Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome back to another episode of Conservation Stories. This is your host, Hilary Timmins Sims with you once again. And I am excited to bring to you a great legend from our area, Ms. Jane Deaver. Jane, thank you for joining us so much. I think that your name will be familiar to a lot of people that are listening if they've been in agriculture for any length of time. But I would love for you to give a little background about yourself. And then as I mentioned earlier before we started recording, I think that people also need to know kind of a little bit about your family and the story of some things that have been really, really neat that's happened in your family. So why don't you start off giving us a little bit of your background.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: Well, thank you for inviting me.
I grew up on a small cotton grain, sorghums, wheat farm that my paternal grandfather bought with his earnings from World War I. He came to this country from the Moravian port of the Czech Czechoslovakia.
And as a he was an orphan. And he came over here because his sisters were here. And he was 12 years old in 1908 and joined the army in World War I. And that's how he got his citizenship. And he took his earnings and came up to the high plains just east of ABERNATHY and bought 160 acres. And that's where I grew up with my many brothers and sisters.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: So tell me, tell us again, what, what year was that when he came? And so his sisters were already here. Were they already in Abernathy?
[00:01:44] Speaker A: One of them was in the Vernon area and the other in California.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: So it's kind of interesting. He actually came through Galveston and went overland to San Angelo where there were some friends, his family after World War I.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: That was a long, long time. I thought you were going to say to World War II. I mean, that's what I was anticipating. I was not expecting the one, you.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: Know, people talk about, especially where I am now.
This research center in South Carolina where I work is surrounded by families in conservation easements, also with land that was deeded to them by the king. So before the Revolutionary War and some of this land. So to me I'm like, I listen about how many generations of farmers, I'm a fifth generation farmer or whatever. I said my it was my paternal grandfather and grandmother that, that both immigrated to this country. And his story about buying his 160 acres of land and I found an extension publication once from 1939 that said 480 acres on 160. He was a really great farmer and he Took advantage of extension. And then 10 years later, they came and visited him again. And it's really wonderful. Stor.
And that's, you know, I tell people in a nutshell, my background is big family, small farm, and my mother's side of the family is the kitten clan from.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Oh, I didn't know that.
Okay.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: She's a kitten. Okay. Southeast Lubbock County. And they've been farming, you know, in the area for a while. And I remember when I was working for Bayer Crop Science, we went. We came to Lubbock for a field day, and the host came up to me and he said, dane, do your relatives still live around Slayton? And I said, well, yes. And he said, can you call them? Because they'd ordered way too much food and didn't have enough people at the.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: That's funny.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: I'm not going to call them, but I acknowledge.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: Acknowledge that. That I have a lot of family.
Oh, wow. That is so. You know, that's one of the. One of the things that we. We've tried to do through the podcast and the website, and we, you know, talk about its conservation stories. But to us, it's not just the conservation of the ecological system, you know, but it is the conservation of a culture, a way of life.
It's the, you know, the conservation of any type of ecosystem that you can think of. So, you know, our economics here, you know, how can. What can we do to help keep what we have as much, and what can we bring in and how can we be innovative? You know, so this is really. It really is fitting. And I know sometimes I feel like I'm afraid some people look at our. Our episodes and think that they're chaotic. But that running theme through all of them is like making people aware of what. What is here, what was here, and what can be here. And I think that there's just a lot of value here. And so tell us a little bit about your family, about your parents and all of these brothers and sisters that you have.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Yes. I don't know.
We still occasionally get together for a big family reunion. And one of the favorite parts of it is we go around saying, how did you join this family?
They didn't really set out to adopt people or intentionally go in the foster system.
But I always say that the first kind of extra sister I had, and I have four sisters, and I had one brother. So there were six of us originally, there were six siblings in my father's family, six siblings in my mother's family as well. So that was planned.
But At New Deal High School, there weren't too many African American families, two or three. And back in the 60s, I was in the first grade.
My parents hosted a birthday party for my oldest sister and they invited some of their classmates and included one of them and my dad. My parents would say, well, she just came for the birthday party and didn't leave.
Oh my goodness, that was Barbara. That was our first. But one of the, the stories is that when I was a freshman in high school at New deal Our In 1975, at the beginning of the fall, four Vietnamese kids, a senior, a junior, a freshman like me and, and an eighth grader, came to our class and I became friends with, I call him now my twin brother, the one that I was the same age as.
