Exploring Landrace Heirloom Grains & Sustainable Farming | Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills

In this episode of Chefs Without Restaurants, Chris Spear is joined by Glenn Roberts, the founder of Anson Mills, a company renowned for its dedication to preserving landrace crops and advancing sustainable farming practices. Glenn shares his fascinating journey from a career in restaurant design and management to becoming a passionate advocate for biosecurity and traditional farming methods.

Topics Discussed:

• The Importance of Landrace Crops: A deep dive into what landrace crops are, their significance in agriculture, and why preserving these varieties is crucial for food security and biodiversity.
• Sustainable Farming Practices: The challenges and rewards of growing heritage grains like Carolina Gold rice, and how polyculture and biosecurity play a role in modern farming.
• The Intersection of Traditional Farming and Modern Challenges: Glenn and Chris explore the impact of climate change on farming and the importance of maintaining traditional agricultural practices in a rapidly changing world.
• Polycropping and Agricultural Diversity: How planting multiple crops together can enhance soil health, increase yield stability, and provide a more resilient farming system.
• The Role of Community in Sustainable Agriculture: Glenn shares insights on how local communities can engage with and support sustainable farming practices, and the importance of understanding where our food comes from.

GLENN ROBERTS and ANSON MILLS
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Transcript

 Chefs Without Restaurants - Glenn Roberts

[00:00:00] Chris Spear: Today I'm joined by Glenn Roberts, the founder of Anson Mills. This episode gets a little nerdy and it runs a little longer than some of my episodes. So I want to keep this intro short. If you're new to the show, this is Chris Spear and you're listening to Chefs Without Restaurants, the show where I speak with culinary entrepreneurs and people working in the food and beverage industry outside of a traditional restaurant setting.

[00:00:21] Chris Spear: I have 32 years of working in kitchens, but not restaurants and operate a personal chef service during dinner parties in the Washington DC area. I'm Chris Spear. Nothing against any of my other podcast guests, but this was one of my favorite conversations. For years, I've been interested in what Glenn's doing, and he's such a wealth of knowledge.

[00:00:40] Chris Spear: Of course, now that I live in Maryland, which is the quasi South, I do a lot of cooking with those ingredients like grits and, uh, Carolina gold rice. This is less of a back and forth conversation. I wanted to do more of the guiding or steering the ship, if you will, and give Glenn the opportunity to really dig into some [00:01:00] of these topics.

[00:01:01] Chris Spear: We cover a wide range, from the difference between grits and polenta to the terroir of corn. Glenn sheds light on the crucial distinctions between landrace, heirloom, and heritage crops. Those are terms I see thrown around all the time, and I really wanted him to break it down, and he does that for us today.

[00:01:18] Chris Spear: We discuss the importance of biosecurity and our changing climate, the challenges of monoculture vs. polyculture, the complexities of hominy, and how these agricultural practices tie into global food security and hunger. We also talk about the role of GMOs in today's food system. That's a lot. I think this episode is a deep dive into the intersection of traditional farming and the modern challenges we have today.

[00:01:43] Chris Spear: I really hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, I'd love to hear from you. The easiest way is to find me on social media. You can easily reach out to me on Instagram or threads at ChessWithoutRestaurants. And if you love the show, there's a couple of things you can do. First and foremost, just [00:02:00] share it.

[00:02:00] Chris Spear: Tell people about the show, let people know it's out there. And if you want to take an extra step, ratings and reviews always help the show grow. And as the show grows, that helps me get more guests. As always, I appreciate your time. Thanks so much for listening and have a great week. Hey, Glenn, welcome to the show.

[00:02:17] Chris Spear: Thanks so much for coming on. 

[00:02:19] Glenn Roberts: It's great, Chris. Thank you. Look forward to our discussion today. 

[00:02:23] Chris Spear: Yeah, absolutely. You're someone whose work I've followed for a number of years. You know, it's interesting. I'm not a southerner. I'm in Maryland now, but I grew up in New England and, you know, I moved down here in 2007.

[00:02:34] Chris Spear: And for me, one of the things as a chef that was important was You know, what is Southern food? What is Southern food ways like? And obviously if you're going to be studying, you know, looking into Southern food and Southern food ways, I think people are probably going to find their way to Anson Mills these days.

[00:02:49] Glenn Roberts: That happens. And, uh, just, uh, to give you some peace of mind right up front. Uh, when you look at the history of Southern food, um, [00:03:00] after our revolution and so much before that, too, uh, rice was driving everything. And Maryland was a major producer. Just so you know, I had no idea, 

[00:03:12] Chris Spear: actually. 

[00:03:13] Glenn Roberts: Yeah. People usually don't think about Maryland and rice, but during the colonial era and definitely, uh, after our revolution, Maryland was a huge player.

[00:03:24] Glenn Roberts: In fact, Uh, the first, uh, three after the War of 1812, where they drafted the enslaved from Maryland who were all in the rice communities up there, uh, and then Savannah and the surrounding of Fusky Sea Islands, uh, in the Savannah region up to almost Charleston. Uh, that whole community moved to what we know as Ethiopia today.

[00:03:53] Glenn Roberts: Uh, after, after the war of 1812, they fought valiantly and they gained their freedom from it and [00:04:00] colonized Africa. 

[00:04:01] Chris Spear: I had no idea. This is what I love about the podcast is like picking up this information, you know, the history of the world via food and foodways. 

[00:04:09] Glenn Roberts: Well, the, the interesting thing was then Carolina gold rice went from Maryland, uh, to, uh, the islands.

[00:04:20] Glenn Roberts: Uh, one of the communities moved to what we know today as Trinidad and they still exist as their own community and they still grow their own rice down there, although they're not growing Carolina gold. Is there 

[00:04:31] Chris Spear: not enough Carolina gold? Like why is Carolina gold, not the rice that we see everywhere? Why do we go in the grocery stores and it's just, you know, long grain, short grain that comes from God knows where.

[00:04:40] Chris Spear: And why do we not have Carolina gold rice everywhere? 

[00:04:43] Glenn Roberts: That's a good question. I mean, right off the bat, Carolina gold is right on the cusp. It's almost a medium grain, but it was the first. Widely distributed place based identity preserved long grain of our continent and continents, if you want to get technical, [00:05:00] uh, cause it was, uh, it lasted longer in commercial production in South America than it did up here.

[00:05:07] Glenn Roberts: And the reason why Carolina gold is not in stores all the time is because it stands between five and a half and seven feet tall, depending on season. And it can blow down really easily as long as you don't manage it right, which is, uh, you know, normal. Rate per acre for rice is up in the hundreds of pounds, a hundred pound plus, and Carolina Gold doesn't like being more than 70 pounds an acre, and its production then, uh, is about one fifth minimum of what normal modern rices are.

[00:05:39] Glenn Roberts: Uh, but it was never meant to grow by itself. You know, they always co cropped it with things. Uh, we don't hear much about it these days, but it was meant to grow with peas and benny and all the rest of it, and it was never grown totally in flood on purpose. It was grown in intermittent flood. 

[00:05:57] Chris Spear: So is it grown down there, um, with other crops?[00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Chris Spear: Like is that how you're growing it with benny and other things? 

[00:06:03] Glenn Roberts: It is. Uh, and we do a ton of research, uh, with what's called polycropping. Uh, I guess the broad population in our country might understand it more from a native perspective, uh, of native people, where the Milpa system, uh, is their version of polyculture.

[00:06:25] Glenn Roberts: But we had the African polyculture system, which It's called the Sun Cycle. And in the Sun Cycle, there were up to 14 plants in any one field, all managed by hand. And the harvest was by hand, too, obviously. So the densities, before they started really pushing yields, after the Revolutionary War, the densities And bionutrition per acre or hectare, depending on who's talking, uh, were incredible because of polyculture.

[00:06:57] Glenn Roberts: So it's okay to have, you know, [00:07:00] 30 bushels of rice if you got 30 bushels of legumes, 30 bushels of brassicas, etc, etc. They had tubers in the system and they were all, all those plants had all the tolerances so they could handle drought, flood, etc, etc, etc. High pH, low pH, shade. A lot of shade tolerant plants in our polyculture system coming out of Africa because the rice was shading everything because it was so tall.

[00:07:27] Chris Spear: How did you get into all this? I guess, you know, I'm sure most of our listeners, at least many of them are familiar with you and your products. I don't want to get too far back in the weeds with history, but I guess for a little context, how did you get involved in the farming business? 

[00:07:42] Glenn Roberts: Well, I had a company called Restaurant Design and Management, which built hotels and restaurants all over the country, did some work overseas too, but the bottom line was, um, I just got tired of being on airplanes and I was working on a project in [00:08:00] Charleston and I looked out at the bay and I said, you know, I'm going to go sailing and I don't ever want to get on an airplane again.

[00:08:06] Glenn Roberts: Uh, so I never left, uh, you know, just moved to Charleston at that point and, uh, moved to Folly Beach and everything was fine and I was still commuting out, like my farthest commute was Atlanta for a while and I didn't even envy that, even though I love Atlanta. You know, I wanted to be in one place. So it started there.

