Everything old is new again. South Carolina's Josh Johnson grows classic favorites like purple hull peas and speckled butter beans at his Old Tyme Bean Co. But it's how he farms as much as what he farms that makes him special. Johnson is part of a new wave in farming called regenerative...
You've heard it your whole life — if you drop food, it's still clean and edible as long as you pick it up within 5 seconds. ACK! Nope, not true. Not even remotely, as we found out at the University of Georgia Center for Food Safety, which is part of the College of Agricultural and Environmental...
Milk. It does a body good. Got milk? How's your milk moustache holding up these days? Those are all familiar images from past advertising campaigns when milk was unquestionably something everybody used pretty much every day. Or so we thought. Turns out a lot of folks have problems digesting milk....
Corn is one of the world's staple crops, so important it sustains about half the world's population. So why did we wait until Episodes 44 and 45 to talk about it? We wanted to do it in the most impactful place possible. And there's nowhere in America they know more about sweet corn — the kind you...
There are three fundamental crops that sustain the world. Wheat and rice are everywhere of course but nothing shows up in more different forms on more different tables than corn. So why did we make 44 episodes of this show before we finally talked about it? Simple: We were waiting to meet the...
So you always thought we invented cold cut and cheese platters in modern times? Hold your roll — charcuterie is an ancient art that stretches back to 14th Century France! But it's had a real renaissance of late. To make great charcuterie, you have to have great meats. And we found an amazing...
It's the oldest story we know — the birds and the bees. We don't need the birds to grow our food, but without the bees we'd be in a lot of trouble. About a third of all crops require direct pollination by bees, including 70 of the top 100 primary sources of our food. Take away the bees, you take...
We import a lot of the food we eat. Fortunately for farmers, we export a lot, too. We think of endless lines of trucks streaming in across our southern border bringing in fruits and veggies from Central and South America, and that certainly happens. But for longer trips, larger loads, nothing...
The Vidalia onion has been around for some 90 years — but no one outside of the area ever heard of it until the mid-1980s when it became available nationally. That doesn't mean there weren't farmers and farm families in the Vidalia region who'd been plowing the land there for generations. It just...
Fifty years ago, no one had even heard of a Vidalia onion: it's the result of maybe the happiest accident in food and farming history. Seems back in the 1930s, a farmer in Vidalia, GA had promised an onion crop to the local Piggly Wiggly. A late freeze took out the crop. No more onion seedlings...