And one day they weren't coming to school anymore and I went and asked my mom about it and she went and checked into it. And they had been in a situation that was not an ideal situation and were saving their lunch money to try to get out of it and be independent. And they were the four oldest children of a family of eight whose father was a military officer in the South Vietnamese Army. So the. When, when the Saigon fell, the mother made the decision to tell the four oldest people they had an opportunity with one of the housekeepers that, that knew an American to get out of the country.
And so my dad tells the story that he was out stripping cotton and came home and he had four more kids because my mother went to the foster care people and they said, we can't find anyone that will take all four of them.
And she said they've been split up enough. They can come home with me.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: Oh my goodness. So what happened to their parents and the younger kids?
[00:07:18] Speaker A: They were here 10 years and got their citizenship and immediately started getting. Working to get their mother and four younger siblings here. Their father was killed in at the very end of the war, like a lot of work. But their mother and four younger siblings came in 86. My immigrant grandfather was just so excited when they came. But the girls, the older girls were grown and so they, they took care of their younger siblings and, and one of my favorite stories about the farm is these were, you know, kids that were privileged children of officers and found themselves on a row crop farm in west and grew up and you know, but there's the most wonderful story about the youngest one of those early four and he built clean rooms for intel all over the world. He was one of the project managers on the international terminal of dfw. He got his degree in Mechanical engineering at Texas Tech and he now works at Los Alamos National Laboratory before the medical school. And I did a story on him about how he could, you know, build and manage projects with these incredibly sensitive mri.
And he said, I learned and fell in love with how to do this on a farm east of Abernathy, Texas.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: Oh my goodness. Wow.
Wow.
Are your parents still living?
[00:08:47] Speaker A: No, my mother passed in 2008 and we had.
We had moved back from Memphis in 2003 and my, my father really didn't want to move from the farm where he grew up. My husband and I didn't have children time and we had the means and we picked up and moved out back to the farm to stay with my dad. And he passed in 2015.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: What a legacy.
What a legacy. And so what were you doing while you were here during those years? Were you working on the farmer for. You didn't. Something else, so.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Oh, no.
My dad said he spent money on two things, food and education.
I didn't have the cutest clothes or haircut, but we were well fed and he. And education was incredibly important to us. So that was not a question.
And I got a degree in textile engineering at Texas Tech because there was a small cotton spinning mill in Abernathy.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Oh, wait, I did not know that there was.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: It's like an irrigation place now. It's right there on.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Oh my goodness.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Called Southwest Textiles.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: Well, it is too bad it's not there because let me tell you, I get emails at least once a month for somebody wanting there to be like a meal here. I. It is unbelievable to me, this.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: In the little field. I think there's a hat on the shelf behind me, this American cotton dress.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: I see it.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: Which was the dinner mill in Little Field. And this hat was made from naturally colored cotton that my father grew for a lady named Sally Fox.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Sally Fox, Yes. I have thought about trying to get her on the podcast too. She. I remember when all of that came about. That was my grandmother remember particular saying, how do they get that they die the seed.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: So interesting.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: It's like you get chocolate milk from a brown cow.
Yes. That was such an interesting. And the thing that's so interesting to me now is like how the world was just not ready for it at the time and how ready the world is for it now. It's. It's really interesting how things have. Have changed and progressed over the years. And I'm curious about your.
You know, I know that you worked in cotton breeding before I, Before I move on though, let me just Say that that denim mill that was in Little Field.
My. My grandmother, she designed a hat and it was a star.
And then it was like the bill. The. The bill.
And it buttoned each point of the star button to the bill and the bill buttons in the back. And she sold those off her head. She and her sister, she'd go to the denim mill and get pink denim and chambray denim and dark denim, and she sold those off her head for $10 a piece, and she made $10,000 selling those hats. And this was like in the 80s. I don't know. I do not. I mean, just we. I think we still. I think they're surviving like three or four of them now. And I've seen them. If anytime I see them in a. Mostly they're going to be like in the Hill country.
And because they were living on at Lake LBJ part of the time, and they just wear those in the store and they just either sell it off their head or she had them in their trunk of her car.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: Oh, that's incredible. Yeah.
[00:12:19] Speaker B: Such an amazing story. She's. Anyway, so I hate that it's gone, but I know it. It. Times have changed. So tell us then, if you have this fiber degree.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I've worked in. In cotton in different segments of the cotton industry and seen a lot of changes and a lot of transitions.
