Prologue

(“Hard Times Come Around No More” Starts)

Bobby Murray: You have to find somebody really dedicated that loves what they do. They love the earth. They love good food, and the people. I think he generally likes the people and telling the story about it as much as he enjoys growing the tomatoes.

Austin Carter: Hey Ariel. I know you and your husband grew a little garden last year. Have you gotten any plants started yet?

Ariel Lavery: Well we normally like to get something in the ground at this time of year. But considering I’m eight months pregnant right now we’ve kind of focused our energies on that this year.

Austin Carter: Well you’ve got something more important growing so I can understand that. (both laugh) But, if you were wondering, the opening clip was from Bobby Murray of the Merrick Inn in Lexington, Kentucky And we’ve talked before about how the homegrown veggies taste better than the store bought. Bobby was talking about someone I met who realized that same fact for himself half a century ago.

Ariel Lavery: Oh really? Someone who was kind of ahead of this recent trend toward growing heirlooms at home?

Austin Carter: He absolutely was. He even founded 2 farmers markets in Kentucky in the 1970s. But more than anything he’s devoted himself to preserving the genetic and historical heritages of Appalachian tomatoes and beans, having collected and preserved over 1500 varieties.

Ariel Lavery: Wow. That’s really incredible. 

Austin Carter: And now, his son is helping to carry on the tradition by cultivating many of the varieties his father has grown for years. They stand in opposition to the trend of multinational seed companies that patent and protect their seed stock by distributing bean and tomato seeds through their website. (theme music starts) It's their life's mission but not without its challenges.

Ariel Lavery: Sounds great! I can’t wait to hear more about what they’re doing.

Austin Carter: What story can a seed tell? And what would be lost if we fail to maintain the biological “heirlooms” of past generations? Today, we’ll meet Bill and Michael Best, a father and son who are doing their best to preserve the seeds of the past. This is, Middle of Everywhere.

Ariel Lavery: Telling big stories from the small places we call home. I’m Ariel Lavery.

Austin Carter: And I’m Austin Carter. Today, One Seed at a Time.

Scene 1 - A Story In A Seed

Austin Carter: Bill Best was born in western North Carolina during the Great Depression. And for his family, farming wasn’t just a profession, it was a way of life.

(acoustic guitar version of “Oh, Shenandoah” starts)

Bill Best: We were [a] self sufficient subsistence farm. We grew everything we ate, and traded maybe for vanilla, or, or something like that. Spices. But we grew all of our own fruits and vegetables, the animals, and wild animals, squirrels, and a lot of that. 

Austin Carter: One of Bill’s earliest memories foreshadowed what his mission would later become.

Bill Best: My first memory is picking beans. With my mother when I was about two and a half. I would pick the ones on the lower side of the bean vine which were growing up the corn stalks while she would pick the ones higher up. And I was captivated by the colors of the beans and the colors of the bean seeds as well.

Austin Carter: Bill came to Berea, Kentucky in the 1950s for college. Berea is a college town in the hills of Appalachia that has a reputation for being a bit more progressive than the rest of the state. The old brick buildings of the campus are rich with history on a backdrop of rolling hills. Bill planned to study agriculture, but his plans changed.

Bill Best:  I had started to major in agriculture at Berea.I thought I might major in agriculture. And then I realized that agriculture was changing at that time. My father never owned a tractor we just grew what we could with, first with mules and when they died, he started farming with horses. And in the 50s, agriculture was becoming fairly heavily mechanized. And Berea was sort of caught up in that at that time and I decided to not major in agriculture and majored in biology and then added physical education later. I was still very interested in plants. 

Austin Carter: Bill went on to get a masters degree, serve in the Army, and teach in Tennessee for a year. Then he returned to Berea to teach.

Bill Best: When we moved to Kentucky in 1963 another couple and my wife and I had bought a farm in Jackson County, 350 some acres for $38 an acre. Land was pretty cheap back then.

Austin Carter: Bill immediately set out to grow vegetables and got a new seed catalog and picked out some beans.