[00:08:30] Glenn Roberts: And then all hell broke loose when I was working with the restaurant community, which is still existing, although I'm not involved with them anymore. But we were working with the old pink house in Savannah, which is still there, and it had been abandoned by its prior owners. And the group I was working with bought it, and they asked me to okay, Do the first stage, uh, low capital fix up, which was really low capital.

[00:08:59] Glenn Roberts: I think the budget was [00:09:00] below a quarter million and it's a three, four property for, if you count the basement, because it's actually a bar down there. So I was working on that and the Smithsonian, uh, said, well, that's a historic landmark and you need to start reading something about where you are. Um, and I met John T.

[00:09:18] Glenn Roberts: Edge, who's, uh, one of the founders of the Southern Foodways Alliance. He said, you're just woefully uninformed about where you are. I said, well, my mom like grew up here, you know, and he said, okay. So he asked me a couple of questions. He said, well, your mom grew up there. She probably could answer these questions.

[00:09:37] Glenn Roberts: You're not, you need to be able to. And the next thing I know, I'm looking at the history of the foods in Savannah, which includes Carolina gold rice. And I'm going, where's the rice. And John Martin Taylor was working on it at that time. And had started to really do some research and bring some light to Carolina Gold Rice.

[00:09:58] Glenn Roberts: And a guy named Dick [00:10:00] Schultz, who was a Savannah ophthalmologist, um, a surgeon, um, owned, uh, some, a farm across the Savannah River from Savannah named Turnbridge. And he and his wife used to come to dinner at one of the restaurants I was working with every Sunday afternoon. They'd walk in, sometimes be covered in mud and stuff, and I was, like, thrilled to see them because I couldn't imagine what, I thought they were hunting.

[00:10:28] Glenn Roberts: Alright, but he was actually working on his own rice field, and it was Carolina Gold. And I didn't know, and he brought me some, and I tasted it, and I went, Oh, whoa, where have I been? What is this? He said, It's the rice of the Carolinas. You don't know anything about that? And Ended up writing a book about it and I ended up working, uh, on that farm with, uh, his son, Richard Schultz Jr.,

[00:10:54] Glenn Roberts: who is still a really good friend and brilliant too. And, um, the [00:11:00] people that ran that farm, uh, Roland Chalmers and his wife Frances, uh, kind of low level running it, uh, from their perspective because they grew up in rice culture and they'd been involved in rice culture in that region. Their families had for multiple generations.

[00:11:19] Glenn Roberts: So I was working in the fields with the snakes and alligators and Roland trying to understand how the rice worked. And it ended up that I just burned all my business clothes and said, Okay, I'm growing Carolina Gold rice and quit and formed what turned into Anson Mills. So it all started with the rice for you.

[00:11:38] Glenn Roberts: It all started with the rice and the Smithsonian, who's still a massive historic advocate. In fact, they're about to do something in Savannah again. They it's Chris Wilson at the Smithsonian is, you know, he's a polymath on top of everything else. He's a world class filmmaker and he runs a major section of the national, [00:12:00] uh, museum.

[00:12:02] Glenn Roberts: And part of that's the African American Museum, which he was heavily involved in, and he actually is a ox rice farmer. He was trained to do so at the Ford Museum and Preserve in Michigan, and then went to Savannah to work with the Ford family south of Savannah, doing ox rice farming interpretation. He was actually growing rice with oxen.

[00:12:29] Glenn Roberts: And he's taught it. Even when he went to work at the Smithsonian, he kept teaching at Acogeek, which is right across in the Delmarva Peninsula from Washington, DC. And I think he still occasionally will go over and do demos and show people about driving oxen and plowing and things like that, which is really cool.

[00:12:49] Glenn Roberts: Uh, so I just stumbled across a bunch of people who were very resourceful. Uh, and I think it all started honestly with John Martin Taylor. I bumped into in a library [00:13:00] somewhere. Um, and he was like going through rice books and he was actually looking at a book I wanted to look at and I said, who are you?

[00:13:07] Glenn Roberts: And he said, Oh, I'm a journalist. I'm, I work in Providence, Rhode Island. I said, what are you doing here? Cause this was in Charleston and it just went dominoed from there. It's just a succession of incredibly talented people. I ended up meeting Merle Shepard who had worked at International Rice Research Center with Gurdjieff Cush, the number one rice geneticist on the world.

[00:13:27] Glenn Roberts: And Merle introduced me to Gurdjieff. And Gerdef introduced me to Anna McClung, who is the number one rice geneticist on our continents. Over the last decade, she just retired in June of 23. But I still work with her. She's still a genius. And I just sit around and They laugh at me mostly because I'm not smart enough to hang with them on a professional level.

[00:13:49] Glenn Roberts: I'm sure you do okay. But I get to hang with the best people. So given that perspective and the fact that John T. Edge told me if I didn't start reading I'd get run down, [00:14:00] I just read my butt off and worked in the field. The other one was don't do book farming. You know, you can't get it from a book. You can read it in a book, but what you actually do in the field is going to be different no matter what the book says.

[00:14:13] Chris Spear: Yeah, I think that's applicable to most fields, isn't it? You just kind of have to roll up your sleeves and get in there and do it. 

[00:14:19] Glenn Roberts: And, you know, I, my dad, when he found out I was to rice farming, he went, I can't believe it. He said, I spent my entire youth trying to get off the farm and here you are. 

[00:14:33] Chris Spear: Food's important.

[00:14:34] Chris Spear: I mean, you know, I'm, I've been in the food industry forever, but it's so interesting because I think to the lay person, they don't realize the thought that's going into these things. You know, you just, an average person, I think just goes to the grocery store, buys their stuff and they don't really kind of see the behind the scenes of, you know, what's going on and the developments and people working in these industries and on the farms doing these things.

[00:14:56] Glenn Roberts: Well, it's, it, it's interesting, [00:15:00] uh, because climate challenges. are seemingly, or were seemingly when I started, this is 25 years ago, were seemingly more present for rice than any other challenges. And I think any farmer that's quote unquote specializing in something, and I learned immediately that you couldn't just grow rice, so.

[00:15:23] Glenn Roberts: The challenges were multiplied by polyculture and trying to do lots of crops and maintain native tilth instead of using chemical or other fertilizers. You actually let the soil and the plants do the work with nature. And we planted, back then, we planted more for wildlife than we did for humans because the wildlife eat all the human food if we didn't.

[00:15:44] Glenn Roberts: So, um, you end up doing all kinds of things you don't anticipate. By the same token, you're always Thinking, you know, well, what do I do next year? What if I [00:16:00] have catastrophic loss? And you know, only took two years before we had catastrophic loss, and I learned a big lesson about not being in one place and farming in multiple places.

[00:16:11] Glenn Roberts: And that's evolved to where we're farming all over the United States now. 

[00:16:15] Chris Spear: And so you're also actively planting things to keep the wildlife satisfied, so they stay away from your stuff? 

[00:16:22] Glenn Roberts: Yeah, they're called decoy fields. Yeah, you have to. In the Ace Basin, well, the Ace Basin, there's a lot of dramatic language around the Ace Basin, but you can disappear down there pretty easy.

[00:16:32] Glenn Roberts: There's one in everything there. Uh, great big snakes and alligators and everything else, and those Those animals, reptiles, all like to be fed. Alligators love to live and hang out in rice fields because nobody can see them. So, they'll bed down out there. Deer like to bed down because nobody can see them.

[00:16:54] Glenn Roberts: So, the alligators and the deer may be sleeping in the same bloody field and nobody knows it until somebody makes a wrong [00:17:00] move. And it's probably the deer that makes the wrong move. Yeah. It's, uh, always true, but the bottom line for all that is. You tend to magnify the chances for yield at three miles an hour in a tractor.

[00:17:21] Glenn Roberts: Your success goes up as you spend more time on a tractor because of the slowness. I don't know how many people out there do this, but if you're used to farming, you're in a tractor for like six hours, you get off, you've been going three miles an hour, you get in your car and you look down and you're doing 15 and think you're doing 60.

[00:17:38] Glenn Roberts: Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, that happens a lot. And the other side of that coin is the same thing is true about environmental, quote unquote, threats versus environmental rewards. The rewards, if you take the highest pinnacle reward, would be to see the aura. In the sunset, [00:18:00] thrown up in a gold halo over a Carolina gold rice field because at maturity, the hulls are gold.

[00:18:07] Glenn Roberts: That's why it's called Carolina gold. And they will reflect light up into the atmosphere and if you have a big enough field, it actually makes a halo over the field and you can see it. So that's something that used to be present in a navigation aid, it was so present, but there's no Carolina Gold rice growing enough to actually make that a consistent thing anymore.

[00:18:27] Chris Spear: I've never even seen rice grow. 

[00:18:29] Glenn Roberts: Ah, well, uh, we should get you from where you are to one of the rice fields, uh, on the coast. In Maryland soon. 

[00:18:38] Chris Spear: Yeah. Well, and we, um, my sister in law lives in South Carolina. She was in Charleston for the past 15 years and now she's down in Beaufort. So we almost every year we're down that way.