And I went from. It's a classic story to have a degree in textile engineering and the opportunity to go to institute in Virginia. And I decided to get married instead.
And I'm 42 years later, still very happy with that decision. But, yeah, so I went to work. It's. It's at that time, I have now, in different segments of the industry, have found that I have had a. A real passion about the seed part of it.
And it started with working in textiles and hearing how they bought cotton. And you knew how you bought. You use different cotton for different products or different qualities for different products. And at that time, before testing, automated testing, and mills would say, well, I'm going to buy this type of cotton from West Texas or this type of cotton from the mid south, or this type of cotton from California.
And it was just, if we want to grow good quality cotton, even when we're in West Texas and the environment's a little more challenging, if you want to farm, if it's your choice to farm in different ways, whether it's organic farming or you should be able to have the seed to be able to do what it is to do and grow what it is you want to grow. So in a nutshell, spending a career first in the output end use side of it and then going into the cotton breeding program at Texas A and M. Because Plains Cotton Cooperative Association, PCCA and their economist named Joel Henry they did this analysis about why California cotton got about 13 cents a pound more than West Texas cotton at that time. And this is in the early 80s and basically it's from the properties of the fiber.
So a program called Plains Cotton Improvement Program was was put together to do a voluntary 10 cent a bell check off specifically for this region. Aside from what Cotton Incorporated does to fund the breeding program to improve fiber quality of the, of the seed that we grow in West Texas. And the breeder at the time at A and M, he asked me do you know anything about fiber quality? And I said well, yes. And so we.
I, while I was working in that program, I thought I might as well learn how to do the breeding part of it.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: So I did masters in PhD working in breeding. I worked with Norma Trollinger. I worked then I went to work for pcca.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: To to when they started being able to do the automated bail mixing based on HPI based on real numbers of the fiber and not just guess of what the fiber quality was based on where it was grown.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: And I worked in, in one of my, one of my jobs was to try to blend the cotton and buy the cotton for the textile mill in Little Field. Then, then I went to work with Norma Trollinger. I think she's an amazing, amazing woman.
And she worked for the USDA when I was working for A and M. And she decided to leave and do a startup firm for to do genetic engineering services in cotton.
And he just some help. So I got that little bit of experience there and went. And then when my husband was transferred, he worked for Coca Cola bottling company here in Lubbock. When they were sold and it expanded, he was transferred to Memphis, Tennessee and I went to work for what became Bayer Cop Science. But what was the very beginning of the fibermax brand?
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Oh, okay, okay. Which is very. I mean I don't even know what percentage of a lot of folks are using fiber Max.
For people that don't grow cotton. That is one of the most. One of the more popular one of.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: Their brand points was fiber quality. So it was a good fit for me. And then when I moved to Memphis we moved back to Lubbock because. Because Bayer consolidated their cottonseed business global cottonseed business in Lubbock at the time.
And when My mother had passed away, so James and I moved to the farm where I grew up.
And John Gannaway decided to retire in 2008. And it was an opportunity for me to go back to the public sector for breeding and really follow that passion. To say, I want to serve the underserved people. I want to make sure that we have genetic resources to seed for, you know, all the ways to farm and all the types of cotton that we might be able to sell. And that's what I did. And I am so excited. And. And I'm going to tell you, the technology and everything has changed so much.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: In plant breeding, including in cotton breeding. And it's exciting. It's also daunting. And I tell people, you know, I think it's time to turn this over to someone younger and smarter. And, boy, am I happy that they chose Dr. Carol Kelly.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: Well, I can't. I mean, you can't.
Experience is something that is hard to replace. And I know if you guys are friends, I'm sure she'll be leaning on that experience, too.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: So we talk by text at least once, at least weekly.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: That's awesome. That's awesome. I will have to have her on so we can hear about what. All she's doing out there at the extension station is where she is. So she's out there north of the airport.
Yeah.
So that is exciting to hear what's happening there.
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Let's keep Texas water flowing strong for the future. Visit sarah conservation.com when hemp became a thing, we had a farmer or a landowner that came to us and said, I want to grow this. And I'm like, what? What is it? I don't even know what this is.
And I mean, you know, because I grew up in Terry county where, like, we were growing all the wines but you still couldn't buy alcohol. Right. It was a dry county.
