JOANNE CLENDINING: In every corner of the state, Maryland is a producer's paradise.

Did you know, ancient grains can relieve what ails you?

That rice doesn't need to be rooted in water?

And that there's more to heirlooms than tomatoes?

Don't go anywhere, stories about the people who work our land and feed our state are coming up next on "Maryland Farm and Harvest."

NARRATOR: Major funding for "Maryland Farm and Harvest" is made possible in part by, The Maryland Grain Producers Utilization Board, investing in smarter farming to support safe and affordable food, feed and fuel, and a healthy bay.

Additional funding provided by, Maryland's Best, good for you, good for Maryland.

A grant from the Rural Maryland Council, Maryland Agricultural Education and Rural Development Fund.

MARBIDCO helping to sustain food and fiber enterprise for future generations.

A grant from the Maryland Department of Agriculture, Specialty Crop Block Program.

Farm Credit, lending support to agriculture and rural America.

The Maryland Soybean Board and Soybean Check-Off program, progress powered by farmers.

Wegmans Food Markets, healthier, better lives through food.

The Maryland Association of Soil Conservation Districts.

The Maryland Nursery, Landscape and Greenhouse Association.

The Maryland Farm Bureau Incorporated.

The Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment.

Baltimore County Commission on Arts and Sciences.

And by... ♪ (theme music playing) ♪ (bird chirping) JOANNE: Have you driven Maryland's back roads and wondered about what's being grown at the end of that farm lane?

Hi, I'm Joanne Clendining, with over 12,000 farms in Maryland, the wonderment is never-ending.

Our job is to give you a glimpse of the life seldom seen.

And as part of a rural preservation district here in Frederick County, Basil Harding Farmstead is preserving the farming way of life that will be here for future generations to see.

Coming up, a farming community that's revolutionizing a traditional way of growing rice, but first, when a farmer's family member became sensitive to gluten, he bucked traditional wheat for ancient grains, and the results made them believers in old-world ways.

♪ ♪ It's midsummer on Maryland's Eastern Shore, for many farmers, it's winter wheat harvest time, and Gerry Godfrey of Mt.

Zion Farm is among them.

But Gerry's harvesting a winter wheat not many people are familiar with.

GERRY GODFREY: It's tall, you can see how much taller it is than regular wheat.

JOANNE: Gerry's planted 10 acres of an old world grain called Einkorn, and the harvest can be a bit more challenging.

GERRY: A heavy head and a rainstorm, it's gonna fall over.

Once it's done that, it's very difficult to pick up with a combine, it doesn't dry right.

There goes your yields.

JOANNE: And with Einkorn, every kernel counts.

GERRY: I would anticipate we're looking at about a 15-bushel yield here, per acre, yeah.

That's a fraction of what other crops are.

JOANNE: So the obvious question, why Einkorn?

♪ ♪ Einkorn is an old-world grain, it's one of the world's earliest forms of wheat.

Evidence suggests it may have been cultivated as far back as 30,000 years ago in the Middle East, where it still grows today.

But for Gerry, it was all about the gluten.

GERRY: Grandchildren who have issues with the gluten.

So I suppose it was just a lark or whim that I, that I, I tried some and, and um, and they don't have a problem with it.

JOANNE: But Einkorn isn't gluten-free, just the opposite.

GERRY: It's loaded with gluten.

It's a low-density gluten and people don't seem to have issues with it.

JOANNE: Modern wheat has a gluten protein which some people find difficult to digest.

But Einkorn was never hybridized, so its simple gluten protein DNA structure is weak and brittle, dissolving quickly in water.

Studies show people with a gluten intolerance, can stomach Einkorn.

GERRY: Well the other positive thing is we just get everybody together to just be a fun day and work, you know it's hard work and hot and sweaty but that how we would, we would gather it in.

JOANNE: And on this day, Gerry's son Alfred and the grandkids are on hand for the harvest.

The Einkorn isn't mill-ready yet.

