(uplifting music) - [David] From the soil of our family farms to your table, there's something special about Georgia, something you can taste in every bite.

(uplifting music continues) Fresh flavors, local farms, unforgettable experiences, Georgia has it all.

Support local, taste the difference, and make memories along the way.

Look for the Georgia Grown logo wherever you shop or visit georgiagrown.com.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Community, learning, working, playing, celebrating, doing life is always better together.

At GPB, we aim to provide you with the tools to be able to do life together well.

Our mission to educate, inform, and entertain inspires everything from our wide range of programming, to our stimulating radio conversations, to our fun in-person events.

We've got something for everyone.

Visit gpb.org/community to learn more about our upcoming events.

- The fascinating and ever-changing world of agriculture.

Let's hit the road here in Georgia and meet the farmers, producers, makers, and bakers who keep us all fed and keep us coming back for more.

Straight ahead, at "A Fork in the Road."

(soulful music) ♪ Mm, mm, mm ♪ ♪ I dig through the mud ♪ ♪ There's dirt on my hands ♪ ♪ Strong like a tree ♪ ♪ There's roots where I stand ♪ - [David] Georgia farmers, artisans, merchants, and producers, we depend on these men and women every day of our lives through the choices we make and the food we consume.

Their strategy and approach is always shifting, but the end game remains the same, results.

(soulful music continues) (gentle music) From the field to the greenhouse to the sea, farming can be conducted in a variety of environments.

And it's the science of farming and fishing that sets things apart as well as geography.

This episode explores a large scale hydroponic farm in central Georgia, a stunning aquaponic farm in Peachtree City, and an iconic local market in Brunswick that works with local fishermen to deliver fresh wild Georgia shrimp to their local community and beyond.

(soulful music) ♪ Mm, mm, mm ♪ - [David] We begin this diverse farming episode in the greenhouses of Macon, Georgia, home to Cox Farms, North America's largest greenhouse operator.

(heavy music) It appears as something out of a sci-fi novel, a system of growth and life, fully automated and visually spectacular.

Cox Farms has gone all in on this new generation of farming, the inside generation, and the result is the clean, crisp lettuce and greens from BrightFarms.

- I like to think about Cox's farming roots going all the way back to our founder, James Cox.

He grew up on a farm in the 1800s, you know, ultimately started Cox Enterprises, diversified into different businesses from our media to our communications, to our automotive services.

One of the things that's really important to Cox is leaving the world a better place and making a positive impact.

And so we then focused in on high-tech greenhouse growing, hydroponic growing because of the opportunity to do a couple things.

One, it's more resource efficient.

We can grow 10 to 30 times as much per acre as you can outdoors.

So we use a lot less water because we're recycling all the water.

We use less nutrients because the plants are taking all of those nutrients up.

These greenhouses allow us to grow lettuce in Macon, Georgia close to where it's going to be consumed versus having to grow it all the way across the country, ship it in the back of trucks, being able to offer that freshness and that shelf life to our customer versus it spending its life in the back of a truck traveling.

From this elevation, you can really see how the plants go from germination to full growth at the other end of the greenhouse where they're harvesting.

You don't see a whole lot of people here.

What I like to tell people is the last person that touches this lettuce is the one that loads the seed in the hopper, and the next one is the one that's loading it on the truck to deliver it to the store.

So most of the people that are in here are either growers, making sure that the lettuce is healthy and doing well or maintenance.

We have a team that works on all the moving parts to keep everything flowing through the greenhouse.

(energetic music) Yeah, this is the beginning.

This is where the lettuce all starts.

Our lettuce has grown hydroponically, and so it's grown in gutters with media versus soil.

We apply the media to the gutter in this system here.

The gutter then moves through into the seeder and these drums pick up the tiny little lettuce seeds and apply exactly the right amount of seeds in the spacing that we're looking for to go into the gutter.

From there, the seeds get watered in and then they ultimately make their way into a germination room, which gives them a few days in the dark, cool, moist climate to sprout their first little shoots.

The reason we use cameras and we don't go in there is we want to keep the climate as consistent as possible because when seeds are born just like babies, they're very vulnerable and so we want to make sure that those conditions stay as consistent as possible.

Once the seeds are sprouted in the fertigation room, they transition 90 degrees where they get loaded out into the production area of the greenhouse.

While we have hundreds of thousands of gutters in the greenhouse, we know where every single one of them is going and ultimately where it's going to end the minute that it's seeded.