So, I mean, I. And I was homeschooled, so I was sheltered. Never smelt marijuana until I walked into it. I mean, I didn't even know that hemp smelt like marijuana.
Obviously it does, because it's the same plant.
Anyway, so the first, you know, when I started researching, went, wait a second. This is a fiber and grain crop. We already. We already grow a fiber and grain crop. Like, this is a fiber and seed crop. What the heck? You know, why are we not, you know, but the issue for us, you're going to say there's one issue. There's no. There's no good genetics for us here, you know, and. And we've. We've tried several things, and, you know, it's. There's a lot of problems. There's problems in every part of the value chain of hemp. But anyway, we started a little organization and with the goal of that, converting to a national organization, which it did last year. So we have a board that's made up of commodity farmers. They grow other commodities and they grow hemp. And so I'm excited to see, you know, the potential there. But we need genetics. We need, you know, a lot of these growers. In particular, one in Oregon has been working on genetics themselves. You know, and then with Oregon State, it. It can't be understated that that is so important.
But here's the missing piece, Jane.
We don't have standards for fiber. So you can see then, like, what you were able to do is you knew the end buyer could tell you what they needed. End buyer can't tell us necessarily what they need.
And so it's almost, I keep saying, like, it's like a loop. It's not a chain. Because this end and this end, they better be talking to each other.
We can't, you know, so I'm excited that we have one Cotton Incorporated board member that's now on that national board, and she's going to be speaking at. It's actually Lacey. So Lacey Vardaman. So she's going to be speaking actually at the Hemp Fiber. They're going to have a Fiber National Fiber meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, next month. And she's going to be speaking because, you know, we've been saying for a long time, I guess the wheel has been invented on what to do here. We. We have Done this with cotton.
Everybody wants to keep reinventing the wheel, you know, and so I'm excited, though, that feel like there's some potential if they don't kill the industry, you know, and the people that are advocating in the industry don't kill the industry before it happens.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: And, you know, sometimes figuring out how to grow it is the simplest thing.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: You know, you mentioned about the. The chain, but also the seed.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, exactly. And that's when I guess it took me probably about two weeks maybe of research. By the time I realized, okay, about every one in every thousand person that you meet is decent in this industry, you know, and they would say, well, we're going to teach farmers how to farm this. I'm like, I've been farming it for 40 years. I'm like, you've been illegally growing pot for 40 years. That is not the same thing. You know, we're talking about a fiber crop. You don't even know how to drive a tractor.
You know, you're harvesting with a sickle. Like. No.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: Well, when I moved out of my office at Texas A, and that office basically, you know, the. The research and extension center at Lubbock, north of the airport, had been breeding cotton for about 100 years. And I was the fourth cotton breeder I called Carol. I just call her number five and.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Wow.
Wow. Yes.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: And.
And I was in someone. Carol didn't want to move from her office. I mean, she had it nicely decorated with lots of pink, so someone else was going to use that office. So I took to cleaning out a hundred years of history.
And one of the fun things that I found were proceedings from what they called spinner breeder conferences.
So in the cotton industry back in the. In the 60s, 70s, maybe early 80s, they would have spinner, what they call spinner breeder conferences.
Those. We can't. It was. It was fun to. To look at those, find those and.
And flip through those and say there was communication going on. We've really had a lot of. A lot of.
There is a good model with cotton as far as the chain.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: Yes, there is. And, and I see, you know, now just those. The end buyers wanting.
I think that as the chain from cotton has modernized, that connection has been lost between that farmer and they are wanting that back badly, wanting that back, wanting to communicate because the standards that people are asking for, they want assurance that they're getting things that are meeting specific standards that are happening globally. They may or may not happen in the United States, but this is a global. We're selling we want to sell cotton to a global industry and increase that, you know, and when you can promote a natural fiber, you know, And I see, you know, right now a Cotton Incorporated, the whole cotton industry is really pushing into this.
The problem with things that are not cotton, which is that they pollute our environment.
They're horribly polluted. And, you know, we. So how can we pollute? Push. Not only just that this is a natural fiber, but it's also being. It's helpful to the environment. And that's one of the frustrations I had with him from the very beginning was, first of all, misinformation that was often spread about cotton through that, you know, trying to, like, you don't have to do that. You know, it's. It's not the same. It's not the same plant. It's not going to do the same thing, you know.
So anyway, I. I think it's.