It needs to be threshed or dehulled, a process that separates the wheat from the chaff.

And that's where Gerry's homemade threshing machine comes in handy.

GERRY: This is a gravity table.

We blow air, we've got fans underneath here that blow up the screen area and we shake it at the same time and we get a fluid thing going on.

And when we do, this more dense, the higher a specific gravity moves uphill and the lighter stuff moves downhill.

JOANNE: It's a slow process, and with only 10 acres of wheat, the yield is minimal.

But for Gerry, it's never been about the yield.

GERRY: I do have a soft spot in my heart for valuable, underused foods.

JOANNE: Besides his Einkorn, Gerry has pasture-raised beef, a stand of American Holly Trees, and the native super fruit, Black Aronia, known to be packed with nutrients and antioxidants.

GERRY: We have a small farm, so if you want to have a small farm, it has to be something of a unique nature.

JOANNE: Old-world grains like Einkorn are growing in popularity, larger operations out west help feed the nation.

But Gerry enjoys sharing what he harvests with the community.

HAL VAN ALLER: Hey, good morning, Gerry.

GERRY: Morning, Hal.

HAL: Thanks for coming by today.

GERRY: Brought you a few bags of Einkorn.

HAL: Fantastic.

JOANNE: By way of the Old Wye Mill in Wye Mills, Maryland.

HAL: This mill's been here since the 1680s, it is the oldest, continuously operating, water-powered grist mill in the country, in the U.S. JOANNE: Hal Val Aller is president of the Friends of Wye Mill, he and volunteer head miller Andy House, grind grains much like they did for hundreds of years.

With the turn of a large valve, water is released from the nearby pond and begins rotating the huge water wheel.

HAL: We have a really wide wheel and it generates about 25 horsepower.

JOANNE: Through a series of gears and belts, the giant grindstones are set in motion, grinding any form of grist from corn to wheat into a fine flour.

HAL: We mill on the old stones we meal corn into cornmeal and grits, and wheat.

And we also grind rye, buckwheat, barley, old world grains, like Einkorn, are one of our biggest sellers and we grind it into flour.

JOANNE: old world grain, ground in an old-world mill.

For Gerry, the past informs the future.

GERRY: As you get older, you're acutely aware that you're teaching the next generation, I think there's so many people that don't have the opportunity to, to see this kind of stuff or to do the stuff like I'm doing.

And so hopefully they can learn a little bit about what's involved with putting food on your table.

JOANNE: Gerry Godfrey's wheat operation is small compared to other wheat fields in the state, but his family is big on the benefits of Einkorn.

And did you know, the grinding stones used in the mill have specific names?

The top stone is called the runner stone and weighs about 2600 pounds and the stone below it is called the bed stone and it weighs about 1800 pounds.

♪ ♪ All right, it's time to test your agricultural know-how, here is our thingamajig for the week.

Do you think you know what it is?

Well, here's a hint, when there's a heavy job to do, this tool just lets you roll with it.

Stay tuned and we'll have the answer at the end of the show.

There isn't a building more purposeful on a farm than a barn.

They're used for anything from storing hay to housing livestock.

Here are some pics of Maryland's finest barns.

Enjoy.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ When you think of a rice farm, I'm sure the images of terraced waterfilled paddies come to mind, but as you'll see in our next segment, a progressive and innovative farming approach has radically changed the way rice is grown.

It's another late summer in Prince George's County and at Purple Mountain Organics Farm Nazirahk Amen is checking on his latest crop, rice.

NAZIRAHK AMEN: We're taking a few samples and then.

JOANNE: He's hoping the moisture meter result will be below 15%, allowing for less drying time and a quicker trip to the shelf.

NAZIRAHK: Wow, look at that.

(laughs).

It's dry.

It's time to harvest.

JOANNE: Nazirahk Amen has been growing rice in Maryland for nearly a decade, just not in the way you might imagine.

This whole method that we're using is based on, what they call "the system of rice intensification."

