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The Poultry Plant That’s Changed the Face of This Appalachian Town

When Sheena Van Meter graduated from Moorefield High School in 2000, her class was mainly comprised of the children of families that had long-planted roots in West Virginia’s eastern Potomac Highlands. Some were African American. Most were white. And for the Moorefield resident, the closest exposure she had to other cultures, before leaving for college, came in the form of an occasional foreign-exchange student.

Since Van Meter returned to her alma mater in 2011, first as a behavioral specialist, then as a principal, and, now, as superintendent of Hardy County Schools, she’s witnessed the makeup of Moorefield’s classrooms change dramatically in a short amount of time. It has become a place where cultures collide, where Spanish, Burmese and English are spoken together on playgrounds, where refugee children try to regain new footing in a foreign land and where longtime residents, both students and their teachers, try to make space for change.

Hardy County’s Assistant Superintendent Jennifer Stauderman says they don’t really have a choice. “And she’s right,” Van Meter said. “We’re trying to do everything we can with the limited funding that we have.”

Over the last 10 years, Hardy County has become the most diverse school system in West Virginia. It has the highest percentage of English Learners (or “EL”), a term Hardy County Schools uses for students whose first language is not English. Of the approximately 2,300 students currently enrolled in Hardy County, 15 percent are considered English Learners. Every EL student in the county, except for one, attends Moorefield’s schools, which has become one of the strongest and rare examples of cohesion and integration between varying ethnic groups within a community that has been slow and sometimes non-reactive in embracing its newcomers.

Families are immigrating to Moorefield, some under refugee status, from around the world, coming from countries like Myanmar (formerly Burma), Vietnam, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Guatemala and others. Today, 18 different languages are spoken in Hardy County Schools.

This swift change is not because Moorefield has found a new, successful campaign for combating West Virginia’s declining and aging population. It hasn’t declared itself an asylum city. But instead, it sits at the center of West Virginia’s poultry industry. And in Moorefield, you don’t have to look far to explain how a town of less than 2,500 has become one of the most diverse places per capita in the state.

Just follow the 18-wheelers driving past the high school, hauling live chickens down Moorefield’s Main Street. They’ll lead you to the answer.

Depending on the way the wind’s blowing, it can be hard to forget there’s a chicken plant in the center of town.

Built along a bend in the South Branch of the Potomac River, Pilgrim’s Pride houses three plants situated together within Moorefield’s city limits: a fresh plant, where chickens are killed and made into various cuts of meat; a prepared foods plant that turns the meat into value-added products like chicken nuggets; and a rendering plant that uses the leftover parts to make pet food and other things. Depending on the weather that day and what’s happening at the plant, the air throughout town often contains an odor that’s hard to miss, a putrid-like mixture that can make the olfactory system think of waste or death. This reporter also noticed a warm, salty seasoning smell around the prepared foods plant, similar to putting your nose in a bowl of $1 chicken-flavored ramen.

“Everybody complains about the smell,” said Amy Fabbri, an adult English as a Second Language Teacher in Moorefield. “And the response is always, ‘It’s the smell of money.’”

If the smell doesn’t grab you, the large tractor-trailer trucks driving down Main Street, passing Moorefield’s library and shrinking downtown district, might do the trick. Or the hundreds of workers exiting doors on a shift’s change. Many cross the street in droves, walking to their cars in adjacent gravel lots. Most of the migrant workers in particular take off down the sidewalks, as many don’t own cars. At least, not yet.

Gravel lots surround Pilgrim’s Pride property, welcoming employees who travel from surrounding counties to work at the chicken processing plant. While at the same time, many of the company’s migrant workers, who live in Moorefield, walk to work.

Pilgrim’s size and hold in the community would be similar to a coal mine in West Virginia’s Raleigh or McDowell County, back when coal was king, said Chris Claudio. He grew up in Moorefield and lives there today. More than 1,700 people work at the Pilgrim’s location. It’s the largest employer in the county and trumps the second largest, American Woodmark Corporation, by around 1,000 workers, according to Hardy County’s Development Authority. And for the 125 migrant and refugee families that have enrolled their children in Hardy County Schools, it’s the employer name almost all write on forms.

“In coal mining communities, everyone is connected to the industry, whether you do it yourself or you have a family member or a friend [that does],” Claudio said. “That’s definitely the case in Moorefield.”

Pilgrim’s plant in Moorefield has become fully integrated, meaning Pilgrim’s Pride maintains ownership over the entire process from chicken to egg and back again. It’s known as vertical integration, a common practice in the chicken industry, where the company even supplies the local, contract farmers with specific birds to raise and the proper feed to give them. Pilgrim’s is a supplier to giant companies including KFC, Sysco and Popeye’s. To meet demand, the plant kills an average of 450,000 chickens per day over the course of two shifts. That totals up to 2.2 million birds per week, according to a factsheet provided by the company.