Bill Best:  I was told that a lot of people were growing Blue Lake, which was, well it was almost a new bean at that time. (gentle acoustic guitar music starts) Produced by seed companies. A bush bean. I had never seen a bush bean before. We had always grown the cornfield beans or climbing beans. But I let the seed appear. Let them become full. Its tradition in the mountain. You want your beans to be full and tender. But I let them full and they were tougher than work shoe leather and I had no idea what had happened. And I complained to my fellow gardener. His job at Berea was to purchase all of the food for the Berea College food service. And so he was really up on what was going on in food. And he said, “Well, you better get used to it cause that's the way it's gonna be from now on. And I didn't argue with him. I just said to myself, not if I can help it.

Austin Carter: Agriculture was changing at the hands of big seed companies. And this was a turning point for Bill. 

Bill Best: That November, Thanksgiving, we were visiting my family in North Carolina and I related my experience to my mother and told her I didn't know what had happened. And she said, “Well, I can solve that problem.” And then she gave me the beans that I had grown up with and I've never looked back. 

(gentle acoustic guitar music resolves)

Scene 2 -   A Market For History

Austin Carter: The tough, bush beans that Bill had disliked so much were bred to be mechanically harvested while the older seeds needed to be picked by hand. And just as he always favored the old, unmechanized ways of doing things, he started to grow his family’s beans. He also started to grow tomatoes and had an experience which changed his perspective.

Bill Best: I had an early crop and I took some of them to Lexington to Kentucky Foods. And the guy looked at it and he said that he would take all I could bring. He liked the taste of the tomato. And so when I took a whole trunk of my station wagon over to him and he looked at them and he said, “You brought me ripe tomatoes.” And I said, “Well yes.The ones that you liked so well were ripe when I brought them.”  And he said, “But I want green tomatoes.” And he said “Well when some of my groceries want some I’ll gas them on the way to the store and then they'll change color by the time I get there.”

Ariel Lavery: Gassing tomatoes? Is that a common practice?  

Austin Carter: Bill says it is, and it’s one of reasons he says that modern tomatoes lack taste. But the man Bill was selling to couldn’t believe Bill didn’t know about  this practice.

Bill Best: He called me he says “You're ignorant.” And I said “Yes I am. Because the tomatoes I brought you were ripe and that's what I thought you wanted.” and he said “But I want green tomatoes. They last longer.” And that was my first experience in in growing tomatoes for market for her produce markets. That was long before we started the farmers markets and and knew that tomatoes in stores didn't taste very good and then I realized why.

Ariel Lavery: That makes so much sense. So Bill learned a lot about the state of agriculture and produce in those early years of farming.

Austin Carter: Definitely. And that experience would lead him to find other ways to sell the vegetables he grew.

Bill Best: I helped found the Lexington farmers market in ‘73. And then started the Berea market, myself in ‘74. 

Austin Carter: Bill’s youngest son, Michael was born in the early seventies and he recalled his dad’s dedication to the farmers markets.

Michael Best: My dad was involved in, in starting these markets and I've got a brother and older brother and older sister. And we would, we would be a little upset, I would say, because we'd have to go down to the market. And we'd have a crowd at the beginning, and then it died out. And my dad would always tell us, you can't leave until the market’s closed. You got to stay there ‘til 5:30 when the market closes, because somebody may come at five o'clock. And if they don't see the market open, they're not coming back.  

Austin Carter: All that work and dedication to the market showed returns even though it took Michael some time to realize it.

Michael Best: It benefited the market. And when you're that young, you don't see what it takes to actually start one of these markets.

Ariel Lavery: So Bill and his family were really on the forefront of this whole movement toward local produce and farmers markets!

Austin Carter: And a lot of it came from Bill’s realization that he could sell a product with better flavor and texture if he just had a place to do it. And the farmer’s markets also began to reap another benefit 

(slow acoustic guitar starts)

Bill Best: I would always have a crowd around me buying things and then when people would come up and they would usually hand me beans in a pill box. And you say try them you’ll like them and then walk off.

Austin Carter: So Bill would keep and try those beans. But at first he didn’t inquire much about where they came from.

Bill Best: It didn’t dawn on me early on that I needed to be getting as much because I wasn't as cognizant of the importance of the history of that time. But shortly thereafter, when I had my first ones that I tried and found out how good they were, I thought, well, I need to start paying more attention to where they came from and getting the story. 