I think it's super interesting that, you know, that history of what's there. I came across a book. It's called Lubbock From Town to City. And it's a collection of different essays or newspaper articles, and there's one that tells kind of the history of cotton breeding and how. Like that first, when. When they first came and they brought those seeds from the Deep south for Mississippi. Mississippi, and the wind blew that fiber right out of the burr, you know, and so. And then. Then, you know, someone. One farmer had the sense to say, oh, look, this. This plant right here. That didn't happen with this one single plant on my field.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: I believe that legendary story would be about AJ Maka.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: I wondered who that was.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: Yes, he was one of my grandfather's best friends, also a Czech immigrant. Really? The Maca family. Yes.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. So from. Is he from. Was that in Lynn?
[00:26:53] Speaker A: I'm trying to remember if it's in Lynn County. They. They were south of Lubbock around Woodrow.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: I. I don't. I think it was. It was either Lynn or Lubbock County.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Okay.
Such a fascinating story. Like, just the. The forethought of thinking. I mean, you know, this is the disaster, but what can we. What can we build out of it? And then there was a fire. The extension station burned at one point, and they lost all of that. Correct. And then if I'm. Am I. If I'm remembering correctly, and he was the one that had that stock, that original stock.
[00:27:32] Speaker A: Yes, he had the original plant. And I think that there are some other, you know, maybe parallel, just not discoveries, but plant breeding. Has been the far channel plant breeders.
[00:27:45] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:27:45] Speaker A: Right. For thousands of years. Whenever you, you go into your field and you select, you pick the seed of the best plant.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: Right.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: And in the case of hina, it was a Thanksgiving day storm, I think in 1926 that came in. We, I guess they waited till the freeze, you know, before harvesting different things. But yes, the storm had blown all the cotton out on the ground and he found that one plant that had held on to all its cotton and he did, he planted it the next year. And what, what made it interesting to me as a more modern breeder, geneticist is he thought, oh, I'm gonna plant the seed from this plant and it's all gonna be, you know, tight in the bowl and it's segregated like a single gene does, like a single gene mutation does. 25% of it was still pretty loose. 25% of it was, you know, hard to get out of the burr and 50 was, was heterozygous and, and it was just kind of all over the board and he was like.
And he did take some seed to the experiment station and then, you know, you know, and, and how you got it purified. But they sell seed under the mock brand for a while and they call it, you know, storm proof and storm master or whatever.
But it really, you know, kind of, you make a whole change, you convert to, okay, we're going to start introgressing the genes or the characteristics of this. And people used to really get down on us pretty low about we didn't produce really high quality cotton because we just couldn't do it in this area.
And I would go back and say, I would guess that that original, some of those original mutations that carried this trait that we really needed were associated like so many times in breeding with not great fiber quality. And it took years and it took breeding and there's certainly we can do it.
And I, I'm going to tell you a story if you don't mind. I would love it because here at this Florence, South Carolina associated with Clemson, we call them research and education centers.
We still have a very traditional model when the land grant university system was developed that there's a big partnership with the USDA and we still have a couple of USDA scientists co located here and one's the cotton breeder. And the cotton breeding program here in Florence, South Carolina has a long history.
And I remember as a graduate student maybe 1986 or so, thinking my career was completely over because there was a legendary cotton breeder named Tom Cole who was here at Florence.
And he was what we call vertically challenged, by the way, my. I'm the short. I'm 5 foot 8 and I'm the shortest sister in my family. We're tall.
He was really short.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: And I got up and gave my impassioned presentation and showed research about how it was possible for. For us to grow good quality cotton on the high plains of Texas. And this man raised his hand and said, I don't know how you can do that. The last time I was in Lubbock, I was standing knee deep in mud and the sand was blowing. And my response was, well, that's not very much mud.
And I realized when it came out of my mouth that I was. That was it. And he just bust out that thing and it was okay.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: But oh, my gosh, that is.
Oh, my gosh. You know, it does. That reminds me of the wine industry in Texas.
And I mean, like, really, our wine was bad for a long time. And. And I still have people. I mean, it's been good for the last 25 years. I mean, it's been good wine, and I still have people go, ooh, I had it once. And I'm like, you need to try it again. You need to try it again. You know, and it all has to do with that varietal, you know, and find, you know, learning that, oh, my goodness, like, we can grow what they can grow in Spain. I mean, like, we've got such a great area for growing here, so. And that's something I think I like about our. I didn't. It's easy to think that our. Our area is just only cotton because we do have a lot of. Of a cotton, but there are a lot of folks that are diversified as well, too. You know, a lot of people, you know, started a lot of peanuts. We started growing peanuts back.
