(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.

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.

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) ♪ I came form 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 in the food we consume.

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

(soulful music) (uplifting music) Agriculture is Georgia's oldest and largest industry.

It has played a dominant role in Georgia and the nation's economy for almost three centuries.

And as the world has changed, so has the way we grow our food, what we understand about our food, and how we deliver this food to our communities and beyond.

This week we explore a variety of greens in Georgia, from lettuce grown in a multitude of ways to the fields of greens and cruciferous cabbage, kept cold and fresh from the field to your local market.

(soulful music) Let's begin this episode in the oh-so-green greenhouses of R&G Farm in Dublin, Georgia, that is, where many varieties of leafy and buttery lettuce are grown.

You'll find it in your sandwich, in your wraps, and most commonly in a salad.

There are several varieties, many textures, and even different colors.

Time to explore the world of lettuce.

(lively music) And to learn more about this leafy green, we meet a farmer who grows multiple cultivars throughout the year.

(gentle music) - Our farm name is R&G Farm, which is named after our children.

My son is named Riley and my daughter's named Grace.

We started 16 years ago and I am owner-operator, everything.

I was a school teacher before I had my children, and then when they both entered school, I wanted to do something.

I loved gardening and so my husband suggested maybe farming.

And so we started researching what, you know, Georgia needed.

So next thing I know, an 18-wheeler pulls in our yard and we built a greenhouse.

(lively music) I grow butterhead bib, romaine, red oak leaf, and green oak leaf lettuce.

- [David] Lettuce can be grown outside, but it's in these hydroponic hoop houses where Alexis can better control the climate, adapting a better growing environment when the outside weather fluctuates.

- I always tell people hydroponic greenhouses, you only need an acre per house.

So you can do it anywhere.

You can do it in an urban setting in the middle of a city, you can do it in your backyard, which is how I have it.

We live on 15 acres, but I'm only using two of those for the houses.

They're all self-contained.

So you pretty much can control the temperature, you can control the environment, how much sun, and you can keep the insects or the bugs down to a minimum.

There's always some things that are going to get in.

You can't control it 100%, but your grow out with your crop is so much better.

You're guaranteed 90%.

You can't always guarantee a hundred.

My turnaround time, so it only takes from a seed to when I'll pick my lettuce, it only takes six weeks.

So if I lose a section, then I can turn around pretty quick.

Unlike a farmer that farms outside, if they don't get rain or if bugs get into it, they're out for the season.

So that's why I say it's more advantageous maybe in the future to see more of these greenhouses go up.

(lively music) I have two tanks filled with nutrients.

So one of them has calcium, iron, and then the other one has magnesium phosphate, monopotassium phosphate.

So there's a lot of nutrients constantly being fed to the heads of the lettuce.

(uplifting music) - [David] Let's talk about this process and how it works.

- [Alexis] I have a computer that does everything, and when it sees if the nutrient levels go down, the computer automatically feeds it.

And how it works is the water just goes through the trays, constantly feeding water and nutrients to the lettuce 24/7, 365 days a year, and then it recycles itself into a 500-gallon tank.

- [David] Are there varieties that are more challenging than others?

Romaine versus bib?

- Yes, the romaine, if you look at it wrong, it'll probably go, "I don't like you today," and it'll die or it'll wilt or it'll get a fungus and you'll be like, "I don't know how that happened."

And then one year you'll have a great year, and then the next year you'll have everything go wrong.

The romaine can be the most challenging.

The butterhead bib is easy.

The bib is your staple hydroponic lettuce.

Whenever you hear people say, "I grow hydroponic lettuce," I guarantee you that it's bib.

And then the oak leaf is pretty easy.

The summertime is not the oak leaf's favorite time of year.

During the middle of the day, it'll start to wilt because the sun is too hot.

But as soon as the sun goes down, it perks right back up.

I wanted to mention too that we're also GAP certified, which is Good Agricultural Practices.

We have to do that for the common market and for the schools.

An auditor comes out, he checks our books, makes sure that we're following policies of, if you cut yourself, what do you do?

If you're sick, your employees can't come in.

Make sure you're washing your hands.

And it's good to let people know that we make sure we're sanitary and following all the rules to keep the lettuce healthy and to keep everyone else healthy.

(upbeat music) So the water is coming through these pipes here from the pump.

It's coming from the 500-gallon tank all the way in the front of the greenhouse.

And the pump is pumping the water through all these, these big white PVC pipes and it goes up into the black.

And then we've got these tees that are put in these holes and that pushes the water into the white ones.