Austin Carter: What was obvious though, was that people liked the “old” seeds that Bill was collecting, the tomatoes and beans were drawing customers back each week for a simple reason.

Bill Best: People like heirlooms. They like flavor. They like to think that what they're eating is good for them as well.  

Scene 3 - Preserving Diversity

Austin Carter: Michael was very young when Bill started the markets in Berea and Lexington. He and his siblings weren’t enthusiastic to work them in their youth but Michael finally had a realization about the real value of that work as a teen.

Michael Best: My dad said “whatever you make at the farmers market on the last day of the year, you can keep.” And I'd been making around $200 a day and this was is in early 80s. So that wasn't bad. I was in my awkward phase 16, 17 year-old boy, selling things and interacting with people wasn't my thing at all. But he told me that, he said, “You can keep whatever you make.” Well, I loaded up that truck and took it, took it to the market. And I sat there until 530 and I sold everything out of that truck. And I made over $800. So I made four times because he gave me that incentive.(laughs) But from that point on, I did that all the time, I realized, heck, there's a huge difference here that I could be making for the farm for the entire farm, not just for my little bank account.

Ariel Lavery: That’s pretty forward thinking for a teenager. Was that what made Michael want to go into agriculture?

Austin Carter: It was. He got his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the field. And all the while Bill is still growing and collecting more seeds and more stories about them.

Bill Best:  I think around 2000 we started a seed exchange here. The Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center where we started growing seeds for sharing, and selling mostly on the internet. 

Austin Carter: Michael, helped with paperwork and such. 

Michael Best: It was totally his idea. As far as an organization that needed to be formed to save seeds for just the regular people, the backyard gardeners. Maybe some farmers that grow on a commercial scale. The people that you know, have memories of growing up with a specific kind of seed from their family, in their community. And keeping those seeds going so that they can have a resource, a place to find them.

Austin Carter: As the project and his collection grew, so did Bill’s renown and acclaim as a seed saver and preserver of traditions. In 2003 he won the Southern Foodways Alliance’s, Keeper of the Flame Award. He authored two books about seed saving and preserving the tastes and traditions of the old seeds. And eventually, his collection swelled to over 1500 heirloom beans and numerous heirloom tomatoes.

Bill Best: I guess you can just say I'm a bean nut and my collection goes to show for that too.

Ariel Lavery: Wow!  1500 bean varieties!  Imagine trying to fit all those in the grocery store! 

Austin Carter: Bill said Appalachia has an amazing amount of biodiversity, partially thanks to Native American cultivators but also because beans have a tendency to mutate.

Bill Best: Beans are constantly mutating. And the same solar radiation that gives me skin cancers that I have to have taken off is quite busy mutating beans. And tomatoes do that too. But that's why there are 1000s of varieties of beans in existence now. And Monsanto will never be able to control the pollen in the air. 

Ariel Lavery:That is so fascinating. I never would have imagined that the solar radiation would have affected beans the same way it affects us. So, Monsanto is one of those big multinational seed companies right?

Austin Carter: Yep. And they own patents on certain genetically-modified seeds and have litigated over cross pollination with their seeds. For Bill, seed saving is about maintaining a critical biological principle.

Bill Best: Any people of a scientific mind realizes that biodiversity is important. And of course, the seed companies when we had a world of small seed companies. There was a lot of biodiversity being maintained by those companies. But when we had a cannibalization process, whereas smaller seed companies were bought up, or maybe merged, and then were bought by the multinational seed companies. Just thousands of very valuable varieties were abandoned, and no longer grown at all. Just maintaining that biodiversity is very important and worth doing. If you even don't think in terms of flavor, and nutrition, and everything that I think about is just the biodiversity itself.

(uplifting acoustic guitar music starts)

Austin Carter: That biodiversity is now the subject of great study at Tennessee Technical University, in Cookeville, Tennessee, where Michael works. His father and mother donated seeds from their collection to be studied there by a plant geneticist.

Michael Best: Tennessee Tech has a plant geneticist who came to this university about five years ago. And he's actually got the entire collection himself. My dad and mom, you know, gave him a little bit of every seed they had. And he's grown out those seeds for genetic testing. And so his interest is actually to, to figure out what the diversity is of those seeds. How many different types of beans are there, really. They cluster in certain groups where they're very similar. And so he can kind of tell what seeds do you have to preserve to preserve the whole collection. So you don't actually necessarily have to keep up with 1000 different kinds of seeds to preserve the germ plasm and the diversity of the collection. 