JOANNE: Known as SRI, it was developed to help small rice farmers increase yield by reducing plant density, improving soil, and reducing water use.

NAZIRAHK: So we're growing rice, as a regular garden vegetable, basically is how it works here.

We grow six varieties on about an acre and a half and this is going to be the fourth variety that we're harvesting.

So ideally, we get about 6,000 pounds off of this acre and a half and it looks like actually we're going to get more than that this year.

JOANNE: While he adapted his farming methods, he also adopted some new farming equipment.

NAZIRAHK: In small grain production, part of our issue is that there's not a lot of American-made small grain equipment, less than 50 years old or so.

And so now we've gone all over the world, I've imported like a lot of Japanese equipment, mostly because Japan still has a rice production system that is farm to table, most times within the communities.

JOANNE: The only downside he's found is that the manual is in Japanese.

NAZIRAHK: I have a relationship with a man in Japan and he speaks English and so far, we've been able to work out most of the issues that come up.

And so that's been kind of our saving grace.

JOANNE: It also doesn't hurt that the machine works really well.

NAZIRAHK: It's very precise for what it does.

Now when we go down the row, we want to make sure we're getting all of what we grow into the combine.

JOANNE: And Nazirahk has a pretty important reason for that.

NAZIRAHK: We save our own seeds and we just go from year to year using the seed from the previous year.

The whole beauty of the method that we use is that we only need about a pound of each variety to reseed the whole field.

JOANNE: There's just one big thing missing from his field that you would find in most rice fields.

Around the world, rice producers either transplant into flooded fields or drop seeds into dry fields and then add water.

The key is water and lots of it.

Which originally made rice a non-starter for Nazirahk.

NAZIRAHK: For years our family has been committed to trying to grow as much food as we could for ourselves and so our hangup was grain production.

We would turn orange in the wintertime from eating carrots and sweet potatoes.

JOANNE: But then, he attended a lecture about the rice intensification method and discovered something remarkable.

NAZIRAHK: I realized that we could do this in Maryland.

You can grow rice without having a flooded paddy.

JOANNE: But what about the water?

NAZIRAHK: Number one, rice does not need to be flooded.

Rice is grown in flooded paddies for, for weed prevention.

I mean even though the rice benefits from it, you don't need to have the paddies saturated until the plants get to like fertilization.

JOANNE: In lieu of flooding, Nazirahk preps his fields like he would for any other garden vegetable, plastic sheets with well-spaced small holes are his weed prevention.

Two strips of drip tape under those sheets allow him to dial in water as needed.

NAZIRAHK: We keep track of the amount of time that the plants are in the field and when we know it's getting close for this variety to come to fertilization, we start giving it more water.

Instead of a couple times a week, we may start watering it every day for a while.

There's been years when we haven't had to even turn on the irrigation because we got enough water from the rain.

JOANNE: There is one part of the planting process that does involve a good soaking.

NAZIRAHK: This brown liquid that you're looking at is actually an inoculation in our efforts to kind of move from an organic level of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, we're moving more towards biological farming.

It's just like using probiotics in the human body, if we put down enough good microbes, it'll out-compete all the bad microbes.

We only do an acre and a half, that's our limit as a small farm.

We're experimenting with methods to try to get that number up but really with the labor-intensive method that we're using, an acre and a half is like the max that we want to try.

JOANNE: While still an experimental crop, Nazirahk is blazing a trail for future rice farmers in Maryland.

Purple Mountains rice along with their other products are available at two area farmer's markets, Takoma Park and Dupont Circle.

Coming up, Al Spoler gets nostalgic over produce.

But first, it's hard to imagine life without refrigeration.

If you like cold drinks, ice cream, and fresh meats and dairy products, then you have a farmer to thank on this week's, "Then and Now."

♪ ♪ From ancient times, people used underground storage structures, called "ice houses" to stockpile large amounts of ice or snow.