[00:18:47] Chris Spear: Well, you're surrounded by our rice fields and a bunch of others too. Yeah. That's cool. I have to make it a part part culinary trip, get out of the restaurants and out into the fields. 

[00:18:57] Glenn Roberts: Yeah. Well, I'm around give me a ring [00:19:00] when you're down there, the, the, we farm right outside of Buford. So. 

[00:19:03] Chris Spear: But now you clearly have, you know, corn, you've got grits, you've got field peas.

[00:19:08] Chris Spear: You have such a wide variety of products. Uh, how fast was that scaling? Like once you started planting other crops, it had just, was it kind of a slow grow or was it like all of a sudden we're going to put three new things in at once? 

[00:19:21] Glenn Roberts: Well, the one, I couldn't get enough seed to plant enough rice to actually make an income.

[00:19:28] Glenn Roberts: So the stupid decision I made, which turned out to be not so stupid, but it seemed like a stupid decision, I'll grow corn, I'll mill grits until I can get the rice up and running. And I was thinking only in monoculture because, frankly, I didn't know anything. Um, So we started growing really old corn. Um, people were really nice to us as far as seed access goes.

[00:19:51] Glenn Roberts: So I was very lucky. Um, and we did historic mazes of the South Carolina urban and [00:20:00] then rural, uh, cultures. Uh, and just followed that and then fell into native culture, which there isn't any maize culture that isn't native anyhow, which is something I hadn't even thought about until I really got into it.

[00:20:12] Glenn Roberts: I don't know why, uh, but we ended up doing the three sisters things, waiting for rice to mature out and have enough seed to plant enough to actually start milling. So we went two years. Uh, growing corn and making grits and doing cornmeal. And it was interesting, uh, we didn't have the attention of anybody in our immediate region, but Annie, uh, at Balconalia in Atlanta was interested, then Charlie Trotter was interested, and then, heh, heh, then Tom Keller called up and said, Any chance, uh, you guys would do polenta?

[00:20:53] Glenn Roberts: And I said, okay, so we talked to Bob Klein, who's got N Cal Growers now, that he was just, as a [00:21:00] restaurateur back then, he wasn't farming or milling. Uh, now he's one of the biggest millers in the Northern California. God bless him, I hope they come through this okay. Speaking of which, uh, we've got, I don't know when this airs, but we've got some problems on the West Coast.

[00:21:17] Glenn Roberts: Again. Um, anyhow, those people, uh, made the requests, you know, we wouldn't have ever done polenta had Keller not said no one out here is ever going to buy grits. Well, that turned out not to be true. 

[00:21:30] Chris Spear: I have a quick question while we're there, because I want to know what, in your opinion, the difference between polenta and grits are, and even, I think like two years ago, if you went to the regular grocery store, Bob's Red Mill, it said polenta slash grits on the bag.

[00:21:44] Chris Spear: Like it was the same thing. And to me, they didn't. They weren't, I wouldn't use them as grits. It was definitely for me, polenta and now it's called polenta. So, you know, is it semantics? Where is the line between polenta and grits? 

[00:21:57] Glenn Roberts: Um, it depends on how nerdy you would like to get. [00:22:00] You can get a little nerdy.

[00:22:02] Glenn Roberts: Okay. Well, in it, how much history you want to honor when you think about polenta? Basso basso polenta is low, low and slow. And anybody that really loves Italian food, certainly on a chef level, knows that's what polenta means, just means slow, uh, slow, slow and low. Uh, so that means the cookery because it emanates from native maize where the clay pot would break if you put it too near the heat.

[00:22:30] Glenn Roberts: Uh, so it was always a slow cook. So, two hours for producing grits or polenta, no big deal. Cause you got some kid stirring the pot, or shaking the pot, depending on what you're talking about. So, the difference between grits and polenta is absolutely nothing, according to the US government. Everything, and when you see polenta and grits on a bag, it's okay to say that, cause that's legal under USDA definitions, because it's ground maize.[00:23:00]

[00:23:00] Glenn Roberts: They can be cornmeal, everything, grits are cornmeal, grits are polenta, grits are this, that, and the other thing. If we go to Italy and look back at our country, no one would say that, it's Cucina Povero. And how did it ever, it started as a super elite thing and immediately went to Cucina Povero, meaning the cuisine of poverty.

[00:23:20] Glenn Roberts: Because it was so easy to grow and so prolific. And they realized immediately, uh, it was introduced through Venice. And went up to Lombardy and then went over to Trasimeno where, you know, the peas and corn became familiar in African culture there. They were already familiar in African culture down in Africa.

[00:23:41] Glenn Roberts: But if you look at the progress of quote unquote Palenta in Italy, essentially it evolves when you get nerdy to the place based identity preserved ideas of where the maze happens. The easiest way to understand it is New England, 8 Row Flint, [00:24:00] is Otofile in Italy. It's the same corn. But honestly, because land race, meaning those things selected hand to hand over centuries or millennia, will reflect terroir, like wine grapes, we don't do that with our staples anymore.

[00:24:20] Glenn Roberts: We don't talk about corn like we talk about wine. But in Italy, corn is like wine. It's where it's grown, how it's handled, and who selected it. Because it changes. If you plant corn here, it's going to be a different flavor over there, if it hasn't been bred to a farthy well by Mendelian, CRISPR, or other genetic modification, on and on and on.

[00:24:46] Glenn Roberts: They don't flex like any other plant. Quote unquote, land race mazes do. Land race means it's hand selected and it's selected because it reacts to the local terroir, just like wine grapes. And who [00:25:00] thinks about mill goods? Like wine. And the answer is, winemakers do. When we started, the best mill goods you could get in California were being done by winemakers because they cared about flavor expression and terroir because that's what they did for a living.

[00:25:19] Glenn Roberts: And it was very difficult to get their attention past that. To talk about, well, shouldn't the American public have this too? And that's what Keller was interested in. That's what all of us were interested in back then. And the bottom line is If you get nerdy, it's place based, identity preserved, reflecting terroir.

[00:25:42] Glenn Roberts: There's no difference between cereals. If they're really good and they're flexible, meaning that they've been selected by hand for centuries or millennia, they will react to where they're grown. The season, the kind of soil, whatever. You know, they even, you can even have interdiction with animals will [00:26:00] actually change.

[00:26:01] Glenn Roberts: We've seen this, where you allow wildlife to graze on purpose, We've seen a difference in aroma flavor profile. On that side of the field versus where we have a 15 to 17 foot tall fence where they can't get in there and mess around. 

[00:26:16] Chris Spear: I love that stuff. I didn't grow up eating grits. Actually, my mom went to a boarding school for high school and I guess they made her eat hominy grits and it was probably instant, you know, back in like the forties or something.

[00:26:27] Chris Spear: So she hated them so much that I grew up and that was literally, I think the only thing she said was not allowed in our house was grits. So I hadn't even had grits until I met my wife, who's from Virginia. Uh, I was like 23 years old or something, but I think in general, it gets a bad rap. Like I, you know, I'm a private chef.

[00:26:47] Chris Spear: I ask customers what they want. And when you talk about grits, it's like, love them or hate them. And a lot of people, I think maybe have only had instant grits, maybe only cooked with, I don't know, water, no seasoning. It just seems to be one of those things that people have a [00:27:00] predisposed opinion about. Um, you're, you're Your website, I think I was checking out, you have like 17 different types of grits, which I think speaks to what grits truly are, as opposed to just this very not delicious cornmeal mush that some people are equating grits with.

[00:27:15] Glenn Roberts: Well, you touched on two things that are super important. One, how many grits? Uh, the word hominy in, uh, urban south speak, uh, is a dish of cooked, non nixtamalized grits. Whereas hominy grits can also be grits made from corn that has been nixtamalized, otherwise cooked. Soaked in, uh, what used to be wood ash, uh, in the ash barrel, in the rain barrel, and then you pull the corn out and cook it, and that, uh, helps in niacin and other flavonoid conversion, uh, for both, uh, expression [00:28:00] of flavor across the board and nutrition across the board.

[00:28:02] Glenn Roberts: So how many grits can get really confusing? Just like everything else, the xenophobia is daunting and frustrating when you start digging in, but how many grits the way they were advertised could mean just straight milled corn, you know, and could be very coarse or it could be very fine. Uh, and then if you go to the industrial processes where the corn is actually de germed.

[00:28:31] Glenn Roberts: So they're taking most of the flavor components out of it, and then it's further processed and cooked and then released as quote unquote quick grits, uh, there's hardly any flavor left in those at all. They're just pavum. You know, they're, they're very peptic, I'll give it that. There was a reason to do it, sorta, kinda, maybe, I never understood it, but the bottom line is, that doesn't have anything to do with true culture when you're actually working Maze that [00:29:00] people have kept as an identity for their own families.

[00:29:05] Glenn Roberts: That is a totally different thing. And it leads, you get to do all kinds of fun things from making hominy with it, which is phenomenal when you have really good corn to do it. Uh, every, you said, you know, 17 grits. We probably have a lot more than that, uh, as far as custom goes because 60 percent of our chef orders are custom.