Scene 4 - What Is Old, Is New

Ariel Lavery: So Bill’s founding of the farmers markets and his decision to preserve bean varieties has turned into a full scale collection worthy of study. But I wonder if Bill and Michael have seen increased interest from the public in the work they're doing in the last couple of years?

Austin Carter: They definitely have. Bill and Michael say  In the last 20 years, there has been a huge increase in farmer’s markets, local produce and heirloom seeds. And if it seems like Bill was forward thinking about this growing market, a lot of it just came from his inclination to do things the old way.

Bill Best: I just went back to the older ways of doing things because for one, I liked it very much and then found that the customers at farmer's markets were very much preferring the heirlooms and it's still true. I mean they want foods with nutrition and flavor and texture. 

Austin Carter: Along with preserving the physical seeds, Bill’s real passion is preserving the stories behind them, which he can recount in detail. One example is what they call the “Vinson Watts” tomato, named after Bill’s friend who grew and developed it.

Bill Best: He had received tomato seed from his labor supervisor at Berea College in ‘56. His labor supervisor was Wilson Evans. And he had brought his family seed from Lee County, Virginia to Berea and he was growing it and he asked Vinson, if he would take over growing his family tomato. Vinson said yes, he'd be glad to and so he started growing it in his garden. Only that tomato. And he started choosing the best tomatoes for seed each year, improving the tomato significantly both in flavor and texture and in disease resistance.  I had visited him the day before he died in Morehead. I asked him when the Evans tomato became the Vinson Watts tomato. And he wrote in 1980. And Wilson Evans son contacted me last year. He wanted to get some of them family tomato seeds again. So I sent him some tomato seeds.

Austin Carter: Most of the seeds are named after the family who maintained them at some point. And some of these stories go back many years.

Bill Best: I had a friend in college who unfortunately died just recently and we did a lot of things together. And he gave me one of my first bean seeds when I was first becoming a collector of them. And his ancestor had arrived in the United States just at the time of the Revolutionary War. And fought on the losing side and was ordered at the end as a Prisoner of War to either return home to Scotland or move into western North Carolina. What was then the frontier still. And he chose to move to western North Carolina shortly thereafter, married an Indian woman, one of whose contributions to the marriage was the seeds, the greasy bean seeds that were still being raised by the Indians, of course, and those beans had stayed in his family all those years, and it's the Fox Family Bean on their website. 

Ariel Lavery: It’s so cool that he can trace the story of that particular seed back so far!

Austin Carter: I know, it really is. And he knows that history for many of the seeds in his collection which includes some of his family beans like his mother’s, the Margaret Best Bean, and his aunt’s, the Berty Best Bean. But that idea of preserving family seeds and reviving something that is at risk of being lost is a huge motivator for Bill.

Bill Best: It's like history is important to me. History is always written by the winners, and I’m more interested in the true history of something being preserved. And that's what I've tried to do is when people have sent seeds to me, I always request for them as much as possible to tell me how it came to be.

Austin Carter: Michael says other really great things have happened too as a result of their work.

Michael Best: It's amazing the connections that you make with people when you have a just a website that sells these seeds, you know, it's amazing the the emails you get, and the the text messages that you get, of people telling you about their fond memories of growing up eating these kinds of beans and how happy they are that somebody's keeping them alive. 

Austin Carter: A whole new generation of home gardeners, small farmers and chefs are discovering Bill’s beans.

Michael Best: We had Sean Brock, who's a chef down in Nashville come out about two months ago. And he went through the freezer and picked one of every variety we had for sale and we had 165 when he got done. We counted up what he had and we had 165 that we’ve got.

Austin Carter: Restaurants have been serving Bill’s tomatoes for years. Bobby Murray with the Merrick Inn in Lexington, Kentucky first met Bill 30 years ago through his father who bought Bill’s red tomatoes. 

Bobby Murray:  It's just a love and an art form for him. You know the tomatoes evolved. My dad really bought red tomatoes from him and they were very good and then Mr. Best I believe got into he also grew all these heirlooms. And the heirloom tomatoes are thinner skinned. Definitely. Some are acidic, some are sweet. They're always beautiful. You know they just make an excellent plate presentation.