It’s a system in endless demand of workers. For the first half of this year, a large, wooden sign sat directly across the street from Pilgrim’s plant, positioned to catch motorists’ attention driving south along Main Street. In large bold letters it read: “Pilgrim’s: Now hiring. Apply within.”

They’re always hiring.

Poultry worker turnover ranges from 40 percent to as high as 100 percent annually, according to a 2012 report published in the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law. If you ask local officials why Pilgrim’s has begun recruiting and hiring high volumes of migrant workers over the last 10 to 15 years, they’ll tell you it’s a basic supply and demand equation.

“It’s not that there aren’t enough people to work,” said Mallie Combs, economic development director of Hardy County. “It’s that there aren’t enough people who want to do those jobs.”

“I think that’s an easy answer,” said Dr. Angela Stuesse, an anthropologist who has spent years studying poultry plants’ recruitment of Latin American immigrants in Mississippi. “… to say, ‘Oh, people don’t want to do the work.”

“Instead of asking, ‘Why is the work so poor that nobody wants to do it?’”

When Chris Claudio attended Moorefield schools, if Pilgrim’s Pride wasn’t in the foreground — on hot days the smell from the plant seemed to travel further, he said — then it was always in the background. The company’s logo was printed on pencils he used in class. Students would show up wearing company T-shirts their parents had received. And for lunch, it didn’t matter the day, there was always a chicken option in the food line.

Students leaving Moorefield High know if they don’t make it out of town, they always have the plant to fall back on, Claudio said.

“It’s not comparable to a coal miner’s wage, but a decent wage without education,” Claudio said. The average yearly wage for a worker in meat, poultry or fish trimming is $27,790, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For many of Claudio’s peers, when they roll the Pilgrim’s hiring dice, they just hope they aren’t placed on a fresh plant line.

In the fresh plant, where chickens are slaughtered and turned into cuts of meat, workers stand for eight hours or more in freezing conditions — low temperatures are maintained to better preserve the birds — repeating the same motions over and over again. Many are wielding knives and trying to keep up with the high-speed of the line to slice, gut or trim chickens swinging past on mechanized hooks, which can easily lead to accidents.

“Poultry workers often endure debilitating pain in their hands, gnarled fingers, chemical burns, and respiratory problems,” according to a 2013 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The slaughtering of chickens has become more and more mechanized, which means that the human labor required to support that process has become less-skilled, monotonous motions repeated again and again. That’s the kind of job most of the migrant workers receive when they start out at Pilgrim’s in Moorefield. The majority are immediately placed on night-shift, the least desirable shift, in the freezing cold fresh plant.

But hiring migrant workers to complete these unskilled, repetitive and grueling tasks isn’t unique to Moorefield. For more than 20 years, poultry companies across the nation have intentionally diversified their workforce, Stuesse said.

In the chicken plants of Mississippi, which Steusse wrote about in her 2016 book “Scratching Out a Living,” Latin American migrants were recruited in the mid-1990s to work alongside African American employees at the plant. African Americans at the Mississippi plants had “amassed enough power to start forming unions and negotiating their wages,” Stuesse said, “and it was at that moment that the industry was also expanding to more shifts, and so reaching out for workers from different places met both of those needs.”

The plants at Moorefield, both the fresh plant and the prepared foods, are considered non-union facilities. One of the ways poultry companies try to keep costs low, Stuesse said, is to pay workers less.

Located along Main Street in Moorefield, it’s impossible to miss the massive size, and sometimes smell, of Pilgrim’s presence in a town of less than 2,500 people.

“One way to pay workers less is to make sure they are not organized and able to collectively bargain with their employer to set the terms of their labor and working conditions,” she added.

How do poultry companies ensure that workers aren’t organized?

They hire migrants and refugees, Stuesse said, and, in doing so, can flip the construct of a working-class, racially homogenous rural town on its head.

In response to its hiring practices, Pilgrim’s Pride said it considers the diversity of its team to be one of its greatest strengths.

“Labor challenges exist across our industry,” the company said in a prepared statement, “and we are focused on recruiting the right candidates who will thrive in our culture and want to spend their careers with us.”

Whether or not Moorefield’s immigrants and refugees are thriving in their new, poultry home, well, that’s a question for them.

Part Two of Remaking Moorefield, will explore how this small, West Virginia town is responding to its new, diverse neighbors. And what local folks, if any, are doing to bring people together.