So as the gutters come out, they get indexed to their final home in one of these rows in the greenhouse.

The total production area is eight acres.

The fertigation system puts water into the gutter.

The plants drink what they want and whatever they don't drink gets captured on the other end and goes back to be reclaimed and used over and over again.

And then once they're loaded out here into the greenhouse, they move from this end to that end where they're harvested in about 18 to 21 days.

(heavy music) - My name is Mariana Robles.

I'm the head grower for the Georgia facility here at BrightFarms.

It's like a game that you are trying to understand if we set up the entire gutters, entire babies for success from the very beginning.

Do we have the right amount of water in the media from day one?

Check.

Do we have the right amount of humidity and temperature in the germination chambers?

Did we or we didn't?

Check.

And then from this moment it's like how we can just nurture these babies, trying to understand are they developing properly at this stage of growth?

Are we delivering the right nutrients?

Are they responding okay to the amount of light that we are giving them or do we need to back off?

- We have a spray boom that enables those plants to receive water before they've grown their roots long enough to access the water down below them in the gutter.

(heavy music) These flags gives you an idea of the growth cycle of the plant.

Each one of these flags represents a day that that lettuce was planted.

As these gutters move from one end of the greenhouse to the other, they're also spread apart.

So you'll notice in the beginning they were all touching and here they've now moved to about four inches apart.

This creates room for the canopy to grow and spread out and enables us to get more yields out of the same square footage of greenhouse growing area.

What we're looking for in a crunchy green leaf product is a lettuce that you can eat it right out of the package, but it also has some good crunch to it and sweetness.

And so we'll hear that snap (leaf snaps) and that's what's going to help it hold up in your salad and give you a really good eating experience.

But it's also super sweet and tasty and as clean as you can find.

Nothing sprayed on here.

I would be the first person touching this lettuce since the person loaded the seeds in the hopper.

(bouncy music) So in this room, you see the lettuce making the transition from the greenhouse to harvest.

The lettuce is picked up off of the gutter.

The gutter goes out to be cleaned and reused and the lettuce will come up this conveyor belt here.

It comes up and over a mezzanine and goes into this check weighing system here where the right amount of lettuce is measured and then gets placed into the individual packages.

And this is the final product, nice and fresh.

So now that they've been top sealed, we use these robot arms to load each individual tray into the box and then those boxes come around, get taped up and ultimately go out to get loaded onto a pallet to go on a truck and hit the store in as little as 24 hours.

(gentle music) - [David] Stephen Bradley and the team here at BrightFarms truly believe in the mission of growing fresh, healthy produce for their customers.

They see the demand for clean, fresh product as consumers seem more educated and aware of where their food comes from.

They believe growing from the inside can benefit the outside and in the long term, our planet as a whole.

(soulful music) ♪ Mm, mm, mm ♪ - [David] From the greenhouses of Macon to the greenhouse aquaponic combo of Alo Farms in Peachtree City, where the science of nature takes center stage.

(lively music) I quickly learned that there are some smart folks around these parts.

However, understanding the science of aquaponics was a bit more simple than I first expected.

Hundreds of fish powering the growth of thousands of stems of fresh lettuce and greens.

This place was colorful, clean, and the aroma was pleasant.

And here to explain how this incredible operation all works are founders Jefferson Brown and his son and GM, Alec Brown.

- What we're doing is actually creating a living and natural ecosystem indoors.

So we're combining aquaculture, which is raising fish with cultivating lettuce, microgreens and herbs and water.

And how that works is our fish, they produce ammonia and they excrete ammonia through metabolism through their gills.

And then we pollinize beneficial bacterias and microbes in a filtration system that convert that ammonia into nitrogen, which is perfect plant food.

That's then in solution in our water, which becomes a perfect nutrient rich solution for the plants to absorb, to grow, and then their roots work to filter and clean the water that gets recirculated back to the fish tank.

So it's a closed loop living ecosystem and it's just really dynamic environment and so we can grow year round.

(light music) - Believe it or not, I'm an architect and we design operating rooms, surgery centers, cath labs, those types of things.

And I've done a lot of work, missions work with Doctors Without Borders and other church groups.

We would set up clinics all over.

And every time I went to these projects for medical, what I kept seeing were children and families that were starving.

So about after eight years of me saying someone needs to do something, it just felt like God just spoke to me and just told me, "You do it.

Figure out how to do alternative farming so we could bring farm, local produce and all that to the people where they were."