And then the water that goes from this hole goes all the way through the tray into the big tube back there, which goes all the way back into the big 500-gallon tank.

And then it starts all over again in a big circle.

But after every crop rotation, we clean everything out every time.

We do clean out the 500-gallon tank 'cause we will vacuum it, make sure there's no algae or sludge in it.

But when we go to clean it out, we open up these valves.

There's one on each end of the house and we just shoot the water out that way.

And that's how it flushes everything out.

(bright music) So what they call this is a Dosetronic, and it's the computer that is the heart of the entire greenhouse.

The top number is what your nutrients are supposed to be at, and it's feeding the water, which then goes to the plants.

And then this bottom number is your pH level for your water.

So it's just measuring how much of like the calcium's going in.

I put like 20 pounds of calcium in this tank and the iron, I put about nine pounds of iron.

Just instead of me having to figure out exactly how much goes in, the computer does it by the units and figures out exactly what the plants need.

If I get too much, then it's gonna burn the tips.

If I get too little, especially the iron, it's gonna turn the plant yellow.

- [David] A little east of Dublin in Metter, Georgia, there's another hydroponic farm known as Better Fresh Farms that grows several varieties of lettuce in containers and uses ultraviolet light to enhance growing and build resistance to disease.

Let's learn all about it from Farmer Grant.

(soulful music) Grant is a graduate from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has engineered a unique yet practical strategy for his high-quality produce.

- Essentially in this environment, we control all the conditions that the plant is exposed to 'cause it's indoors.

We can start the plants with nutrient-rich water and exclude the soil and therefore exclude the need for herbicides, pesticides, and other chemical applications associated with farming.

We grow about 13 varieties of specialty hydroponic lettuce, some French radishes, and at the moment, over my right shoulder, some kale.

The taste of our produce is incredibly important.

If it wasn't at a higher level than the other stuff that we're competing against in the market, we wouldn't be able to charge the premium we can currently for our product.

Not only is it a more fresh option, but the flavor profile that we create in here, given it a really ideal environment to grow in the duration of its life cycle, really gives it a pronounced flavor and also improves the texture of it.

(gentle music) You really find that the specific varieties of lettuce we grow in here all have very different characteristics because they get the opportunity to grow the very best version of themselves.

The lights themselves, it's just the blue and red light frequencies from a high-efficiency LED.

Essentially it's all the plants need to photosynthesize.

It gives us a way to grow plants indoors using a low-energy light source.

Essentially what we do is we try to mimic in every 24-hour life cycle, the perfect day.

So we provide 18 hours of light and an ideal temperature range for them, which gives them a longer period of time every single day to grow.

And then a six-hour night cycle where we drop our temperatures and change the environment a little bit to mimic a night cycle.

So every day they get what we believe to be the perfect day that they can experience.

We're very meticulous in our process.

We were raised to believe that anything you do for somebody else should be done well.

There's a conscience associated with what we do.

If we don't try our best to give the best product, then I can't be convinced when I go to try and sell the product that it's what we say it is.

(uplifting music) - [David] Grown fresh, both indoors and out, the world of lettuce, be it green or red, leafy or crisp, is a nutritious, tasty, and versatile veggie.

(soulful music) We now journey from Metter to Milledgeville to revisit a military veteran who farms with a purpose to provide for his fellow vets and for his surrounding community.

(upbeat music) - One of the things I love about growing is our climate.

We can grow greens all year round.

We try to grow locally from different varieties that have regional and local significance.

In the beginning of the 1900s, we had about 540 different types of greens.

Because of industrialization of our food system, we ended up with now under 50 varieties.

We show raised bed gardening to scale, right?

Each raised bed is three feet wide by eight feet long.

What we try to do is we grow instead of like acreage, we actually grow per square foot.

And so we assign a dollar amount per square foot, which is $25 per square foot, is what we want to grow for the year.

And then we take the amount of square footage that we have and then we can come up with a dollar amount on what we need to make for the year.

So we're not gonna be growing varieties that require 180 days to grow, you know, like parsnips.

We're gonna grow faster varieties like beets, like greens.

We're gonna get multiple crops on each one of these greens.

You know, we'll pick these things right until I can get a bunch.

And really, what a bunch is, is when I can fit 'em between my index finger and also my thumb.

This is considered a "bunch," but what they're asking for is a "mess," which is a whole bunch of bunches, right?

And that is literally a term that's used throughout the South, whether it's a "bunch" or a "mess," and that's the accuracy of that as well.