Could a Universal Basic Income Solve Appalachia’s Post-coal Poverty?

While a three-week reprieve to the 35-day government shutdown is easing some of the pain, the month-long spat between President Trump and Democrats in Congress threatened the livelihoods of people receiving government assistance all over the country. Local economies are still feeling the ripple effects, and many fear the new negotiations could lead to another damaging impasse.

In central Appalachia, where one in four residents live below the federal poverty line, the shutdown adds urgency to a long-standing debate about what a safety net in rural America would look like, and whether there are ways to construct programs that would be more immune to the politics of the moment.

One solution increasingly becoming a part of the mainstream political discourse: Universal Basic Income.

UBI—a federally-provided, no-strings-attached monthly payment to all U.S. adults, similar to Social Security—has been proposed as a potential solution to rampant poverty since Richard Nixon’s presidency. More recently, it has emerged as part of the Green New Deal, introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal found initial support from at least 40 members of Congress.

Economic theories aimed at giving low-income communities more cash-based aid are often modeled on urban impact. But there is growing interest in examining how UBI—a policy that has drawn bipartisan curiosity and support—could be a potential answer for generations of poverty in rural America as well.

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As of late, national support for a UBI has come from progressive circles, but the theory has historically drawn support and criticism from both sides of the political aisle.

Progressives like Ocasio-Cortez have pushed the idea as a way to support Americans whose incomes would be disrupted by the end of the nation’s fossil fuel economy—the central goal of her Green New Deal. But even some of the country’s most notable conservatives, including former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, have floated their support of similar consolidated welfare systems, where a single payment would replace individual anti-poverty government programs like food stamps and housing assistance.

Many opponents tend to focus on concerns that a Universal Basic Income would too closely resemble a welfare system gone wild, without accountability on either end. But UBI supporters say that without it, economic disparities—especially along geographic boundaries—will only grow.

Coal cars fill a rail yard in Williamson , W.Va., Friday, Nov. 11, 2016. The hard-eyed view along the Tug Fork River in coal country is that Donald Trump has to prove he’ll help Appalachian mining like he promised.

Historically, local economies in Appalachia have been dependent on one or few industries. Until the recent past in central Appalachia, coal was king. Economists refer to this as the establishment of a mono-product economy, or a mono-economy, and some Appalachian communities are experiencing multi-generational effects of the decline of the extractive industry in their communities. Coal industry employment fell at a rate of 27 percent between 2005 and 2015, with the largest losses concentrated in the central Appalachian coalfields of eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Shifts in global energy prices and demand, plus depleted coal reserves and the increased cost to mine what’s left, are largely to blame for the most recent decline in coal industry jobs. But for decades, Appalachian miners have also been dealing with the mechanization of their industry. Further automation and mechanization tied to the tech boom are now widely seen as a potential threat to working people everywhere. Those same looming changes threaten the displacement of workers in any number of industries, and are now used as an argument, in many cases, to support UBI.

“Depending on the study you cite, automation will replace anywhere from 9 to 50 percent of American jobs,” Leah Hamilton, assistant professor of Social Work at Appalachian State University and a supporter of UBI, said. “Even if it’s only 9 percent, we know that those in lower-skilled jobs will be affected the most.”

Many Appalachian communities have attempted to deal with job losses by retraining skilled miners for new opportunities in the tech industry—programs in eastern Kentucky are teaching laid off miners to write code, for example—but Fadhel Kaboub, an economics professor at Denison University in Ohio who studies UBI theory, emphasizes the ineffectiveness of retraining workers as a way to reintegrate them into the workforce.

“Work-oriented and employment-oriented programs tend to focus on training and changing people’s behavior without actually creating the jobs that people need,” leaving them without viable work opportunities, Kaboub said.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., arrives to hear President Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2019.

Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would include a federal jobs guarantee program providing “all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition.” Without that component, Hamilton explains there will be more competition for the jobs that remain, depressing wages even further.

“This will be especially acute in areas like Appalachia which has historically been so dependent on the already declining mining and manufacturing industries,” she said. “Our traditional social safety net programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and Supplemental Security Income have all stepped in to fill some of the gaps for Appalachian families, but come with significant income and asset eligibility criteria, which discourage recipients from taking part-time work or starting small businesses.”

Although opponents disagree, Hamilton argues that a Universal Basic Income comes with no such disincentive for finding fulfilling work.

“If Appalachian families were to receive a basic income, they would be able to rebuild local economies through small business development and become less dependent on national economic trends, without risking the loss of basic household security,” she said.