Way back when, in the 90s, early 90s.
And. Yeah. So a lot of. You know, and when you were mentioning that that blew out on Thanksgiving Day, I remember that we got a call. We were living in Lamb county, but we were home in Terry county in our.
With our family for Thanksgiving. Got a call that every one of our modules on a section had caught fire.
Coming home and seeing that smoke from miles and miles and miles away.
[00:32:46] Speaker A: From the research side, I've always felt like it's important to serve the major crops of the area, but also to have a balance and the research and always be looking ahead. And. And I'm really. I have a one scientist here who. Who works on specialty crops. You know, sometimes they're maybe not going to work.
[00:33:06] Speaker B: Right, but you should all.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: But from the research side, not just in the different crops that you should be looking at while still respecting what the growers are growing, but also the types of growing, you know, the types of research when people say oh, organization organic is not going to work or whatever. I say, you know, in from the research side we need to be prepared because we can have these great advancements. You know, when we had DM herbicide tolerant crops and we could really take care of the weeds and then nature comes and says, okay, now the weeds are beginning to develop resistance or we're going to have drift issues as we move to different types of herbicides. In all of the things in the research side, we need to be always a little bit, make sure that we're balanced and, and looking forward. And I, we, we've talked about some of the, the hemp and some different things.
When I was at PCCA and we were selling most of the denim from the mill at Littlefield to Levi Strauss, they came to us and asked about indigo dye, natural indigo.
And me and crazy Emerson Tucker, my boss, talk about legendary in the cotton world, we decided to grow some indigo and then we decided to get dye out of it, which means harvesting that indigo and making it basically rot, which we did in our backyard at PCCA and made everybody mad.
But so fast forward to this April when I went to a meeting, a program meeting. There's something called sare Sustainable Agriculture Research Institute SARAH program.
And we were giving a, we had the, invited the stakeholders and we're doing a project reviews and what type of priorities they wanted to see. And everybody was, was engaged. And there was a, a farmer sitting next to me, actually an African American farmer. You could tell he was smallholder, he was very quiet and he was listening. And toward the end of the meeting he said the company that has contacted me and said they will buy all the indigo that I can grow, but I'm not going to grow it because I don't know how to harvest it and some other things.
And there was this interest and I went back to the office and I mentioned it to our Dr. John park, who's our specialty crops person. And within a week he had indigo seeds and we have indigo growing. And it's.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: That's extension. That's the power of extension. That's the power of extension. It's that partnership that just, you know, at one time was so invaluable, you know, and I, I'm so, so surprised how many people don't know about it anymore, you know, and so I'm super glad that you guys are, you know, doing that and, and partnering and making things like that possible. Those are the stories that need to be told.
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I know that FBRI has done some indigo research. I've seen some of that there as well. I know that there's, there's just a lot of interest in those type of things, you know, and we interview a young farmer from Plainview who has a. He's been in a grocery store there on the square and in Plainview Frontier Market, and you know, he's doing strawberries and, and he, he will tell anybody anything they want to know, you know, and he says you can make a living doing this, you know, and, and it's just not something that I think is. Never entered my mind that you could make a living doing that around here. Never thought about it, you know, and.
[00:37:20] Speaker A: Even, even if, like you said, sometimes growing the crop is the least problem. It's, you know, having infrastructure to extract dye or having, you know, the, the market. But there are still a lot of small artisans. We have here in South Carolina, speaking of extension, a thing called art and agriculture, where they do a tour every year. And there's still a lot of artisans that use indigo dye and art in, in small processes. So we're looking at it not only with the potential can we breed or engineer indigo where it increases its output of the dye. Because right now it takes way too much to get the amount of dye. That's one aspect, but also from an ornamental standpoint, because indigo is a native plant here in South Carolina.
[00:38:13] Speaker B: Really? Oh, darn. Wow, that's so. Well, South Carolina's, it's a beautiful place. And so what are you in charge of there?
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Okay, so just like any land grant university System, Texas has 13 research and extension centers. South Carolina has six.
And one of them in the state legislative mandated mandate, Clemson University is supposed to manage these research and in education centers and have at least two.