And being an architect, that made sense to me because it's about creating community.

- [David] So you have this Peachtree City community here.

Is it something you feel Peachtree City has embraced?

- Very much.

We started out, we were doing it with a cash box.

It's honor system.

So we know how much produce we put out.

The community supported us in such a way they just wanted us to be successful.

Part of that community too is we listen to them and there are cultural foods that they can't buy or can't get locally that we're raising for them.

So it's like them having their own personal farm.

So we're serving our community by doing that.

And then another part of our heart and our mission is that the first 10% of what we grow, the best 10% of what we grow, we give to families who can't buy it.

That's our heart and our passion.

(festive music) - [David] This is some of the greenest romaine I've ever seen.

Is it partially delighting?

Is it just how healthy you've made it?

- Really, it's because it's a perfect balance.

We have optimum light, optimum nutrition and climate.

It's thriving and what you'll actually see on some of these romaines is these little nodules and stuff in here, these little pockets.

So we sent those off to the lab and we're like, "What is this?

Is this abnormal for romaine?"

And essentially what they sent it back and said, "Your lettuce is fat with nutrition."

Those are actually extra stores of antioxidants, polyphenols, all the micronutrients and things that your body needs to heal, repair, and grow.

And then importantly, that's where flavor comes from.

- [David] These fish, they're almost the engine of this whole place.

- There's about 250 fish in each tank.

We have Mediterranean varieties tilapia, and then they're all raised here from the time that they're about the size of my thumbnail to about this size here, which gives us about a three to five pound fish, which brings us a market size filet.

So we're producing about 500 filets every single week here at the farm.

It's a beautiful animal.

It's a very healthy animal.

It just needs a opportunity to be raised in a healthy ecosystem.

And if you're in the farm, people can say like you don't smell fish at all.

So with even with over 7,600 fish over here, you don't smell fish.

The biggest misconception is that people think we use a fish poop to grow, and that's not really what we're using.

So we filter that out.

We run it through a clarifier.

We remove the solid waste.

And what we want from the animal that we're taking is the ammonia.

- And ammonia is very toxic.

That's where our beneficial bacterias come in.

The beneficial bacteria eat the toxic ammonia.

Those beneficial bacterias create waste.

That waste is a nitrite, and then we colonize another set of bacterias that eat the nitrite, they create waste, and we end up with nitrate, and nitrate's the perfect plant food.

So through using beneficial bacteria, we take care of what's toxic in the environment, purify it, and turn it into perfect plant food.

(light music) - So these are some of our microgreen varieties.

We have broccoli, carrot, celery, citrus basil, a spicy mustard mix, some pea shoots and pea tendrils, as well as radish.

- [David] Explain how microgreens work.

You know, you're calling it broccoli and carrots, but it looks nothing like we're used to.

- It's a young plant, so we're harvesting it at its either first like baby leaf or cotyledon stage.

We just start harvesting them really young.

And because we're also using our nutrient-rich water for them, we just are increasing the flavor profiles, the amount of nutrients in the plant, really the stuff that's super helpful and healing and reparative to your body.

- [David] The store here in Peachtree City features some new and old friends of "A Fork in the Road," and the key is that everything is fresh.

- What's truly unique about our farm is being able to walk in, shop, and then also see everything growing in here.

Like we're selling our living basils, but right behind that is basil that's growing.

So it's literally like you're reaching into the farm, harvesting it.

So it just has that unique, fresh feel to it.

- [David] Intimidating science at first eventually became a method that just made perfect sense, serving fresh produce, fresh fish, and a wide variety of Georgia grown products to the folks of Peachtree City and the Peach State as a whole.

(soulful music) ♪ Mm, mm, mm ♪ Let's now work our way to the coastal city of Brunswick where a fifth generation run city market goes above and beyond to deliver wild Georgia shrimp and a variety of fresh Atlantic seafood.

(light music) Georgia's commercial shrimping industry has deep roots dating back to the early 1900s.

In fact, Brunswick, Georgia was once known as the shrimp capital of the world with hundreds of boats crowding the docks.

Today, the scene is quite different.

(gentle music) The fleet in cities like Brunswick and nearby Darien are much smaller than they used to be, but the high quality shrimp, which many call the sweetest and best in the world, remain in Georgia's nutrient-rich water.

Captain Johnny Bennett bought his first shrimp boat at the age of 16, the Dora F. That trusty vessel caught wild Georgia shrimp with him at the helm for nearly 60 years.