[00:29:25] Glenn Roberts: Wow. Not even what's on the, I think there's a hundred and some items offered on the website. There's another hundred behind it that aren't offered on there, plus the custom stuff we do. It's nuts, but we have all this stuff. I'd say we have at least 30 different kinds of maize that we can use for both research, which is the number one thing we do, um, and we do that pro bono, by the way, and all of our seed is pro bono too, so we've never charged anybody for seed in a quarter century.

[00:29:52] Glenn Roberts: So that's our mission. 

[00:29:54] Chris Spear: And use the term land race. Like, yeah, do you still use the term heritage or heirloom? And I know some [00:30:00] people use even the term like ancient grains is, are, are you moving away from the term? And is there a difference between like heirloom and land race? 

[00:30:09] Glenn Roberts: Great question. And the answer is yes, generally.

[00:30:12] Glenn Roberts: And it started in New Jersey. So not far from where you are now. Um, they had these beautiful tomatoes in New Jersey that were hybrid, but they're the first. tranche of hybrid genetic breeding, um, and that happened in the early fifties in New Jersey. And New Jersey is famous in the New York markets, et cetera, et cetera, for its produce, as we all know.

[00:30:36] Glenn Roberts: So they were bringing, uh, they had heirloom tomatoes, which had just been done by hand. No Mendelian or other kind of genetic crosses. They just were selected by hand. And then they had Mendelian crosses starting in the 50s, and those hybrid tomatoes, quote unquote, could not be called heirlooms. [00:31:00] Somehow it evolved to the way I understand it to this day, and I've looked at this a zillion different ways, but the bottom line is I think generally, We all think about heirlooms being something that came to market before a 50 year point.

[00:31:20] Glenn Roberts: When we were in the 70s, 80s, 90s, you put a half century on that, you're pre Mendelian pretty much. So you could say heirloom was still passed hand to hand. When we got into the aughts and now we're in the twenties, uh, 50 years ago, well, we're talking 1970 now, the hybrid revolution was huge by then and no one called that heirloom except the definition seems to have been the 50 year point.

[00:31:52] Glenn Roberts: So they started putting these early New Jersey heirloom tomatoes. And, but they were actually hybrid tomatoes, [00:32:00] small change there, but the big change would be when you have super bred hybrid tomatoes that have no flavor character whatsoever. They're red and they kind of do tomato work kind of sort of maybe, but they don't have any distinctive aroma flavor profile or place based conveyance and how they taste, what they look like, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:32:20] Glenn Roberts: I 

[00:32:20] Chris Spear: can go find those in the grocery store today. They're beautiful. They're red, they're plump and you eat them and they don't taste like a tomato. 

[00:32:25] Glenn Roberts: Yeah, and some of them are so weird texture wise, you can actually use them as tennis balls, and we've done that. So, you know, the bottom line is, and no harm, no foul, you know, whatever gets food on the table these days, I'm not so sure, to go to your kind of nuanced question, I'm not so sure I'm nearly as Dedicated to, it's got to be this or that anymore because of the threats we have.

[00:32:51] Glenn Roberts: What's going on in California right now. What was going on in Charleston three weeks ago where no one knew it [00:33:00] and they woke up and there were six feet of water all over downtown and no one even knew it was coming. The U. S., U. S. Weather Service didn't know, the Coast Guard didn't know, nobody knew. You know, you're gonna talk about freaky?

[00:33:13] Glenn Roberts: You got six feet of water in your front yard, and it's all through your house on the first floor, and you're going, whoa, you know, that's something. If you don't call it climate change, which they're, you know, the atmospheric rivers are not technically called climate change results yet. But when you think about that, I'm not as nearly dedicated to whatever can grow, and specifically what should grow, as I used to be, even though I still haven't walked away from the fact that Aroma Flavor Profile belongs to those things developed by hand, by people.

[00:33:49] Glenn Roberts: And not in a lab, uh, and I have a lot of people that argue with me that, about that all the time, including one of my best friends and the coolest person I've ever worked with, Anna McClung, [00:34:00] who's post doc in genetics for corn, maize, wheat, and rice. She knows it all, and she'll tell me I'm full of it. That, you know, she can breed stuff just as pretty as I can do with Landrace.

[00:34:14] Glenn Roberts: So the difference between Heirloom and Landrace would be, there are hybrids now that are Mendelian in Heirlooms, and it's okay to call them Heirlooms. But if it's Landrace, it means you did it with your hands, and your eyes, and your mouth. You know, you did it with taste and you did it with the way you feel too.

[00:34:33] Glenn Roberts: We forget that one because nutrition comes into it immediately when you're talking about substance and trying to persevere and famine, et cetera, et cetera. All of it plays a game in land race. Whereas in heirloom stuff, there's targets. Um, that are Mendelian now and hybrid and then not too long from now, we're going to have super hybrids in that same class and they'll still be heirlooms technically under that definition.[00:35:00]

[00:35:00] Glenn Roberts: Sorry to get long winded about it, but 

[00:35:02] Chris Spear: no, I think it's an important distinction. And, you know, it's one of those, you see the terms kind of thrown around almost arbitrarily from people. And it's like, what is heirloom grains even mean, you know, or land race? 

[00:35:13] Glenn Roberts: Yeah. Land race. is a definite. It means that it was selected with eyes and hands.

[00:35:19] Glenn Roberts: That's the one we use, and frankly it's not a term that may be in your world out there a lot. I still don't hear a lot of people using it if they're not actually in the seed business. Um, and that would mean that they're actually in the land raised seed business, which is a whole different business than the other seed businesses that are doing hybrid work.

[00:35:41] Chris Spear: Has the food system food system gone so far that this isn't even something that's going to ever trickle down to the general population. You know, I'm, I'm in the food business. You see this in restaurants. You hear chefs talk about this, but then, you know, people are going to walmart and buying these giant bags of commodity flour and, you know, [00:36:00] rock bottom prices.

[00:36:01] Chris Spear: And most people aren't buying It's These products and they're somewhat seen as like a luxury ingredient, if you will, even though they're not that expensive compared to some of the other things out there. Like, I feel like there's a little disconnect. If these things are so good for you, like, if they have more nutrition than a lot of the commodity grains and produce, um, and it's good for the environment, like, are we going to Okay.

[00:36:23] Chris Spear: See a day when people, you know, your average next door neighbors got a bag of, you know, Carolina gold rice or something like that. Or is it because I still see it as something that like high end chefs are serving in their restaurants and not on everyone's dinner table. 

[00:36:38] Glenn Roberts: You're Uh, I think exactly right.

[00:36:41] Glenn Roberts: One, if you think about a rice that's doing a hundred bushels an acre versus one that's doing fifteen, uh, you have to think about where are the price points and, uh, unabashedly I think Anson Mills and our price points because of what we have to do to do it and the fact that we don't [00:37:00] monetize seed and chefs know this, that's why We're charging so much because we do biosecurity.

[00:37:06] Glenn Roberts: Would Carolina Gold Rice be here now if there weren't a biosecure effort behind it? And the answer is, I don't know, but my guess would be no. And the biosecure effort has to be between geneticists and seed master growers who take care of the small things and keep it true type, meaning it still is Carolina Gold, it tastes like, looks like, and cooks like Carolina Gold.

[00:37:31] Glenn Roberts: If you use that as an example, will that ever be commoditized? And the answer is very complicated these days, but it drops to a very simple statement. What's actually going to survive here? I went to the White House, John Podesta looked all of us in the eyes and was like, 30 of us there and then a hundred staffers or something.

[00:37:54] Glenn Roberts: I frankly, I'm not even sure why I went, uh, but they asked me to go. So Podesta just [00:38:00] got up on the stand and did a five minute, just said, we're screwed, we're behind, we're not moving fast enough. And it's time to start moving. And I looked around and I thought it was supposed to be all for food people, but most of the people there were in emergency management or land retention.

[00:38:20] Glenn Roberts: I don't know how many other food producers were there. I'm not even sure why I was invited. Uh, because everybody there but me was grant seeking. I'm grant giving. I don't take grants. So I'm not, still to this minute, sort of confused, but the thing that Podesta said, who's now taking Carey's place, by the way, is pretty stark.

[00:38:44] Glenn Roberts: He just said, we're not moving fast enough. get faster. So when I hear this uh, discussion about will we get Carolinagol rice on the table, my immediate reaction these days is not to [00:39:00] hyper analyze that and or start running down the road screaming with my hair on fire that will there be any rice on the table, forget what kind of rice it is.

[00:39:09] Glenn Roberts: But, if you look at it hard, if you're in Indonesia, you got a problem. If you're in rice country in California today, you got a problem, don't you? Because your land is washing out to sea, because it's got hyper floods. Is that climate change? I don't know. But it's happening, and it's happening with more frequency, and wildfires are happening with more frequency.

[00:39:35] Glenn Roberts: I've had tons, we have 200 plus farmers in research and or production in the United States All of them have had an episode of something in the last five years. I mean, nasty something. How does that compare to time before that? Well, wildfires have always been around, but not with this frequency. Floods and catastrophic weather events have been around on coastal regions [00:40:00] and other places forever.

