(lively music) - Next on "You Oughta Know."

A sweet and salty family recipe makes for a tasty treat and a successful business for this Bucks County mom and daughter team.

While in Bucks County, we visit a local mill that's sourcing grains the old fashioned way.

Plus the visual autobiography of a renowned photographer takes center stage at the Brandywine Museum of Art.

(lively music) Welcome to "You Oughta Know."

I'm Shirley Min.

Time is winding down to catch an acclaimed photography exhibit at the Brandywine Museum of Art.

Best known for his photos of jazz musicians, "Frank Stewart's Nexus" showcases his work and takes us to the beginning of his photography career.

(jazz music) - [Amanda] This exhibition covers Frank Stewart's entire career.

And he's an artist that's really deserving of investigation, both for his subject matter and his devotion to understanding photography as works of art.

(camera clicking) (jazz music) - Around 13, my mother one day said, "We're gonna go to this march on Washington."

So I said, "Okay, I'm going with you."

We got there and she had a camera, she had a Brownie.

I said, "Look, I'm getting ready to take pictures with this camera.

This is too monumental for us not to be documenting it."

I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and that was just like being in apartheid.

You couldn't even look at white people.

If you looked at them in the eye, it was called reckless eyeballing.

They could put you in jail for that.

(chuckles) So when I got to DC and I saw all of these white people and black people together, for something for black people, it was like phenomenal.

Those were my first pictures.

(jazz music) The top photograph here is New Orleans first line, and it's a dirge, very slow.

When they put the body in the ground and the music is upbeat, it's called the second line when everybody comes back and they partying and dancing.

And that's some of the best of America.

Down here, (chuckles) I was taking pictures on a National Endowment for the Arts grant in the South.

And I saw a newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi.

It said, "It's gonna be a Klan rally."

So these guys are late for the parade, so they're hurrying up to get in line.

(laughs) And this is the worst of America.

(jazz music) - One of the most important themes comes early on, and it is the overriding rituals of African American culture that Frank has photographed through his entire career, in depth and behind the scenes portraits of jazz musicians, street photography, or visiting his ancestral roots in Africa.

(upbeat jazz music) - Early in my career, I wanted to know where at the beginnings of African American culture came from so I went to West Africa.

This was 1974.

It's called Call and Response.

In West Africa, if you're a drummer, you're not doing anything, you're not saying anything unless there's a dancer to respond to your call.

So that's where Call and Response came from.

Drumming and dancing.

(jazz music) This is Ghana here.

Ladies with water on their heads.

They have to walk a mile to get the water and a mile back.

And it's in the clouds, the mountains are in the clouds.

So women come in the morning and the men go get their water at night.

(jazz music) Making food in Africa is a whole ritual.

Pounding fufu, is a yam, and you pound it with a big stick.

And that stick weighs 30 or 40 pounds.

It's heavy.

And this lady is pounding this with one hand and turning it with the other hand.

(upbeat jazz music) I went to Cuba in '77, the first American journalist to go.

It was such a vibrant culture then.

Everywhere was music and art and everybody was into the revolution.

And Fidel was alive and, you know, he was very active.

(upbeat jazz music) The next one is New Orleans.

Right here is a young boy out on Canal Street in the French Quarter.

And to me, he's telling these white people across the street that, I'm still here, you know?

I'm still here.

(chuckles) Yeah, I'm still here.

(jazz music) Winton and his father, they're gonna play at a funeral, so they're practicing "Flea As The Bird."

(chuckles) (jazz music) I had a stepfather that was a jazz musician in Memphis.

His name was Phineas Newborn Jr., 1957.

Count Basie brought him up to New York to play opposite him in the original Birdland.

So I came with him.

So I would take pictures of these guys in the clubs.

That's how I kind of got into taking pictures of jazz.

It was Miles Davis.

It's called "Miles in the Green Room."

Living in Chicago, I lived two doors away from his sister Dorothy.