And during that time, Captain Johnny's grandson, Jonathan, followed his path, beginning to captain the Dora F from time to time at age 17 and eventually acquiring his own boat.

- My name's Jonathan Bennett.

I'm a commercial fisherman out of Brunswick, Georgia.

Been doing it my whole life ever since I've been able to walk pretty much.

- [David] Unfortunately, the Dora F sank back in 2024 as Hurricane Helene tore through the Eastern Seaboard, but the Bennetts didn't give up.

They acquired a new vessel, properly named the Dora F2, and they began a new chapter in this Brunswick shrimping saga.

(energetic music) - When you first get at the dock, of course your outriggers up, you got to let everything down and you got to let your nets out, pulling two 40-foot nets with 6'4" doors on them.

And once you see how your doors are on the end of the outrigger, we'll actually let this down your turtle shooters in your bag.

This is going to trail behind the boat.

Once you get that behind the boat, you'll let your cables out and them doors will actually act like a spreader.

When they hit the water, they're designed to bust open and hold the mouth of your net open.

And then you have, I don't know if you can kind of see it, but your silver chains dragging right here, that's called your tickler chains, and they drag exactly four foot in front of the net, and that way all the shrimp that are buried up in the mud get kicked up and they go into the net.

It funnels all down and comes through this turtle shooter, and whatever cannot fit through them two inch bars gets ejected back out into the ocean, and whatever can go through them two inch bars comes down in here to your net, and then we dump it right here on the deck, sort through it.

You got to make sure them turtle shooters for your DNR have to be at a certain 55 degrees at all time.

It doesn't shoot the stuff out like it's supposed to if it ain't on the right angle.

You want to make sure you got absolutely no holes in here whatsoever, because this is where all your money goes, everything you're doing.

If you drag three or four hours and you got a hole and you lose half your stuff, then you just kind of wasted your time, fuel, everything.

(energetic music) I don't know if there's enough shrimpers in America to keep up with the demand for it, and that's kind of how we got where we was at now because it's so hard to be a shrimper, to be able to afford it.

And then also you got to be able to want it.

To be able to go to work for three or four months sometimes without getting paid a dollar, you got to know how to manage your money.

Sometimes you make good money, but I don't mean you can just spend it.

You got to keep it, put it up for the winter, or if your boat tears up.

You can't just want to do it.

You got to love it, that's for sure.

(upbeat music) - [David] Coastal development, high fuel costs, and a massive influx of cheaper farm-raised imported shrimp have put a squeeze on local shrimpers and fishermen.

Unlike imported farm-raised alternatives that are often grown in crowded ponds, wild shrimp grow naturally in Georgia's clean, nutrient-rich coastal marshes.

This natural environment gives them a sweeter flavor and a firm texture, but it also makes them a nutritional powerhouse that can now be found in many school meals throughout Georgia.

(upbeat music) Wild Georgia shrimp are an excellent source of lean protein.

They're packed with essential vitamins and minerals, including vitamin B12, selenium, and zinc, which support a healthy immune system.

Plus, they contain omega-3 fatty acids, which are crucial for brain development.

(gentle music) The shrimper's day usually begins before the crack of dawn.

Some boats go out on multi-day trips, keeping the shrimp on ice before they're brought back to the docks to be processed.

The Bennett captains prefer to go on day trips, unloading on the day of the catch.

Now, most of the shrimp caught by fishermen like Captain Johnny don't have to travel far to get to the dinner plate.

Walker Owens's family has run the city market in Brunswick since 1948.

Walker is a fifth generation operator of the city market and his family has a long history buying fresh wild Georgia shrimp from the Bennetts and other boats of the historic Brunswick fleet.

(upbeat music) - This boat here and the boat outside of it, they're big, but they're not as big as they can get.

A lot of the real big freezer boats stay out for weeks at a time.

These guys stay three, four days, depending on the weather and the wind and everything.

But he was out for three days.

Out here, he was out for a couple days and there's a few boats like that.

And then we have some of the older, smaller boats over here.

They go out and come every day.

Those are two really cool boats there, and those captains come and go every day.

Johnny Bennett, he goes every day, so that's his thing.

In the '70s, there was probably 150 boats on the waterfront and six or eight packing houses, and now this is the last packing house right here.

And these are the last boats.

We're the last shrimp dock in Brunswick left and kind of hanging on now with what we got.

These boats here, they go out and catch the shrimp, they go offshore.