[00:40:03] Glenn Roberts: But not with this frequency. When I think about that, I go back to what Podesta said at the White House and go, Well, he wasn't saying that for the audience, his hair's on fire, he's running down the road, and we're all gonna die. He was saying that because he wants us to step up. So I think the real question would be, We're not concerned whether Carolina Gold Rice ever gets on the table if it takes 135 days to harvest it.

[00:40:29] Glenn Roberts: We want it to stay as an identification for history and culinary and we don't want to lose that aroma flavor profile because it's really important. By the same token, we also want to be able to do stuff that works when a catastrophic event happens. And that means if we've got 130 Eight day rice to maturity and harvest out of the field from planting.

[00:40:55] Glenn Roberts: Do we have one that'll do it in 40 days? And can we [00:41:00] concentrate on that too and still keep our eyes? Glued on where we're going, and the answer is we got to learn how to walk and talk and chew gum and then do climate work too. 

[00:41:13] Chris Spear: So is there a lot of, um, groups working together on that? Or is it silos like you're doing independent work?

[00:41:20] Chris Spear: Someone else is doing that? Or is there really been a lot of cooperation to kind of bring that knowledge together so that on a whole scale, it can move faster? Um,

[00:41:34] Glenn Roberts: I think there's better public awareness. Of what's going on outside the United States in that particular path of what do we do for biosecurity with regard to climate change and what we actually do in our country. And you can take climate change off of it and just go. What do we do in order to feed everyone?

[00:41:58] Glenn Roberts: And I think [00:42:00] that the world is ahead of our discussion in farming in this country, in America. And so you've, you've touched on something. Are there groups that are working together, doing what they need to be doing? And the answer is yes. Are there enough of them? The answer is yes. Hell no. We are so far from where we need to be right now, we, we can't go any faster.

[00:42:26] Glenn Roberts: And I'll give you an example. We're working on one crop. We started on this crop two years ago. Got really serious about it this fall, so we booked the crop. We got it planted last month. It was planted, right after it was planted, it was 13 degrees, 30 acre field of research. Blizzard for three days at 13 degrees.

[00:42:50] Glenn Roberts: Right? Then 10 inches of water until last week. Last week we did a germ test on the entire field. Everything out there germinated just like nothing [00:43:00] happened. Amazing. This is the garbanzo beans? These are the green chickpeas. Yeah. And they're little teeny. They're not big and yellow and round. When they're dry, they're dark green.

[00:43:11] Glenn Roberts: Like split peas, fresh out of the field, which are bright, dark green, and they make flour, and they make green pizza. So we started this program, uh, the idea, you know, 40 days to green pizza for crops that actually will do that. And, uh, so far, uh, Uh, it has a lot of success. I can't believe it. Uh, and so we're just giving seed away at the speed of light.

[00:43:39] Glenn Roberts: All we're doing is identifying things that will mature in the 50 days arena and down depending on season, climate, situation or whatever. But it's stuff that you can throw in a parking lot and scatter some compost and come back in 30 days. You got vegetable level something in a staple and you go 40 days and it's dry and it's harvestable as a staple.

[00:43:59] Glenn Roberts: It [00:44:00] can be like then stored. 

[00:44:03] Chris Spear: So if you were growing something and had a flood or bad weather and you totally lost your crop, this is something that then maybe you could clear your field, get in and at least make some kind of money this growing season 

[00:44:14] Glenn Roberts: and not only make some kind of money. Yeah. I think we're past the income thing.

[00:44:21] Glenn Roberts: I think that all farmers need a financial model, although I've never cared about that. I was in the hotel business, so I got enough financial models. for a lifetime in the 30 some years that I was doing hotels. Um, I'm certainly aware of how that works. I don't care anymore and didn't when I started Anson Mills, didn't do it to make a profit.

[00:44:40] Glenn Roberts: I did it to do biosecurity mainly cause I didn't know anything when I started. Now that I know something, I'm glad I did it that way, even though it was stupid at the front. Um, now it's not anymore. Because our largest asset, our mill's 4, 000 square feet, our seed house is 30, 000 square feet. We [00:45:00] don't monetize anything coming out of the seed house, and it's full of seed from floor to ceiling.

[00:45:05] Glenn Roberts: It's a hundred and some feet tall ceiling and a 30, 000 square foot footprint for processing and everything else for seed. And we don't monetize it at all. We pay for it. For farmers to produce it, but we don't sell it to anybody. We give it away. And that's been the model now for a quarter century. And it was stupid when we started.

[00:45:23] Glenn Roberts: It's even probably more stupid in a lot of ways now, but it actually works for climate change and chefs are the audience that actually understand that. They understood it 20 years ago. I can remember when Annie at Bacchanalia in Atlanta looked at me and she said, You know, this polenta is killer. And I said, Yeah, well, that's, thanks, you know.

[00:45:45] Glenn Roberts: And she said, No, no, I really mean it. And I said, I do too, you know. And, you know, so let's get more people to grow it. She said, well, no, you're doing it. And I said, no, we need lots of people to do it. Right. Not just [00:46:00] me. So if you got anybody that wants to see the next thing I know, we've got like 40 calls for seed from just any, just a conversation with any over the cooking line.

[00:46:08] Chris Spear: Well, that definitely seems counter to the capitalistic nature of the U S especially big agriculture. Normally you would think I have this one thing that people love. I'm the only one who has it. I'm going to keep it all to myself. Okay. Thank you. 

[00:46:21] Glenn Roberts: There's that's fading and it's fading very quickly. Reason being what you said, you isolated it.

[00:46:32] Glenn Roberts: If I have a catastrophic event on my farm, even if I have crop insurance. If it's actually degraded my soil, I might have just lost ten years of native, uh, tilth work that I'd done, paid for, and everything else, and having to start over. If I'm going to start over, do I want to wait another season, even if I get crop insurance?

[00:46:54] Glenn Roberts: And the answer is no. I want to interdict this one for land retention, if nothing else, [00:47:00] which is why that Podesta conference was there and why there were so many emergency management people there. In fact, the guy that's in charge of emergency management for Maryland was one of the coolest and smartest people there.

[00:47:12] Glenn Roberts: Amazing man, I don't remember his name because I'm old and senile, but really on top of things and caring and talking about incidents in micro regions of Maryland. I'm going, who are these people? Why don't farmers think more like that? You know, because those are farmers being affected and he knew as much about farming as he knew about urban catastrophe, etc, etc, the whole deal.

[00:47:36] Glenn Roberts: It was, I was like knocked out and there were lots of people like him there. He was special. The other guy was from that stood out. Um, and there were the Kristen Goodrich guy, Kristen's a woman. She runs a Tijuana estuary. They got their hands full now. But she's managed to keep it from eroding completely and blowing up the entire, uh, [00:48:00] system for water retention in San Diego County.

[00:48:02] Glenn Roberts: She's, uh, ten years in on a system that they're going to roll out for the entire state so that all this crap that's going on right now in, uh, Los Angeles and North and South, uh, for erosion because of the atmospheric river that they've got an interdiction idea that works essentially like I'm saying for the catastrophic recovery.

[00:48:23] Glenn Roberts: If you've got beautiful wheat in the field, you've got 500 acres of wheat with a co crop in there. So it's all native tilth and all of a sudden you've got a wildfire that goes in and burns it out. What are you going to do? And the answer is the short season stuff, which Kristen has been doing for decades with native plants.

[00:48:41] Glenn Roberts: And I did ask her, I went to see her, because I thought it was so cool what she was doing. And she told me, looking at me right now, she said, We do it with native plants, and we're going to do it with native plants. One, because there's no IP on it. Two, because Uh, they're really present and they're, they're extremely fast and they're very retentive for soil.

[00:48:59] Glenn Roberts: [00:49:00] So, I said, well, what about the culinary side of this? Isn't it worth it? She said, well, if you're doing it in toxic recovery, it's not worth it because who can eat it? And I said, well, if you're doing it with native plants and it's toxic, aren't you in the same window? And she said, yeah. I said, okay, well. Uh, it's worth a try, because some parts of that won't be toxic, at least for wildlife, to get started.

[00:49:22] Glenn Roberts: That's food plot business. It's interesting, abruzzi rye is the number one land raised cereal grown in this country, and it's grown for wildlife, it's not grown for people. Really? And abruzzi rye is killer. I mean, it's really good. And it goes all the way back to the Jesuits. They went out of Rome to go to a brootsie.

[00:49:45] Glenn Roberts: That's why it's called a brootsie rye. You know, you're going, wow. You know, 

[00:49:49] Chris Spear: is it a varietal that the animals naturally are drawn to? Like there's something in it that they like about that varietal over others. 

[00:49:56] Glenn Roberts: Here's one we do. You have a field of [00:50:00] advanced breeding chemical stuff going on. And then next to it, you've got a field of land race stuff that's done on native tilth, no chemicals, no nothing added to it on old seed.

[00:50:11] Glenn Roberts: Where do the birds go first answer? They know the, they, they know what from flying over it hundreds of feet up in the air, we've seen the sun blacked out by birds hitting our fields, which is why we plant decoy fields so that they can, birds can eat it. They're smarter than we are. Well, they have an instinct for that stuff, and one can look at the culture for other groups where it gets so advanced that, um, we end up talking about porpoises sometimes because of their acumen with regard to keeping themselves alive.