And one of them is in the PD region. We are in the Pee Dee region, the great Pee Dee River. I'm about an hour from Myrtle beach, and we have 18. Excuse me, 12. We had 1812 faculty members working on everything from plant breeding to molecular breeding to vegetables to soil health to cotton production to entomology. But this is an old institution with a lot of history, and it is a testament to what we've been talking about. Transitions, conservation, and looking ahead. Because this station was primarily a tobacco research station.
[00:39:21] Speaker B: Oh, sure it was.
[00:39:23] Speaker A: And when I came here, they said, we're sorry, we ran out of office space. You no longer have a conference room. But they. Off, off of my office, they built in a porch that. Our building is actually built over a pond.
And they said, but you have this private sunroom. And I was talking to someone on the phone, and I go into that room for privacy sometimes for conversations. And I said, I'm in my sunroom. He said, oh, no, that's the old smoking porch.
We still have one tobacco plot where we do disease screening, but we've transitioned into vegetable breeding and vegetable pathology. Small grains.
And so it's, It's. It's a research and Extension center that's 2,300 acres. 809. 800 to 900 in crops. We have certified organic land, about 14 acres of certified organic.
And the rest of it is forest. And I mean from a girl from West Texas. First of all, I dared to drive myself into the forest by myself. I'm not.
[00:40:30] Speaker B: No, I know, I know. At one point we thought we were. Might move to Oklahoma after we quit farming. And I, I told my husband, I was like, I don't know. How will you know when somebody's coming at you?
Like, no one's ever come at me, but like, like there's too many trees. I can't tell. Somebody's going to come get me.
Oh, wow.
So how do you manage a forest?
[00:40:50] Speaker A: Well, I'm learning. So I am the director of this, of this center.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:40:55] Speaker A: Which is just.
I tell them I'm the space police and keep the lights on. And, And I'm also the graduate student advisor. But it's, it's just a. I have always.
I've. I've enjoyed so many transitions in the cotton industry industry itself.
And this is another transition. I still work with the USDA cotton breeder. I've been working with him for 20 years. I have my first research trial out in the field in cotton.
But learning about all the crops and stewarding and helping this center, which has been so important to the economy of South Carolina, into its Next phase, yes, South Carolina may not be as wealthy as the state of Texas, but, but agriculture is the number one economic driver in the state of South Carolina. So it makes a different perspective when you're working in agricultural research here.
[00:41:49] Speaker B: Well, and it's different in that, you know, that the, they're smaller farms. And so you're talking about, you know, for us, it's like as cotton has less and less value then you know, you've got, your margins are less and less and less. You're going to take on more acres and more acres and workers. And now we have folks that are turning back dry land and landlords that can't find farmers for those dry land acres. And you know, things are changing here as well. And you know, we're about to interview a couple of young men that they're 18 and they've been watching their dad transition to some regenerative top techniques of farming and, and then they've created a regenerative Texas. And so I'm super excited to, you know, to see, you know, somebody from, you know, two generations that are willing to work together and change is something that is so super unique.
[00:42:41] Speaker A: I love that. I love that. I listen to Lacey talk about essentially four generations interacting, you know, on, on the transitions that that they're making there. And you have relationships. And there's the president of Mix and Seed. When I met him at one of our field days, I remember him from my days in industry.
I tried to sweet talk him into donating some cover crop seed to us and, and mixed species cover crops. And they are just, he was very excited about it. He gave me a little discount. But we're really, really, I think on July 21st we'll be hosting a really nice cover crop Field day.
[00:43:23] Speaker B: Awesome. And yeah, that's great. Well, it's a lot different to, to raise a cover crop there than it is here, but it can be done.
[00:43:33] Speaker A: Yeah, we, it's. I couldn't believe it. You know, we had to worry about when, what time you plant and water availability here. We have to worry about something getting too big that you can't get your equipment through.
[00:43:44] Speaker B: Yes. Oh, my goodness.
[00:43:46] Speaker A: So, you know, it's so amazing to look at the different things you have to consider at different areas in farming, but we're all doing the same thing, so.