(uplifting music) - [David] Collard greens are the oldest leafy green vegetables we grow, dating back 2,000 years.

- Collard greens, right?

They are Mediterranean food, but they look drastically different in the Mediterranean than they do now.

So when the enslaved came over, they had what was close to what collard greens used to look like back in the Mediterranean.

They may have had like a very small stem, right?

And they may have been much, much smaller.

So the interesting thing about collard greens is that they didn't originate in the United States, but because of the environment that they were brought into, collard greens are more uniquely American than anything else because they changed when they brought 'em from their wild state over to where we are now.

Most people, when you ask 'em how many collard greens there are, most people only know between one or three.

But there were over 165 varieties of collard greens that we know of.

And we have right now, I think 65 different types of heirloom collard greens.

But the unique thing about this particular collard green was that it started in Vermont as a cabbage.

And so what happened was when settlers moved from Vermont to North Carolina, they wanted to grow their cabbage, but because they moved to a different place, the cabbage never closed because of North Carolina and the region that it was at.

So as the cabbages never closed, they saved those seed.

And here you have the North Carolina Yellow Cabbage Collard.

And some of those settlers moved down to the South in Georgia and settled here in Milledgeville.

And this was one of the collard greens that they grew.

One of the reasons why we try to maintain that diversity, and we talk about that diversity, is because it has historical significance, and especially for small family farms who are trying to get the best out of their product.

If you're just selling commercial-raised collard greens versus the North Carolina Cabbage Collard that was here from the 1800s, you give your consumer a choice of what they want to bring on Sunday for Sunday dinner.

This has a cool story.

(gentle music) - [David] We continue our exploration of greens down in Norman Park, Georgia, home to Baker Farms.

The Baker family run a larger operation than Farmer John in Milledgeville.

But just like Farmer John, food quality and safety are priority number one.

(uplifting music) - My name is Joe Baker.

I'm one of the owners here at Baker Farms.

Started off with my dad, we was probably growing three to five acres of cabbage, a few acres of squash, traditional row crops in South Georgia, peanuts and cotton and so forth.

Now we've gone from that to where we're at today.

It is very humbling to just look back over the years and, you know, see where we come from.

- Me and my brother and my sister, we grew up all of us working on the farm, all of us trying to provide and make the farm grow, always keeping that family-oriented aspect to it.

We've never fell away from that, which is important to all of us.

- I'm married into the Bakers, some of the nicest folks you'll ever meet.

When I finished my college degree, I came out with an accounting degree and my brother-in-law offered me a job just helping part-time while I was finishing school.

And by the time I had finished school, I'd made my mind up that, hey, I wanted to farm and farm with his family.

And at that time my father-in-law, you know, he had the wisdom to let me and my brother-in-law take over a lot of the farming stuff.

And you know, they just have always been the type of people to let people go and reach their potential and not hinder those people by standing over 'em and making decisions for 'em.

So it's been a great relationship with his family.

- You know, I've always stressed the quality and my children worked hard to make sure we had that quality, and I think that's been a big part of our success.

(uplifting music) - I pretty much oversee all the guys that works in the fields on the tractors.

Yeah, it's pretty much 24 hours, seven days a week, but it's a lot of fun and I wouldn't wanna be anywhere else.

- Every time another family member has joined the operation, the operation has continued to grow.

I mean, I would not be where I'm at today if it wasn't for family.

And when I say family, I don't mean just siblings.

- It's been great working with the Baker family.

I've been here for 24 years and they brought me in and I felt like I was at home from the very beginning.

The way Terry planned this business from the start, we think more about the quality of product that goes in it than the market.

That's the first thing.

It's made it easy for me to sell because of the quality.

It helps sell itself.

(light music) - If it starts, if it is quality, it's kale or collards.

When it's ready, I just tell him it's ready, and we start harvest.

- Jorge has been with this company for 30 years.

Some of his story is just unbelievable, how he started at the very bottom, working actually with some of his uncles that were overseers at the time.

And through the years, he's just taken on more responsibility.

- I started from cropping greens, squash, cabbages.

Now I'm supervisor of the crew on the field.

And I never thought we was gonna be here all these years.

But we here for 29 years with Baker Farms.

I'm so proud.

(inspiring music) - [Joe] We're harvesting curly mustard.

We grow collards, kale, mustard, turnips.

We grow cilantro, we grow parsley.

Today, as you can tell, we're harvesting curly mustard.

When we get through, they'll go to our packing facility.

Some will be packed and shipped out directly to retailers, some to wholesalers.