[00:50:52] Glenn Roberts: and nutrition. So the answer to all this, it seems to me would be to look hard at [00:51:00] what can grow very fast for catastrophic recovery and approach things as catastrophic recovery. Plus then you have to be your regular farmer. Plus you have to be your regular producer, your regular seed person. You have to maintain all that because that's part of the culture.

[00:51:15] Glenn Roberts: And you now do this. And if you look back in history, what we don't do in this country since I'm a rice guy. I look at Indonesia and what don't we even recognize? Rices that mature out at 28 days and you can harvest them just like Gaspi maize was part of native catastrophic recovery because you can plant it and harvest it dry.

[00:51:42] Glenn Roberts: You can harvest it as roasting ear at I believe 28 to 32 days, but you can actually take it out of the field dry at 35 to 38 days from direct seed. So, if their maize crop goes down, they always had this. This is historic. We just stopped doing it. [00:52:00] Sometimes I keep thinking, oh yeah, I'm really, uh, this is really cool, this, look what we're doing.

[00:52:04] Glenn Roberts: I'm going, no, no, we're just looking over our shoulder trying to figure out what we forgot. You know, and that really doesn't take a lot of brain power, which, There's why I get to do it because if it took a lot, probably wouldn't be doing it. 

[00:52:16] Chris Spear: And are there, um, crops that you've brought back from almost extinction?

[00:52:21] Chris Spear: Like, I know there's been a couple of things, right, that you, you know, there wasn't a big stock of that you kind of had like a small stock of seeds and have now brought back. What are some of those things? 

[00:52:32] Glenn Roberts: Well, in the May side, um, honestly, Guinea flint was gone. Uh, I did this, by the way, it wasn't me, the whole group of people, uh, really starting with Dr.

[00:52:44] Glenn Roberts: Merle Shepard, who had been focusing on this for his entire career, he was born in Georgia, he worked at the International Rice Research Institute, he was an entomologist. And because he's an entomologist, he spends as much or more time in the field than farmers and or [00:53:00] farm researchers or seed researchers or geneticists.

[00:53:03] Glenn Roberts: And all of his friends were the best geneticists. So, like I said earlier. He brought so much to the table and he was passionate about trying to keep everything in the public domain and affect the local region first wherever he was. He was in charge of two Caribbean islands, as far as biosecurity goes, as a volunteer.

[00:53:25] Glenn Roberts: He didn't, no one else really wanted to do it. He did it, and he did a phenomenal job doing exactly what I'm doing now. Going down there, trying to figure out what was fastest and most biosecure, get it going. He wasn't doing Mendelian breeding work. He was taking whatever he could find locally and protecting it and recreating it.

[00:53:44] Glenn Roberts: Increasing the seed and passing it out for free. It's where I got the model from him, right? So the idea of doing this means that we have guinea flint now, which didn't, we didn't know it was gone because we didn't [00:54:00] know that we ever had it. And those are the ones I've specialized in, beyond Carolina Gold Rice, which everybody knew was out there.

[00:54:07] Glenn Roberts: There's a rice that Dr. Anna McClung worked on from 2003 forward, called Carolina Long Gold Northern Rice, it has three or four names. Uh, which she ended up calling Santee Gold. We, we thought we'd find it. We sent three research Um, adventurous people into Indonesia because they thought maybe it was still in Siloesi somewhere couldn't find it.

[00:54:29] Glenn Roberts: So 25 years later, we still haven't found it. Dr. McClung bred a rice she called Santee Gold when she released it. That is close. It's not exactly what Carolina Long Gold was, but it was the one that made American continent's rice production popular worldwide. Uh, because it was so exceptional. It was a super long, long grain and had that blue white, clear texture presence emotion about it.[00:55:00]

[00:55:00] Glenn Roberts: It's a very, you can tell it's a really special rice when you taste it if it's grown chemical free. Uh, that. Is something she did. So we have a lot of stuff like that 

[00:55:11] Chris Spear: sounds like fun going on an expedition looking for rice and grains. 

[00:55:17] Glenn Roberts: It can be really scary. I've done done it in Mexico and to me, everybody but me was having a great time.

[00:55:26] Glenn Roberts: I was like, freaking because I kept thinking, are we trespassing on time. You know, and then Twaddle Lands and all that stuff because we were in Tepanitza Walkup on the Divide. And I kept coming across. I was the only one that went up on the Divide completely. Everybody else was just freaking because they were in the middle of this beautiful, uh, native maze system.

[00:55:47] Glenn Roberts: That had, the polyculture had multiple different plants growing with the maize and it was all done by hand and it was straight up 50 plus degree incline to the divide [00:56:00] and they all stopped there. I kept going because I wanted to go see what was up on the divide because I pretty much knew from my upbringing because we were raised with native people that there was probably sacred plots up there and turned out there was.

[00:56:11] Glenn Roberts: I counted one had 23 different cultivars in it. It was only Maybe five meters by three meters right on the divide, you just go around a little corner on a little teeny path and there it is all those plants growing and you know somebody had been there just recently tending it and taking care of it and it's a religious plot and then twaddle.

[00:56:34] Glenn Roberts: That must be beautiful to see. I can't imagine seeing something like that. Yeah, because you can see forever up there. Number one, number two, um, It seems welcoming a lot, but it's, it's not really our place. It belongs to the people that have been there for thousands of years. If not a bunch 

[00:56:51] Chris Spear: of Americans, uh, plotting through the fields, I'm sure that can be received a number of different ways, depending on who you encounter.

[00:56:57] Glenn Roberts: Yeah, and we had to be really careful. We don't take [00:57:00] things away from those environments, but everybody that we want to go with wants to take something with them, and we say no, you bring things, you never take anything, but no one listens to that. Sorry, I hate to say that out loud, but why not? A friend I know really, really well.

[00:57:18] Glenn Roberts: I won't name who this is, but So I'm taking ear of corn and stuff it down his pants to hide it. And when he did that, I looked over and I saw one of the native people just shaking their head going, you know, here, I can't believe you did that. Yeah. You know, he's a wonderful guy and he's done tons of great work and he just couldn't help himself and I sort of get it.

[00:57:40] Glenn Roberts: Yeah, 

[00:57:42] Chris Spear: I mean, I'm on the surface. It's like, you know, it's one ear corn. Big deal. Like, is anyone going to miss that? But the, um, the principle of it, 

[00:57:53] Glenn Roberts: it's not really ours. None of it that we have is really ours. We keep forgetting that somehow we think that we did it. [00:58:00] We didn't do anything. If you look at what the culture was before we showed up on this continent, it was freaking amazing.

[00:58:07] Glenn Roberts: I'll give it to everybody worldwide. Famine is not as prevalent as it used to be. I wouldn't say the same thing about conflict, uh, but famine is not. So we have made. You know, in one case, you could say, okay, well Bill Gates has got great ideas. Because not so many people are dying of starvation. That maybe is a raison d'etre for anybody doing this.

[00:58:30] Glenn Roberts: I've never been able to get there. I just think, you know, CRISPR, hyperbred stuff. And I know that it's fast. And I don't have any big reservation about it now. Like ten years ago, I would have been virulently opposed to it. I don't know anymore what's going to get us there. And all I know is that none of that newest technology, we have enough history with it to know what's going to happen to it.

[00:58:56] Glenn Roberts: And we know what happened to the soy revolution in Oregon, if we actually [00:59:00] read well, they brought the first GMO soy in and contaminated the entire state by mistake. They didn't even know they were going to do it. That was in the 80s. Nobody even knew GMO. So it was in this country and somebody had brought it down, planted it, and it contaminated everything in the state of Oregon.

[00:59:15] Glenn Roberts: And we were done by that time. They just had to release it because it was already in genetics. 

[00:59:22] Chris Spear: That's why we have to look at the past to help us dictate the future, right? We've already been down many of these roads before. And what were the outcomes, the pitfalls, but also the successes. And how do we take that and implement it into whatever system we use going forward?

[00:59:36] Glenn Roberts: Yeah, but on the happy side of all this stuff, the plants with the most tolerances that haven't been messed with. are also the best plants to breed from. If you look the pedigrees for all the stuff's out there, we've gone through a half century of geneticists that don't even go in the field, don't know any names, they only know numbers, and they didn't think it was [01:00:00] important.

[01:00:00] Glenn Roberts: That's over. We have geneticists now that care about names and numbers, both. And they will look hard at trying to preserve aroma flavor profile because it's directly tied to nutrition, it's tied to resilience, it's tied to all kinds of things that we weren't thinking about for a century plus in the revolutions for breeding that we have.

[01:00:21] Glenn Roberts: And if you take a hard look at where people are coming now, there's a lot of young people in genetics now that really, really care about resilience first and right after that aroma flavor profile. So that's good for chefs worldwide. And aroma equals flavor equals nutrition. And they're actually doing that in the fast sciences now too, not just in land race work where you're doing it by hand.

[01:00:46] Glenn Roberts: They've got machines, and God knows what CRISPR's doing. But they're actually using those vectors to keep the profiles for aroma, flavor, and nutrition. And whatever they're working with instead of just [01:01:00] bypassing whatever they need. 