Growing up, she was like my aunt.

So she helped me get this picture when I'm shooting, when he comes back from a hiatus in 1981.

I'm shooting for "Ebony" magazine.

It was at Avery Fisher Hall.

And he's standing up on the piano stool here, and he looks like a Christ-like figure.

And I think it is one of my best photographs.

In fact, it's in the permanent collection of MoMA.

(jazz music) This is Ahmad Jamal right here.

He's the first one to take me on the road when I was like 25 years old.

He was a very influential jazz musician.

And he just passed two years ago.

And the face kind of looks like an African mask.

That's what I'm trying to bring out, importance of him and who he is in terms of African American music.

Ahmad Jamal.

(jazz music) All right, this is New Orleans.

Before Katrina, there was over a hundred black churches in the Lower Ninth Ward.

After Katrina is only 11 now.

The black churches were the center of the culture in New Orleans at the time.

That's where the music came from.

That's where the food came from.

That's where everything came from, these black churches.

So I thought that this organ that was under 30 feet of water for a month was a good example of how devastated the area was and the culture.

- [Amanda] This isn't straight documentary photography.

This is beautiful, artistically composed, trying to capture something really ephemeral in the moments and the places that he is, that is beyond just point and shoot.

So you'll get a mixed interpretation of his entire career as you walk through the gallery.

(jazz music) - The Brandywine Museum of Art is the last stop for this traveling exhibit, which ends September 22nd.

Well, fixing our planet's climate crisis takes time, innovation and committed people like the owner of this flower farm in Northeast Philly.

- Soil health is essential for growing healthy fruits, vegetables, and flowers.

It's also key in mitigating climate change.

Here at Jennie Love's Love 'n Fresh Flower farm in northwest Philadelphia, there are a lot of nos, no tilling, no fertilizer, no pesticides, no mowing.

- We're focused on healing the ecosystem and supporting habitat as much as we are on producing a crop.

- We're gonna learn about what you can do to combat climate change.

And it starts with the soil and some native plants.

- This is a native plant, so it's native to our region.

This is called Baptisia or false indigo is its common name.

Little native bumblebees love, love, love this plant.

These plants have evolved over millennia with the native soil microbes and all the different life that is in the soil.

These native plants know how to support our local biome.

They're heartier, generally speaking, they don't have as many pests and diseases, so the native plants tend to be more resilient.

My hope is seeing the space that when I first took stewardship of it was fairly lifeless, not a lot going for it, and now after a decade plus of really nurturing it, it is humming with life.

So if every single person who has even just a small part of land did the same things at home, we could have such an impact.

- [Susan] Like even if you grow plants in pots, that is helping with climate change somehow.

So like talk to us about that.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Any plant that is photosynthesizing, they're taking sunlight, they're creating their energy and they're putting their roots down into the soil, that is sequestering carbon.

So the more plants we grow, the more carbon that's sequestered.

- Climate change can seem overwhelming sometimes, but even if you live in a row home with a submit backyard, there are things you can do.

- We just learned about simple changes we can all do to help our planet.

Here now, to tell us more about this new video series on "Climate Fixers," like Jennie Love, is Susan Phillips, Senior Reporter and Editor of the "Climate Desk" for WHYY News.

Susan, welcome to "You Oughta Know."

- It's great to be here.

- I love this series.

"Climate Fixers," I think is exciting for you who has done so much intensive reporting of the environment and the climate crisis.

And some of those stories are very heavy.

- [Susan] That's right.

- Tell me about "Climate Fixers" and how it's different.

- Yeah, so as a climate reporter, I sort of do a lot of gloom and doom, but what we wanted to do with this series was, and it's specifically short videos for social media.

And what we wanted to do was talk to people and profile people who are working on positive change, are working to solve the climate crisis almost like in their own little backyard here in the Delaware Valley.

- Yeah, and I like, because then we can all be climate fixers and if we're all doing something in our backyard, the change can be quite big.