However, in 1803, cold became more practical when a wealthy Montgomery County farmer, Thomas Moore, made keeping foods cool a hot commodity.

Moore needed to transport butter 20 miles from his farm to the Georgetown market without it melting, so he invented a practical ice box called "the refrigerator."

His prototype was made out of a cedar tub insulated with rabbit fur, then he filled it with ice and wrapped it with a piece of sheet metal.

The tin chamber could keep 22, one-pound pieces of butter cold.

Later that year, Moore's invention was granted a patent from President Thomas Jefferson.

Moore invited Jefferson to his house to see his new invention.

Jefferson was so impressed, he drew a sketch of it on his invitation.

A year later, the President purchased his very own refrigerator.

Though the term refrigerator was used in 1803, the appliance we know today didn't actually appear until the 20th century.

The early electric refrigerators relied on toxic gases and they sometimes turned deadly.

The only safe place to keep them was outside.

The invention of freon changed that and the refrigerator's popularity took off.

WOMAN: Think of all you can store in here on these big firm shelves that roll all the way out to you.

JOANNE: By 1950, more than 80% of farms and 90% of urban homes had one.

Today the refrigerator is America's most used appliance, found in almost every home.

If Thomas Moore only knew how "cool" his invention was.

On this week's "The Local Buy," Al Spoler gets a blast from the past and learns a thing or two about open-pollinated produce, Al.

♪ ♪ AL SPOLER: Here at Chesterfield Heirlooms, walking through a hoop house is like entering a time tunnel because virtually all the plants and seeds here have history that goes back decades if not centuries.

MATT BARFIELD: We look for a lot of things that you are not familiar with but makes you curious to try.

STEFANIE BARFIELD: When you can actually celebrate the history of where the produce, the fruit, the vegetable started, where it began and you can grow it today in 2023 it's, it's pretty remarkable that you can grown the same produce that Thomas Jefferson did.

AL: From seeds grown at Monticello to crops cultivated by the Cherokee, Matt and Stefanie Barfield are committed to bringing produce of years past into the future.

Their heirlooms are all open-pollinated true to type, that means the flavor and genetics are the same as they were centuries ago.

And with most of the plants originating pre-1940, Matt and Stefanie are hoping to show that there's a story in every seed.

STEFANIE: And the quirkier the better, we're always looking for something that's a little extra strange, but we really grow it for the flavor.

The taste is just unbelievable, it's, it's so pure and it's so true and there's actual flavor.

MATT: These carry something else with them both on the plate and with the story.

AL: When you hear heirloom, you might immediately think of tomatoes of which Chesterfield has plenty.

But an heirloom is any seed that is passed down through the generations and right now at the farm, it's pepper-picking time.

Matt, we're deep here in pepper land, I can't believe it, I feel like I'm in a pepper museum.

Sgt.

Pepper's been really busy, I guess.

Everywhere I look there's a different variety.

When I listen to you it seems like every pepper has its own story, so this is like a lot of history in this hoop house.

MATT: Yes, there is.

AL: Wow, tell me a little bit about some of these.

MATT: Sure, we've got our Jimmy Nardellos that's our favorite fryin' pepper, that came over to this country in 1887.

AL: Wow.

MATT: And then on our right here, we've got the Fushimi pepper that's been cultivated in Japan in the Kyoto regions for hundreds of years.

AL: And I guess behind every pepper there's some history.

MATT: There is indeed.

AL: These are all cooking peppers, right?

MATT: Yes, sir.

AL: Okay and no evil peppers?

MATT: No evil peppers.

AL: Okay, that's good, I'm relieved.

But they're all deep red in color, are they ready to harvest?

MATT: Prime pepper season.

AL: Let's get pickin' then.

MATT: Let's get pickin'.

AL: So what are we picking now?

MATT: We're picking some of our Jimmy Nardello peppers.

They're a sweet, smokey, Italian fryin' pepper, they are simply delicious.