[01:01:01] Chris Spear: And what about things like people saying, you know, food is different and they're getting sick.

[01:01:06] Chris Spear: Look at the gluten. A lot of people talk about, well, the weed is different. And if you go back and eating an ancient grain or a land race, you know, that maybe people have gluten sensitivities don't have the issues. I don't know how much you've looked into that or can speak on that. 

[01:01:21] Glenn Roberts: I can speak lots on it since we've listened to people.

[01:01:25] Glenn Roberts: Millions of them by now, um, I still feel most of the retail calls we have when they're really concerned with, uh, gluten allergens, segregation, et cetera, et cetera. We wrote the protocol, uh, with the USDA for small mills, uh, 20 years ago. And when I say we, I was watching them, but I kind of tried to anticipate what they were thinking about because I knew about it from large mills because I'd worked at G.

[01:01:54] Glenn Roberts: F. Mills in California learning about the milling business. What [01:02:00] turned out is that we are now focusing on the same thing we would call land race, but the geneticists who actually have a lock on this stuff going forward are using advanced breeding in order to preserve that instead of eliminate it.

[01:02:16] Glenn Roberts: That's a huge change. 

[01:02:19] Chris Spear: It's, um, I guess not something that happens overnight. It seems like it takes a long time, you know, as a, as an outsider, like myself, it, it seems like there's no change. And then all of a sudden there's a change, but I'm sure you're seeing it more incrementally than everyone else. 

[01:02:35] Glenn Roberts: Yeah.

[01:02:35] Glenn Roberts: Well, it started, um, you know, it started right after 2000 generally in our field, uh, where we're looking at land races and then the, because of the success, Let's pick one. Jimmy Red Corn. Well, there's six different cultivars easily in Jimmy Red Corn that are, that can be isolated. And God knows whether they're [01:03:00] true type, uh, over a decade, because the corn's not been around.

[01:03:04] Glenn Roberts: It was only discovered 20 years ago. It had been lost completely, uh, by a guy named Ted Tuning, uh, that worked with it. And my daughter saw it growing. I didn't even say it. I would have missed it completely. But the rest is history. That corn is out there making whiskey now and it's really, really great for grits and meal.

[01:03:23] Glenn Roberts: And, you know, I go back to the thing, well, there was no real single Jimmy Redd. What we've got is, uh, Was, could be separated out to six different unique cultivars, and we actually did research on four of them, uh, to find the one we thought would work best for distilling and best for grits and meal and stuff like that.

[01:03:45] Glenn Roberts: Uh, but that whole presence. Um, Wouldn't even have made it past Ted's yard, I don't think, had he not understood what he was working with. Um, And, We now have [01:04:00] geneticists that thinks like Ted was thinking back then. He wasn't a geneticist. His wife was the county coroner. He was home schooling his kids. He built the MILPA patch just because it was part of the lesson that he wanted to teach his kids.

[01:04:13] Glenn Roberts: I don't even know that he'd ever done it before he'd seen it, but I don't think he'd ever grown Milpa. But he put a 40 foot diameter Milpa patch right in his front yard, and my daughter saw it. She said, Daddy, tall corn. And I'm going, what? You know, we're on a river road. Where do you see tall corn? She said, back there, back there.

[01:04:28] Glenn Roberts: We turned around and went back. And it was a Milpa plot that Ted was doing. And he was actually thinking, like, geneticists are working now. We'll see. You know, we don't have a lot of choices at this point. You know, we're still chemical free. We're only working with land races. We're not doing hyperbreeding.

[01:04:47] Glenn Roberts: I don't even have the schooling for it. Um, we're not even doing testing on hyperbred stuff a little bit, but not much. And some of the hyperbred stuff that we've seen [01:05:00] is awe inspiring. Deep roots, tall straw, relatively, will stand because the big deal about deep roots and tall straw is you're growing in a monocrop.

[01:05:09] Glenn Roberts: Like I said, it blows down. You grow it as a polycrop with other things with it, it doesn't blow down because it's not as close. Uh, it makes a wall when it's grown too close. So these new ones have maybe medium height straw because they need to know that the symbiosis in drawing minerals up through those roots into the kernels that they're doing if you pick rice.

[01:05:32] Glenn Roberts: There is enough, uh, osmotic action there in order to fill the mineral profile of the kernel to make it balanced nutrition. Nobody was thinking about whether roots were important in breeding up until about ten years ago. The first thing they did in the medallion system was dwarf the roots because they knew if they dwarfed the crop before they did that, nobody would do the crop.

[01:05:55] Glenn Roberts: They still had riots. I had riots in New England, riots out in Kansas, [01:06:00] the wheat mills, because of dwarfing, because of deep roots, and the fact that they didn't like the flavors, and they didn't like the reaction going back to your statement, we still have reaction to quote unquote modern wheat, it's not peptic.

[01:06:13] Glenn Roberts: The reason why is because the mineral profile is whacked. They're supposed to be fixing it, we'll see. 

[01:06:20] Chris Spear: I didn't know anything about the, um, deep roots and the, the root structure. That's not anything that's ever even filtered out to like something I've heard about. 

[01:06:29] Glenn Roberts: Well, there's lots of good things about deep roots.

[01:06:32] Glenn Roberts: One soil retention to obviously if you're building soil as a vector in natural farming, which is what you do, your elevation gets higher and the roots can take more advantage as you continue to improve tilth. Or the nutrition available in the soil, and the biotics that go along with it. You get a full, uh, cycle of worms, this, that, the other thing, you get [01:07:00] positive neems, get rid of the negative neems, the plants do it on their own, in native systems that are, you know, thousands of years old.

[01:07:08] Glenn Roberts: Everybody had to eat, so they knew about this, they just, they wouldn't codify it this way, they wouldn't say it was science, they'd say it was just stupid to do it any other way, because you'd starve to death. Uh, so, the, the idea of having full biotics and then trying to still fight famine with it, with catastrophic, occurrences, etc, etc.

[01:07:28] Glenn Roberts: We've been around since the dawn of civilization. By the same token, those systems that survive fed people. And we're now in a science window where the scientists have to feed people. They don't have a choice. 

[01:07:47] Chris Spear: So, you know, this is a lot of great information. I love kind of getting nerdy about this stuff, but what about from an actionable standpoint?

[01:07:57] Chris Spear: You know, I've got people listening to show it's [01:08:00] educational, but what can people do? Like, do you have advice for people who are listening to this? They're passionate about this. What are some things that we as people in the food industry, especially can do to make an impact? Cause I think It seems overwhelming.

[01:08:14] Chris Spear: And do you have, like, any advice on where to start or just how to make some kind of impact? You know, whether it be about food security, feeding people, raising awareness? 

[01:08:26] Glenn Roberts: I think one of the most successful Um, programs that deal directly with what you just asked is Brownsville, um, in the United States because it's community oriented, it's urban, where you wouldn't expect it and they do everything there.

[01:08:45] Glenn Roberts: Um, they grow their own wheat. Uh, they've got forays up into the Hudson where they can go to wheat farms and then bring the wheat in themselves and mill it, uh, right there in Brownsville, which is, uh, the most [01:09:00] underserved community in this region, according to everyone. Uh, and they literally pulling people off the street, teaching them how to grow things and then cook them.

[01:09:13] Glenn Roberts: It's a great concept. And I think that can, that can expand. Uh, I think that even if you just have a pot And a lamp and some soil in a little teeny studio apartment somewhere in an urban setting, you can get a seed and put it in there and watch it grow and start to learn something. I think that you can also always reach out through your local farmers markets and go to a farm and you, the volunteering to be exposed to that environment is limitless because who doesn't like people that really are interested in what's going on.

[01:09:54] Glenn Roberts: with plants if you're a farmer. Uh, so, that's an unending, uh, [01:10:00] opportunity. To make it make sense, I think everybody needs to think really hard about seed. If you've got a garden, you should grow some culinary plants in there no matter what they are. Not just tomatoes, but you should be thinking, what about fast staples?

[01:10:18] Glenn Roberts: How many people grow rice in their garden? Even if you're gonna just sit there with 2, 000 seeds and hand pick some of them and like cook five kernels and that's it. Period. What about just growing some wheat? And where is the fast seed that people that don't have a lot of time or attention just want to get done?

[01:10:43] Glenn Roberts: And the answer is there's tons of seed companies out there, we all know them, um, that actually can identify what grows fast, easily, doesn't need to be tended, and can actually be a food plant beyond growing tomatoes in your yard, peas, or things like [01:11:00] that. You can actually grow other things. And then you find out eventually that those things are supposed to be grown together anyhow.

[01:11:07] Chris Spear: Yeah, I just talked to Steve from Rancho Gordo for the podcast and I was amazed that he kind of started with beans because I don't think I would ever go and decide to plant like with of all the things I could plant in my garden, beans would not be it. And to hear that he was like, oh, yeah, and I was growing beans.

[01:11:23] Chris Spear: I'm like, who grows beans? I don't know anyone who grows beans like that. 