So in the piece that we just saw with Jennie Love, we see that she's encouraging us obviously to put more native plants in our gardens, in our backyards.

That's one way to help cool the planet, but there are other things that Jennie is doing.

Can you tell us about some of those other ways that we can help?

- Yeah, I mean, one of the things that she talks about is just taking the weeds out of your garden.

And I don't know about anyone else, I love weeding, but I always just throw it away.

- [Shirley] You're alone in that.

(laughs) - I probably am.

And just put all the weeds in your bucket.

Fill the bucket with water, put a lid on it, wait for like six months, and when you open the bucket, it's gonna be kind of disgusting.

It's like this murky, mucky stuff, but it's really good fertilizer that you don't have to pay for.

And it's actually better for your soil than the fertilizer you would pay for at a store.

- Because fertilizer in and of itself that you would buy at the store, maybe not the best thing for the groundwater or the environment.

This project, in your reporting, have you discovered other ideas or other ways that we can be like climate fixers in a way?

- Absolutely.

So there's a lot of people in this region who are working to combat what's called fast fashion, and that includes like all these clothes, all these cheap clothes that we wear are made from fossil fuels, number one.

Number two, they're so cheap that people are buying too many of them, and then they end up in a landfill.

And that's really causing a lot more methane emissions too, and also just pollution in general.

So what they wanna do is emphasize slow fashion.

For example, flax is a beautiful blue flower, and it used to be grown all over Pennsylvania because you use flax to make linen.

And linen is just such a great nice fabric.

It really keeps you cool in the summer.

And not only is it easy to grow flax, you don't have to use pesticides.

And it's a lot more climate friendly than cotton, for example, even though cotton is natural.

When you're done with your flax made piece of linen clothing, all you do is stick it into your compost bin.

You don't have to worry about is this recyclable?

It literally decomposes because it's all made of a plant.

- That's very interesting.

And I think too, there was something with the fast fashion in that the fabrics that are in fast fashion, they're a blend of materials and some of them are synthetic and therefore you can't recycle them and it's not sustainable.

- That's a big problem with fast fashion, is there's all these clothes that nobody can do anything with except throw them into a landfill or burn them in an incinerator.

But there's a PhD candidate, there's some folks down at the University of Delaware who have come up with this solution that they think is gonna help that problem where...

It's a chemical solution.

They use chemistry to break down the fabrics into their different component parts.

So we took a trip down to the lab.

I even cut a piece of my shirt and got it, like put it through the process and it got, you know, broken down to its component parts.

And so there's a lot of different solutions out there that people are doing in this region.

So that's one of the things we wanted to do, was highlight that.

- Where can people watch these stories?

- So of course on our website, WHYY.org, but also our YouTube channel and our Instagram as well.

- I love it, Susan.

I love this whole concept of "Climate Fixers," and I love this series.

Thanks so much for being here.

And you can also learn more about the story Susan covers by heading to WHYY.org.

Producer Gianna Kelleher continues to bring us stories that take us closer to the farms and families that feed the region.

This week she takes us to Doylestown to check out the nearly 200-year-old Castle Valley Mill.

- My name is Mark Fisher.

I'm the owner in part of the family business here at Castle Valley Mill in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

So this mill is a family property.

My grandfather, he was a Master Miller in Germany, in Bavaria, and he bought this place around 1947.

And then when my grandmother passed away, my wife and I decided to kind of sell everything we own and buy the place from the estate.

This building that we're in was built in 1798.

There was a mill of some sort here as far back as 1730, but this, you know, where we're standing, this wood is 1798.

The outer third of this mill was added in 1879, but it's been through about three or four families.

You'll see that we are using kind of a mishmash of technologies where any of the old material, old machinery, old bucket elevators and systems, we use them all and they work beautifully.

(gentle music) We bring the grain all the way up to the very tippy top of the mill.

