Families share personal stories about farming in the South
Ashley HopkinsonWelcome to The American South!
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This week we're talking about food and farming.
We take you to the beautiful North Carolina mountains to a family farm dedicated to sticky rice. Lee's One Fortune Farm is a patchwork of eight family-managed farms scattered through several rural counties. Though the farms grow a variety of Asian staples, their crowning jewel is rice production.
Then we journey to Mississipi to a few family farms betting on tea as the South's new cash crop. They take us through the intricate process of producing high quality tea and we learn from those who have mastered the centuries-old art.
While we're on the subject of food, I would like to introduce you to our sister publication Southern Kitchen, which re-launched at the start of fall. You will find hundreds of recipes and stories about Southern food that will absolutely delight you.
Thank you for reading. Take good care!
Ashley Hopkinson (Editor, The American South)
What's the South talking about?
- Texas: Federal judge blocks state's restrictive abortion law
- Alabama: UAB launches $4 million rural health care initiative
- Louisiana : State's largest medical marijuana producer expands
Hmong refugees grow rice and uphold food sovereignty in NC mountains
For Lee's One Fortune Farm owners Chue and Tou Lee, Laotian Hmong refugees, the rice they grow in the North Carolina mountains represents wealth, but not because it delivers top dollar at tailgate markets.
"In our culture, if your family was able to eat rice at least two meals a day, or even three meals a week, you're considered one of the rich folk," Tou Lee said.
More than that, it's a symbol of a life rebuilt from the ashes of the Vietnam War, an American war that left the Lees and many other Hmong refugees to scratch out an existence in the Laotian jungle.
Chue Lee remembers the jungle. She remembers it being wet and her family being hungry. "We didn't really have a childhood," she said.
The Lees, now the parents of six children ages 9 to 34, have since carved out a more stable life in western North Carolina. It's also one of food sovereignty.
Tea farming takes root in the American South
In central Mississippi, outside the town of Brookhaven, a field is lined with long rows of precisely squared-off shrubs, which look more like misplaced landscaping than a crop. These are tea plants, or Camellia sinensis, a cousin of the camellias that blossoms in yards across the South.
Jason McDonald knew nothing about tea, or even much about farming, when he was casting about for a crop to plant on this land he inherited from his grandfather. After a visit to the Charleston Tea Plantation, for many years one of America’s only commercial tea farms, McDonald decided to give it a try. (In 2020, “plantation” was dropped and the name was changed to the Charleston Tea Garden.) With his husband Timothy Gipson, in 2012 he founded the Great Mississippi Tea Company.
“The first couple of years, we were the village idiots,” McDonald said. “Now that we’re making money, people are asking, ‘What’s going on here?’”
What's your favorite classic Southern dessert?
In “Southern Sugar” Belinda Smith-Sullivan has recipes for the cakes, pies, cookies and candies that grace tables across the South. She has recipes for hummingbird cake, red velvet cake and pineapple upside down cake. She includes desserts tied tightly to specific states, like Mississippi mud cake, Kentucky jam cake and Alabama’s Lane cake. And the book has those treats like divinity, pralines and fudge, that are the sugary highlights of so many holiday potlucks.
Read our Q&A with Belinda Smith-Sullivan where she discusses Southern tradition and the delicious sweet treats. 🥧🍨🧁