[01:11:27] Glenn Roberts: Yeah, but if you, you know, they, they lied to us, I always say this, this is probably hackneyed by now, but they lied to us about the sisters. There's not just three. And my first conversation with Steve, uh, 20 years ago now, uh, we were both kind of nerdy, uh, back then.

[01:11:47] Glenn Roberts: Steve's Still amazing and was back then too, but our first conversation was about the fact that the everybody thinks that it's three sisters and that's hilarious because obviously that [01:12:00] gives him an in and he was using that said, well, you do corn. You like corn. What about beans? You know? Corn, beans, and what?

[01:12:09] Glenn Roberts: Oh yeah, there's three sisters. And then it turns out there's lots of sisters, it's not just three. And that is a good way for introduction. Amy Halloran, uh, used to talk about wheat as pancakes. She never said the word wheat when she was speaking to children, right? She said, well, this is how you grow the pancakes.

[01:12:33] Glenn Roberts: And, you know, that works. The New York Botanical Garden had a youth program, um, where they actually grew their own rice and milled it. That was pretty cool. 

[01:12:45] Chris Spear: Right. Well, I absolutely hate mowing my lawn. I think having lawns is one of the most overrated things that we hear in America do. And every year I try and dedicate more and more of my yard to growing something and [01:13:00] Sometimes I'm really successful with some of the things I grow.

[01:13:02] Chris Spear: Sometimes it doesn't work the way I hoped, but I'm always trying to figure out, you know, what I could do better for the next year. 

[01:13:09] Glenn Roberts: Yeah, well, then I will recommend that here's, here's what we did in. Uh, Arizona, obviously drought and 120 plus degrees. It's not the best place to have a lawn. In fact, lawns were outlawed out there.

[01:13:26] Glenn Roberts: Uh, when we had water shortages, if they caught you watering your lawn, you'd get a massive ticket. Uh, that's true in California and places too. Having said that, uh, referring back to Kerry Fowler and his work at the Fowler, uh, Golden Fowler Farm, uh, he's working on stuff that needs no water at all. I think what was it, uh, I think the equivalent of three hundredths of an inch.

[01:13:53] Glenn Roberts: He's working on a grass that only needs that much moisture, and it's edible, supposedly. [01:14:00] I could be wrong on this, but I, in fast scanning the article in the Times on what he was working on, It was kind of fascinating, so if you need a replacement for a lawn that's edible, which I agree with you, I think lawns are a total waste of energy, um, you know, we end up growing a bunch of different fruits and vegetables and it works better as a replacement.

[01:14:21] Glenn Roberts: Then Alon does and you don't have to pay somebody to mow them 

[01:14:25] Chris Spear: and there's so many great resources about what works in your area. You know, I, I was talking to Scott at high wire about this a couple weeks ago, but it was funny. One of the times I was at the distillery, I was with my wife and we sat down the bar and I look and David Shields at the end of the bar, just having a whiskey or something, you know, and I, yeah.

[01:14:43] Chris Spear: Went over and talked to him and he's someone who's so interested in this stuff and right away wants to know where I live and is then telling me all the things I should grow. And he said, you know, take some notes on this. He's like, here's the lettuce you should grow because it grows really good there.

[01:14:56] Chris Spear: And I love having things like that. Um, you know, talking to people who are passionate [01:15:00] about, you know, what grows good where, what these, um, other varieties are. And I'm always trying to like change up what I'm growing and kind of maybe find something that's great for specifically my region. Well, 

[01:15:13] Glenn Roberts: there's a practitioner who you probably already know, David's best friend in history is Dr.

[01:15:21] Glenn Roberts: Bernard Herman, who's a professor emeritus of Chatham Winery. And then Chatham Winery is doing a whole program on native plants that belong to the tribes and the early settlers of Maryland. Uh, which is phenomenal. So you're in the right place. Great 

[01:15:45] Chris Spear: place to be, I guess. 

[01:15:48] Glenn Roberts: Definitely. 

[01:15:49] Chris Spear: Well, it's been great having you on the show.

[01:15:51] Chris Spear: Is there anything? I mean, we could talk for hours. I'm sure about this stuff. But is there anything you want to leave our listeners with before we get out of here today? 

[01:15:59] Glenn Roberts: Yeah, I [01:16:00] think you need to understand where your food comes from. And I know that's everywhere. But. It said we were at the point where everyone really means it.

[01:16:12] Glenn Roberts: You may in your lifetime, if you're younger than me, I'm 76, you may in your lifetime need to know where your food came from because you will be growing it. That is not impossible. We can't just continue to have. The commoditized world system that we had in the past. Everyone knows this. I do know that a person from Syngenta recently retired, just went to work for a sustainable company getting paid.

[01:16:42] Glenn Roberts: He volunteered to do it because he feels that it's time to move forward. That's huge. A step in the right direction, right? Definitely more than that's a giant step for sure. That's a lot of brain power that's been involved in God knows what all [01:17:00] these years. I remember when I started Anson Mills, the first people that came to see me were from Syngenta.

[01:17:05] Glenn Roberts: They didn't, I had one mill and a table and a boulter. Right? It was just me behind a restaurant, for crying out loud. And six of them flew in on a Gulfstream and wanted to know what I was planning to do. They just showed up. I'm going, Hey, do you guys have a budget where you can just come to some P crap place in Columbia, South Carolina, and talk to somebody that doesn't even know what he's doing?

[01:17:29] Glenn Roberts: They said, well, you know, we figure you said you wanted to do rice, we're working on rice, we thought we'd come talk to you. You know? I, to this minute, don't know why they showed up. They're really nice people. Heh heh. You must have been doing something right. You got their attention. I don't know. They wanted to talk about GMO rice.

[01:17:49] Glenn Roberts: And I was saying, well, what's GMO? Cause I didn't know, and neither did I care. Cause I w I wanted to do the classic rices with the sow. And I didn't remember anybody saying anything about GMO [01:18:00] and I wanted the seed to be available because nobody had the seed. It was really frustrating. I just wanted to grow the rice.

[01:18:05] Glenn Roberts: Cause my mom was raised on that rice. All right. So it was just kind of simple and turned out to be very complicated to get the seed available to everybody. 

[01:18:16] Chris Spear: Well, it seems like the food world is very fortunate that you stumbled into this path and have been doing what you've been doing for so long at this point.

[01:18:24] Glenn Roberts: Well, I'm fortunate. I think it's the other way around. I'm just lucky, just lucky, lucky, lucky. I have no idea you mentioned David Shields. It was just serendipity. I didn't know who he was from Adam. I don't even remember how I met him. I remember, like, offering him a loaf of rice bread, and saying, you know, if you're interested in plants, you should take this bread and think about it.

[01:18:49] Glenn Roberts: I had no idea who he was, I just, somebody said, you need to go hear this guy talk. And at the end, I had a boule that we just made, uh, with Mike [01:19:00] Shempaugh, uh, way back when Mike only had, like, ten employees and only two people working in the kitchen, but he was doing scratch bread and he was a really good baker himself.

[01:19:12] Glenn Roberts: And, you know, started there. He ended up with 30 people employed in his bakery. It was really good. Uh, but he did the first rice breads that were made from locally grown rice that was actually place based from the place the rice bread was supposed to be made to the spec of the original stuff. And I ha happened to have a loaf of it.

[01:19:34] Glenn Roberts: I gave it to David and he freaked out. He said, I don't understand all this, but I'm going to. And I had no idea what that meant. Next thing I know, he'd written 10 books. 

[01:19:43] Chris Spear: Well, you know, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? That's the, the more I talk to people and the more that I dig in, it seems like, you know, there's, there's synergy and you, you know, you meet the right people sometimes just by serendipity, but you know, kind of taking [01:20:00] information from each other, sharing information and building on what everyone else is doing.

[01:20:04] Glenn Roberts: Well, two things. You're in a place where people are doing rice and other old plants. Chatham Winery, Bernard Herman is running that program. And you're also, when you get to Buford, don't forget to call me and we'll just go wander around with some alligators and snakes and walk around on a rice field. Oh, 

[01:20:23] Chris Spear: that 

[01:20:23] Glenn Roberts: sounds 

[01:20:23] Chris Spear: amazing.

[01:20:25] Chris Spear: Well, thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate having you. 

[01:20:28] Glenn Roberts: Yeah, it's been fantastic and I wish you the best. And look forward to all the rest of your great work. I appreciate it. 

[01:20:36] Chris Spear: Well, thanks so much. I appreciate it. You're still here? The podcast's over. If you are indeed still here, thanks for taking the time to listen to the show.

[01:20:45] Chris Spear: I'd love to direct you to one place, and that's chefswithoutrestaurants. org. From there, you'll be able to join our email newsletter, Get connected in our free Facebook group and join our personal chef, catering, and food truck database so I can help get you more job leads. [01:21:00] And you'll also find a link to our sponsor page, where you'll find products and services I love.

[01:21:04] Chris Spear: You pay nothing additional to use these links, but I may get a small commission, which helps keep the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast and organization running. You might even get a discount for using some of these links. As always, you can reach out to me on Instagram at Chefs Without Restaurants, or send me an email at chefswithoutrestaurants at gmail.

[01:21:21] Chris Spear: com. Thanks so much!