. Because the Charleston Gold Rice is planted in dry conditions this seemed to be a perfect fit. 

After Glenn, Merle, and David visited our farm in January 2011, we began taking the steps for planting in late spring. We received shipment of the seed in late April and by mid-May we planted 4 acres of Charleston Gold. The field is predominately peat and we are able to keep most of these 80 acres moist by maintaining water in the perimeter and center canal throughout the summer.

By late September the crop was in very good condition. We began harvest in the second week of October. We learned that the AC 72 pull combine was difficult to use in the peat and moist soil. We even spent a day harvesting by hand with six men. Once the larger combine was secured the remaining plots were harvested in one day. In the four acres we sent 8,000 pounds to Anson Mills and Campbell Cox for milling. The yield was approximately 4,500 pound. We are now marketing this crop as the 2011 Lavington Farms Charleston Gold Aromatic Rice. We have distributed this product in 1-pound bags to most grocery stores in the Lowcountry. We have also sold in bulk to several local restaurants. 

See the attached product label that we developed with Clay Rice, the grandson of Carew rice. This family have been silhouette artists in Charleston for three generations.

We are excited about continuing our relationship with the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, Anson Mills, and others to produce the 2012 Charleston Gold crop. We have learned a tremendous amount in the past 12 months and look forward to farming this year’s crop. Thank you to all that has made this possible for the Hagood Family and Lavington Farms.