Right now they have to go out three miles.

They head the shrimp, they ice the shrimp down, they call us, they come in, they put the shrimp in barrels with ice and they use this lift here, this conveyor lift system to pull them up.

They put them into this vat, (upbeat music) and then from the vat, they kind of go into the dock.

They just kind of roll in like that.

That's pretty much how that works.

And then from there, we weigh them in hundred pound boxes, ice them down, and we grade them from there.

So that's a hundred pounds of shrimp right there.

They go from the hundred pound boxes ice down to right here to the grader, and we grade the shrimp by size here.

We dump them in, the conveyor belt runs them up.

They get dumped into the grader, into the conveyor, and there's some cylinders inside of here that are kind of at an angle, and the bigger shrimp come out at the end and the smaller shrimp come out first.

So it kind of grades them that way.

They fall based on their size, so smallest to largest right here.

The smallest size shrimp would be a 31-35 count.

That's 31 to 35 and a pound.

And then it goes to 26-30, which is like a medium, and then 21-25s.

And then we have 16-20s, which is like the biggest we get around here.

And the numbers is just how many shrimp come in a pound.

And then once they grade them, we'll repackage them in hundred pound boxes again, and then we'll put them in the cooler usually for the day and use what we need at the market, at the retail store.

And we sell to a lot of restaurants fresh shrimp.

Georgia shrimp season runs from June 15th, roughly June 1st, June 15th to January the 1st, and they can stay inside of three miles and they can shrimp literally up on the beach if they want to.

But this time of year, like right now, it's getting ready to open, but the season's closed, so we have to go outside at three miles.

So that's where these shrimp came from outside of three miles offshore.

Once the water temperature gets about 68 degrees, you really, they just show up.

They're not there and then they're there.

That's a cotton shrimp, what they call that.

They're good to eat.

I don't know.

They say that they turned that color because they're getting ready to die.

I don't know if that's true or not, but we get a lot of these cotton shrimp.

- [David] A male shrimp is called a buck?

- A buck, yeah, and then a roe shrimp.

It's the female.

You see the roe in the back, the black vein, that's the roe shrimp.

We see a lot of those this time of year, and then some of them don't have the vein.

Those are the buck shrimp like that.

It's a male.

It doesn't have any roe in it.

- [David] Tell me what gives you hope about the future here.

- The demand is still there.

That's one big thing that gives me hope is there's just the demand's there.

And I think people really are starting to kind of care more where their food comes from.

And there's been a lot of initiatives, laws passed, like the new House Bill 117 that they passed in Georgia where the restaurants have to disclose where the shrimp come from.

That was huge.

So that part gives me a lot of hope as far as the sales go.

As far as the actual catching of the shrimp go, I'm trying to hang on to hope.

There's a few young people that are kind of getting into it.

There's money to be made in the shrimping industry.

It's just you have to learn it.

And I wish that there was more young people getting involved with the actual catching of the shrimp, but I have hope that there will be enough.

Jonathan Bennett, he's young, and Bryson Sadler, another guy that kind of helps with his granddad.

He's young, and I'm just hoping that that keeps coming.

Maybe we'll have some more young people.

- [David] When restaurants and consumers choose Wild Georgia Shrimp, they're getting much more than a delicious, healthy protein.

They know where their food is coming from, and they're supporting this historic coastal Georgia industry.

So from two high-tech greenhouses, growing environmentally safe produce with two different methods, to an old school city market delivering fresh local seafood to chefs and consumers on the Georgia coast, it's fun to see both traditional and new age methods succeed with a common goal in mind, bringing fresh, healthy, and local food to the people of Georgia and the Southeastern US.

I'm David Zelski.

See you at the next "A Fork in the Road."

"A Fork in the Road" was brought to you by: (bright music) - [Announcer] Community, learning, working, playing, celebrating, doing life is always better together.

At GPB, we aim to provide you with the tools to be able to do life together well.

Our mission to educate, inform, and entertain inspires everything from our wide range of programming, to our stimulating radio conversations, to our fun in-person events.

We've got something for everyone.

Visit gpb.org/community to learn more about our upcoming events.

(gentle music) - [David] From the soil of our family farms to your table, there's something special about Georgia, something you can taste in every bite.

Fresh flavors, local farms, unforgettable experiences, Georgia has it all.

Support local, taste the difference, and make memories along the way.

Look for the Georgia Grown logo wherever you shop or visit georgiagrown.com.