Austin Carter: Bobby says it’s hard to find people who are as dedicated as Bill.

Bobby Murray: You know, to leave it as God intended it  is just something that's hard to find anymore. I think we all know. And very few people or farmers do that. You have to find somebody really dedicated that loves what they do. They love the earth. They love good food, and the people. I think he generally likes the people and telling him a story about it as much as he enjoys growing the tomatoes.

Austin Carter: Some small and mid sized seed companies also stock varieties of Bill’s beans. And he says mostly he’s flattered, but there is one aspect that he takes issue with.

(soft guitar and banjo music starts)

Bill Best: When they give their own definition of the seed and when it is incorrect, then I will contact them and let them know. And I did that with several of them already. they don't respect the stories behind the seeds. People have changed the history of some of my tomato seeds. And I've complained about that too. But that’s about all I can do is complain. Because they're entrepreneurs, they're not really seed savers. And so I do object to that. 

Austin Carter: Bill and Michael see these seeds as a communal property and history that must be preserved for reasons besides profit. But the coronavirus pandemic has actually resulted in more interest than ever in their seeds.

Ariel Lavery: I was wondering about that!  I’ve heard seed companies are running short because there’s so many people that want to plant their gardens.  

Michael Best:  This past year, we had a movement, you know, back towards gardening, we could tell in the amounts of orders that we had, it was unbelievable. And, you know, the number of beans that we sold out of that, that in a normal year, we would not have sold out of those beans.

Austin Carter: Bill says this new interest in growing food could be beneficial for everyone.

Bill Best:  It may bring about a revolution in agriculture and a more decentralized thing, I hope. We can't let the multinational corporations control the world's food supply. We've got to go back to small, small growers, many of them collectively, being a part of the market.

Conclusion:

Ariel Lavery: I love the idea that all of us growing our own gardens and using heirloom seeds that could lead to a revolution in agriculture. I can just see it now, a whole new economy based on seed trading and cultivating that comes from people’s own backyards.  And that it could preserve a certain part of history as well.

Austin Carter: Me too. And it’s through the unique dedication of people like Bill and Michael that these seeds and stories have been saved. Michael has established himself in his own right but takes pride in carrying on his father’s legacy and says that to many people he’ll always be known for one thing.

Michael Best: It makes you feel good. When, you know, you can actually say that your father, you know, had a big impact on a movement in the country. He's well known all over the place. And I’m, basically, I'm Bill Best’s kid, I've always been that. I'm Bill best son. And that's, that's like I said, the way I grew up and I'm still that way and I'm fine with that. That doesn't bother me at all.

Austin Carter: And Bill, at 85 years old, takes a measured but optimistic perspective about the future of seed saving.

Bill Best: I'm beginning to get pretty enthused about some of the younger people. That was one of my problems. Early on, one of my fears early on, was that when the older people died out there wouldn’t be any young people to come along and, and promote it. I just have a gut feeling that things are going to improve and the seed-saving thing I think we were going to become less dependent on multinationals. And so I'm cautiously optimistic I guess you would say, because of what's happening right now.

Ariel Lavery: Yeah, knowing more about what’s at stake, in terms of preserving these seeds, like maintaining biodiversity, makes Bill and Michael’s work seem like an essential part of the whole food industry that is never acknowledged. But I feel like I’m maybe breathing a little easier  knowing people like them are out there, preserving our genetic variety one seed at a time.

CREDITS

You can find out more about Bill and Michael’s work and the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center at heirlooms.org. Visit us at middleofeverywherepod.org. While you’re there sign up for our newsletter so you’ll always be the first to know about exciting updates and new episodes.

This episode of Middle of Everywhere was produced by me, Austin Carter, with editorial help from my co-host Ariel Lavery. Our editor is Naomi Starobin and our theme music was composed  

and recorded by Time on the String sound studio in Paducah, Kentucky.  Other scoring was from APM music. Marketing and sponsorship support comes from Dixie Lynn. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook at middleofeverywherepod. Middle of Everywhere is a production of WKMS and PRX. This program is made possible, in part, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private organization funded by the American people.