[00:43:56] Speaker B: Which reminds me of a story that you mentioned before. We were recording about the count, the bird count there on your place.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: When I came as director, I got this unexpected phone call to say, can, will you still let us on your property? To count birds. And I thought, sure. For 55 years, the Audubon Society, in conjunction with Francis Marion University here, has been conducting a bird count in December and on our property and some of the surrounding properties, which I'm surrounded by properties that are in conservation easement, mostly some of them are in families, but where this land has been deeded to them by the king, you know, prior to Revolutionary War. And so it's a real difference. Really old in West Texas. But when they sent me. So they sent the report and, you know, we were able to join the bird count if we want. We had sometimes we have up to 65 different species of birds, 1,000 individual birds. And there's a long list. I was looking at it. We had one bald eagle, but there's a long list. They had, you know, all of the birds. But the most interesting thing to me, when he sent me the email with the report, he wrote the low and no till plots are especially productive. And sometime when we're doing research and we're doing these things on plots and we think, well, are we making a difference? We're measuring the soil health and. And we're doing all these things and we're saying, is there really a difference? Difference? Because we don't see it sometimes in front of our eyes. And for them to notice that some of that they were seeing different productivity in the bird habitats and the wildlife, based on the type of research plots we had here was, to me, really interesting.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. And it's interesting too, for us to think about here. One of the things, I think that as a lot of people, some people are going back to grassland to think about, even on the land that maybe there's still row crop farming, like hunting, that is. That's a good way to diversify income, you know. And so if you can, you know, do some things that will help to increase your bird population, even in your row crops that could increase your income.
[00:46:15] Speaker A: We do have, you know, forest specialists. We also have wildlife specialists because it is just amazing, the amount of wildlife.
It's just right here. It's on our same site.
And now we do have some issues with, you know, the deer wanting to.
[00:46:31] Speaker B: Yes, right.
Yes, yes.
[00:46:35] Speaker A: You know, imagine. And speaking of transitions, I. When I got here, we had a huge kind of muscadine grape.
[00:46:42] Speaker B: Oh, yes.
[00:46:43] Speaker A: Vineyard. Because at one time, you know, like I said, you got to try something, you know.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: Right.
[00:46:48] Speaker A: You don't know, some extension folks put in muscadine grapes and thought that maybe muscadine wine was a way for Some of the South Carolina growers to go. There is still one farmer that does muscadine juice, but they decided that was not really what they wanted to do. And the folks that put in the vineyards had since left and not really maintaining them. And they were harboring, you know, coyotes and different things. And finally the farm manager said, jane, you know, what can we do? And I was amazed because I said, well, these are bushy, bushy, wild vines. And they said, we prune them back to the nubs last year. And that's how fast here something regenerates. Right. So I ran all the traps and asked anyone who might possibly be interested in using this, that resource, and nobody took me up on it. And I have never seen something be obliterated so fast.
When I gave the farm manager the thumbs up. Yes. Okay, let's take the bonds out.
And right now we are planting pollinator, annual pollinator habitats because the Clemson University apiculture and pollinator coordinator, Ben Powell, he's amazing offices that are our center and we have perennial pollinator habitats, but where our muscadine grapes are, are going to be an annual habitat pollinator. And you know, it's in. History marches on. There was probably tobacco there at one time.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: Yep. Yes, I'm sure there was. I'm sure there was. This has been such an interesting conversation. I'm. I'm so grateful that you would take the time to get online and talk about the history of all these things. I know a lot of. Probably half of the people that we. We reach have not heard about any of this, and some maybe have heard vague tellings of it. So I just appreciate it. And I also appreciate the efforts that you put in for the cotton industry that my family has benefited from for many years.
[00:48:54] Speaker A: Well, thank you very much for inviting me. Of course. It makes me homesick to talk with you.
I miss you all. And, and I get to. To line up, kind of pop in and. And look at Sarah podcast every once.
[00:49:10] Speaker B: Good.
[00:49:10] Speaker A: I'm so glad. Jeremy or the guys.
[00:49:14] Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
[00:49:15] Speaker A: I can tell you what, that cotton breeding program in Lubbock is in good hands.
[00:49:20] Speaker B: That is so great to hear. Well, I'm going to reach out to her so you can warn her. Then I'm. I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm coming after her.
[00:49:27] Speaker A: Great, great.
[00:49:28] Speaker B: Thank you, Jane. Appreciate it so much.
And thank you, friends, for joining us for another episode of Conservation Stories. Conservation Stories is a podcast brought to you by Sarah Sandhill Area Research Association.
And we are really thankful that you listen. We hope you find it interesting, and we hope that you will share it with someone.
We appreciate it, and we'll see you next time. Bye.