AL: Okay, was Jimmy a real person?

MATT: Jimmy was a real person.

He was one, he was number four of 11 children.

(laughing).

AL: And was this a family pepper that they brought with them?

MATT: This was, this was a pepper that they grew in their garden year after year.

AL: So Matt, you're, you're continuing Jimmy's fine work, and it really strikes me that this farm is a farm with a mission.

MATT: Well we really want everybody to be able to experience these delicious and fun vegetables.

And if we don't share it, you know, they're in danger of being lost forever.

AL: Yeah.

MATT: This chili pepper was at one point in its time in danger of going extinct.

AL: I'm glad it didn't, they're, first of all, they're really pretty.

MATT: And they're delicious, even better.

AL: After harvesting a little bit of history, I think it's time to taste some.

At the farm's market, they're selling their produce along with other products from local farms.

And Stefanie has a few things waiting for me.

Stefanie, you have an incredible spread of produce here and would I be right in saying that this was all grown here at the farm?

STEFANIE: Yes, you would.

AL: And it's all heirloom.

STEFANIE: It is, yes sir.

AL: All heirloom varieties, this is amazing.

Well, I think you can make a really incredible salad with all this, don't you?

STEFANIE: We have made some pretty incredible salads, yes.

AL: I bet, and the thing is it's probably something our grandfathers would recognize.

STEFANIE: And even before them.

AL: Oh, how about that?

Now, I see, I think this is the Jimmy pepper.

STEFANIE: Jimmy Nardello.

AL: And Matt said they were really, really delicious.

Um, should I give one a try?

STEFANIE: Oh yeah, absolutely.

AL: Okay, here we go.

Oh, it's good.

STEFANIE: Good.

AL: Oh my gosh.

STEFANIE: Good.

AL: It's fantastic.

A little bit like, like green beans, but with even more flavor.

STEFANIE: Mm-hm.

AL: Good, earthiness, sweet too.

It's just amazing.

So I can imagine this, you know, fried up and everything would be wonderful.

STEFANIE: Yes.

AL: We'd like to put some information about your farm on our website so people can plan a visit here, okay?

STEFANIE: We would love that, yes, awesome.

AL: We're gonna put it on the website at mpt.org/farm so you can check it out.

For "The Local Buy," I'm Al Spoler, Joanne.

JOANNE: Be sure to check out mpt.org/farm for all our recipes and resources.

Plus, you can watch all "Farm and Harvest" episodes there as well.

Also, don't forget to follow us on social media, for show updates, pictures, and videos.

Now hold on, we're not done yet.

Remember our thingamajig?

Did you guess it?

Our hint was, when there's a heavy job to do, this tool just lets you roll with it.

This is a log roller.

Logs are heavy to move.

This log roller allows you to roll them around the work site.

Congratulations if you got it right.

Join us next week for another thingamajig along with more stories about the diverse, passionate people who feed our state.

I'm Joanne Clendining, thanks for watching.

(music plays through credits) NARRATOR: Major funding for "Maryland Farm and Harvest" was made possible in part by, The Maryland Grain Producers Utilization Board, investing in smarter farming to support safe and affordable food, feed and fuel, and a healthy bay.

Additional funding provided by, Maryland's Best, good for you, good for Maryland.

A grant from the Rural Maryland Council, Maryland Agricultural Education and Rural Development Fund.

MARBIDCO helping to sustain food and fiber enterprise for future generations.

A grant from the Maryland Department of Agriculture, Specialty Crop Block Program.

Farm Credit, lending support to agriculture and rural America.

The Maryland Soybean Board and Soybean Check-Off program, progress powered by farmers.

Wegmans Food Markets, healthier, better lives through food.

The Maryland Association of Soil Conservation Districts.

The Maryland Nursery, Landscape and Greenhouse Association.

The Maryland Farm Bureau Incorporated.

The Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment.

Baltimore County Commission on Arts and Sciences.

And by... (bird chirping) ♪ ♪