So in this case, the corn would come down one of these tubes into this machine, and it goes through all of these different cleaning machines.

These are stacked up on top of each other, one on each floor.

And then we use the bucket elevators to move the grain back up to the top.

So a little piece of grain probably goes up and down this place three times and goes through anywhere from three to seven different machines until it is turned into food.

(mill grinding) Everything is run off of these big line shafts.

So the line shafts turn at a certain speed.

And we've got big pulleys, little pulleys, flat belts, twisted flat belts, all this crazy stuff to get power to all the different machinery.

So this one motor is running that line shaft, which is running, I don't know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine different things, all through these flat belt systems.

These used to be made out of leather.

Now they're made out of canvas impregnated with rubber.

So the whole system is operating at the same time.

So as the grain comes in, it's all getting clean.

Clean grain goes out, then it's getting milled turned into cornmeal, and grits or flour or depending on what we're doing.

This is one of my favorite machines.

It's probably built in 1870.

It's actually called a cracked corn separator and grater, we've modified it a little bit to be a corn cleaner.

So from the top you would get, you know, big pieces of cob or stalk.

The next two levels would be big fat pieces of corn and smaller pieces of corn, and then you get cracked corn and then little gritty things and then dust.

So brilliant little design.

Modern grain machinery is pretty much the exact same stuff.

It's just made outta stainless steel.

My grandfather knew what he was buying.

A lot of this machinery he had salvaged from other mills throughout Bucks County that were being torn down.

And then they were just stored here for the next 70 years until we got ahold of them and we put them back to work.

(gentle music) So now we're on the second floor.

The grain has gone through the sifting screens up top, comes through the floor, goes into this machine.

This is called a revolving disc aspirator.

So where we've sort of screened things out up top, what this machine does is it can separate grain by the weight of the grain or the specific gravity of the grain.

I love this machine.

So it's got a little spinning disc in there.

The grain comes in and bounces off of the disc, meanwhile, there's air being pulled up through this plenum.

So as the grain bounces, it hits the top at the apogee, and it can either float up if it's light or it'll fall down if it's heavy.

Or it'll separate the nice plump firm heavy grain from like the broken, or they call it the bees wings or the little pieces of chaff that might still be in the grain.

So all of these machines can do different things.

This one next to it is called the Carter disc separator.

So this, it's got a bunch of spinning metal discs with little pockets in it, and what happens is the grain that sticks in the pockets will get picked up and thrown down into this other part of the machine.

So this can separate grain by the length of the grain.

So in three machines we've separated it by size, by weight and then by length.

So we keep purifying it.

So what goes into our mill is the perfect plump healthy seeds.

So here on the second floor is the bolting room.

So bolting is an old English term.

Think of a bolt of cloth.

So all of these machines have got either stainless steel fabric or nylon fabric weaves with different size holes in them.

So what happens is the material will come in either the flour or the ground up corn, and as it goes down the cylinder, it starts with very small, medium and then coarse screens on it.

So what this does for us is the very fine stuff will come out first.

Then the medium coarse stuff, and then the gritty stuff, which literally makes grits.

(gentle music) This is where we go from old timey to modern.

This is all stainless steel packaging machinery.

We started off, we packed in little bags with hand scoops, and you don't wanna do that when you're making four tons a day.

So yeah, these are auger fillers.

They'll fill up the bags with our flour, or our grits or our cornmeal, and then we seal them on these machine.

And then we store everything out in the cold room in the big barn outside.

We do a bunch of different grains.

We do hard wheat, we do soft wheat, we do rye, we do spelt, emmer and einkorn.

We do yellow corn and we do red corn.

All of our products are non-GMO.

Some of them are organic, they're all local, which is neat because we know the farmers and we get them directly from the farms and then run them through the cleaning systems here.

Most flour today, almost all flour is done through what's called the roller mill process or the white flour process.

There's three pieces in a seed, food components.

There's the brand, the germ and the endosperm.