We ship all the way from, gosh, Miami, pretty much all over the country.

- I went into medicine, worked in ICU, CCU, took a lot of sciences obviously with that particular background.

So for me it was important to come in and try to help that, build that foundation with regards to the science and the engineering and the computers so that that next generation could benefit from that.

We really feel like our product is the best, safest product there is.

There's only one way, and that's the right way.

And as Bakers, that's what we feel is very important.

(upbeat music) - [David] On top of the greens and an adjacent field of greens and a little bit of reddish-purple lies the cabbage of Baker Farms.

Just another nutritious link in the chain for the Baker family farm.

(lively music) The Baker family of Baker Farms have been growing cabbage, kale, broccoli, and other green vegetables since 1970.

And many of those duties have been passed down through the generations.

It takes experience on the farm, education in the classroom, and true commitment from the family and their employees to make it all work.

- We are in Norman Park, Georgia and we have green cabbage and a red cabbage, or purple-leaf cabbage.

There's very many different types of green cabbage, which are flat, savoy.

And then all we grow in the red cabbage is just a purple-leaf cabbage.

It all started out with my grandfather.

He started out with about 15 or 20 acres is all he had, and my father and my aunt and uncle grew up.

They decided to get into the farming a little bit and started growing some different items, cabbage and collards.

And it went from about 15 acres to today, we grow about 7,000 acres of greens and cabbages and all that good stuff.

- My name's Jacey Wetherington.

I'm the marketing director here at Baker Farms.

I've kind of integrated myself into this position and it's been really fun getting to work with my cousins, getting to work with my family, seeing what I can contribute to this operation.

I am going to Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College.

And it has helped me tremendously in being in ag and incorporating all I'm learning in marketing into this agricultural field.

And so I am grateful for having the opportunity to work in ag and go to college and using both of those to work together.

(upbeat music) Cabbages are actually made of about 90% water.

What that does for you is it really hydrates your entire body whenever you eat it.

And so that's good for your skin, that's good for your hair, good for everything in your body.

(upbeat music) Legend has it that Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his baseball cap.

Before every game, he would put one in, and halfway through he would change it out.

So Babe Ruth believed cabbage brought him good luck.

It seemed to work for Babe Ruth, so maybe it can work for you and I. We'll see about that.

(audience cheering) - We're in the leafy greens business.

Basically anything that you see in the wet section of the grocery store.

When I mean "wet," I mean, you know, with the sprinklers going on in the grocery store.

With the cabbage, they have very different flavors.

Cabbage is very versatile.

Whereas you may not like cabbage cooked, but you may like a coleslaw, right?

So there's so many different ways that these vegetables can be used.

You can find the way that you can get the nutritional benefit from eating healthy, but it may not be the same way every time, right?

So there's different ways to cook and prepare these things so that it meets everyone's taste bud.

(energetic music) With leafy greens, it takes a lot of ice and water to cool this product.

As you can tell, leafy greens, a very perishable product.

Cabbages, on the other hand, and broccoli are handled a little bit differently.

Cabbages are not an ice-intensive process.

They're more of an air-cold and dry-cold product.

So you have leafy greens and broccoli that take tremendous amounts of water and ice to cool and keep that product hydrated.

Versus cabbages, some of those products, you want to keep those products dry.

Cold, but dry.

And we use a vacuum cooler, which is a pressurized cooler.

It lowers the barometric pressure inside of that vacuum cooler, and then super cools that cabbage to bring that field heat out of the cabbage.

(energetic music) Now sometimes we're harvesting cabbages when it's 80 degrees, you know, 85 degrees.

So there's a tremendous amount of field heat that comes in inside of those cabbage heads.

So you have to put it in a vacuum cooler, lower that barometric pressure inside so that that cold air, which is cooled through ammonia, is able to remove that heat from that product.

(epic music) The leafy greens and broccoli as well, they use a lot of ice, a lot of ice to keep that product hydrated.

This ice is crucial to keeping that product fresh.

And the time from which it is cut and then iced and then packaged and delivered is very important.

The speed at which it is cooled has a tremendous impact on the shelf life of that product.

- Once you get farming in your blood, you know, you may get away from it.

You come back and it gives you an opportunity to spend more time with your children, your grandchildren, and that's the important thing in life.

(uplifting music) - [David] So from greens in greenhouses to fields of greens to green and red cabbage and tasty green broccoli, Georgia farmers continue to produce a highly nutritious and high-quality product for their surrounding communities and far beyond.

I'm David Zelski.

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

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) "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.

(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.

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.