The germ is the living thing.

It's an actual living thing that's gonna be a plant eventually.

The starch or the endosperm is all of the food that it's gonna feed off of until it can photosynthesize once it's germinating.

And then the brain is sort of like an outside covering, which is full of vitamins and minerals.

White flour pulls the brain and the germ out completely and all you end up with is a starch.

But it's tasteless by design.

Stone ground, there's a flavor.

Everything is in it.

So everything that God put into the seed, we end up with the food and your bread, and it just has an enormous flavor, more nutritious, and most of all, people can digest it a lot easier.

So I like to call it gluten friendly.

It's the way the wheat should be eaten.

I mean, really, we didn't start this by thinking we'd be a full fledged business, but one thing led to another and we were selling at farm markets and like a chef would come by and buy polenta or cornmeal.

And then they'd come by the week later and they'd say, "That's the best polenta I've ever made.

What are you doing?"

And we realized it's not what we're doing, it's what we're not doing.

We're not overprocessing the food.

It's the way God made it, you know, you just grind it up and eat it.

You know, these things were built back in the Oliver Evans day, back in the late 1700s, and they still work, and they work beautifully.

Modern grain cleaning machinery is kind of the same process.

They had it all figured out in the 1850s.

So we just restored the machines and put them back to work.

And I think they're very happy doing their job.

- Owning a small business is an undertaking not to be taken lightly.

Well, this mother-daughter team has figured out the perfect recipe for success.

(popcorn popping) - It started as a gift giving opportunity for our neighbors and teachers, and it was something small that we did as a gesture of gratitude.

It's really about the camaraderie that happens around the product that we're selling.

It's not about a product or making a profit.

It's about giving people the opportunity to celebrate life.

And it's the little things that become the big things in life.

And being able to have a product that's really the centerpiece of that, that's the mission we're headed towards.

- [Kay] I've been making this for 25 years.

- [Michelle] I came to my mom and I said, "Listen, we have a product that I think is worth selling, and I know I can't do this without you."

And she looked at me and said, "Well, I can't do this without you either."

So we kind of acknowledged each other's strengths.

- And so we decided to start a small business and take this out on the road.

(upbeat music) - Me being a little bit more of the visionary person taking over the social media aspects and the direct-to-commerce website channel.

And then my mom was the how person, being able to balance the books for us, to seek out different farmers' markets and be able to make those connections within the community.

So we definitely hold each other accountable in that aspect and provide a really good balance there.

We are doing this out of our home, so we have very strict rules when it comes to upholding the cleanliness of our space.

- [Kay] Our ingredients are popcorn, pretzels, rice cereal.

and our homemade caramel.

We make it in small batches because we believe that we control the quality.

- [Michelle] The pre-baked, which is assembling and popping the popcorn, measuring everything out and getting our trays prepared.

And then I hand it over to my mom who I call the chef, and she gets the caramel process going.

- [Kay] Caramel is very finicky.

It is very important to take your time to be paying attention to the process of what you're doing, and then pour on top.

And we really stir it up to make sure that it coats every piece.

And then we put it in the oven.

(upbeat music) When it comes outta the oven, my whole house is full of this delicious smell that just makes you want to eat all of it.

We put it out, we let it coal off before we start the packaging.

- When you're passionate about the product and there's such a story behind it, and it's been such an integral part of our celebrations of life, and weddings and graduations, you have a different pursuit of passion that's involved there.

So the fact that both of us are super gritty individuals, that's the foundation of a great dynamic of course.

But to have a really awesome product and then to be able to say that you're in business with your mom, not a lot of people get to say that.

So definitely very fortunate and grateful to have the opportunity, and that's not something I say enough, for sure.

- Okay, when mom pours the warm caramel kraken onto the counter to cool, yum.

I need to get some.

(laughs) But that is our show for now.

I hope you learned something you ought to know about.

We certainly did.

Have a good night, everyone.

(upbeat music)