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Many recent experiments in the UBI space have been centralized in urban areas, like Chicago and Stockton, California, where, in both cases, the cities chose a small number of citizens to participate in a pilot project, providing them with a modest $500 a month stipend. Both projects began in 2018 and impacts have not been analyzed.

In this Feb. 29, 2012, file photo, a Stockton city worker walks away from city hall in Stockton, Calif. Stockton, a Northern California city, has given several dozen families $500 a month for a year as part of a program to study the economic and social impacts of giving people a basic income.

In Jackson, Mississippi, a new program announced in December has promised a group of 12 black mothers $1,000 a month as a sort of a basic income program. The year-long pilot, called the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, is a project of Jackson-based nonprofit Springboard to Opportunities, a group that connects families living in subsidized housing with community resources.

Aisha Nyandoro, Springboard To Opportunities’ CEO, said that the so-called radical concept of a UBI program came to the team in a very old-school way: from actually talking one-on-one with the families they offer aid to, and asking what they need the most.

The resounding answer? Cash.

SNAP and other government benefits cover certain aspects of living in poverty, but leave a lot of gaps when it comes to covering costs like child care while working other jobs, or gas to get to work.

“How do we really begin to say, ‘okay, these systems are not working?’” Nyandoro said. “How do we rewrite them so that they actually are being utilized to help families pivot out of poverty rather than just becoming a poverty trap where the cycle is continuously continuously perpetuated?”

Her goal is to eventually create a larger randomized experiment in Jackson, with a control and comparison group, to examine over a larger period of time how individuals are utilizing the resources, and how participants lives change when the concept of of cash without strings attached is introduced into the complex poverty equation.

“How we will begin to act on poverty in this country is when we get to the place where we’re changing policies, we’re changing systems and having much broader conversation about how our safety net system is currently lined out,” she said.

Nyandoro sees a lot of similarities between Appalachia and the deep south in terms of generational poverty. Where other pilot studies have focused on the working poor, Magnolia Mother’s Trust has honed in on those making less than $12,000 a year.

The main obstacle Nyandoro sees in Jackson, and everywhere, is challenging conservative stereotypes that assert poverty and navigating a broken system as punishments for being poor. By placing this money with no strings attached, she hopes to cut through that rhetoric and place the focus on individual’s choices, not prescribed guidelines.

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In a more rural setting, like Alaska, Hamilton’s position that a UBI will bolster local economies and, in turn, create more local jobs has held true. A 2018 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research examined the Alaska Permanent Fund. While it’s not billed as UBI, the fund has provided an annual stipend since 1982 to every Alaskan. Those payments, of on average $2,000 per person, come from a collection of state oil and mineral leases.

A sign at a used car lot in Anchorage, Alaska, on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009, encourages buyers to use their Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend check early for their purchase.

The NBER study found that Alaska’s program had no impact on the number of people working full-time jobs in the state, and increased those working in part-time positions by 17 percent.

The study supports Kaboub’s argument that low-income people “don’t hate work,” but “hate the idea of being exploited, of being in precarious conditions, of being in exploitation-type conditions.”

“Most people around the world want to work,” Kaboub said, “and people who want to work, they want a decent wage and safe workplace environment. And that’s something that a job guarantee program focused on the economy of care can easily provide.”

Rural Appalachians, however, may not see it Kaboub’s way. In Bluefield, West Virginia, Pastor Travis Lowe works with local business owners at the think tank REBUILD.REVIVE.THRIVE, which focuses on connecting local businesses in need of employees to potential workers looking for employment.

“Unemployment is tied to an increase in hospital visits, ER visits, overdoses, drug addiction… and I don’t think it’s simply because they don’t have money coming in,” Lowe said.

But he isn’t so sure UBI would solve many of these problems for Appalachians, because he believes federal disability benefits are already filling a lot of the same gaps that a proposed basic income might. But disability benefits are also causing a problem for Lowe’s segment of Appalachia as he sees it: dependency on government benefits that require them to sit out of the workforce.

Pastor Travis Lowe, right, and his wife.

“I recognize that this community is in tough shape, and they need a little bit of extra help, and I’m all for that,” he said, but in order to collect disability, beneficiaries cannot take on any paying work, which Lowe sees as essentially forcing them to become unproductive members of society.

To Lowe, UBI could enhance that problem, pushing even more rural Appalachians out of the workforce in a place where finding a job is already difficult enough. While he agrees that money in-hand is better than nothing, he has seen himself the ways that the entire welfare system would need to change before that cash translate to real revitalization in Appalachia.

“I think that when you have a hand tied to something that says you have to promise to not be productive… I think that is more important than a Universal Basic Income, the idea of purpose,” he said.

Lowe sees hope in conversations around the proposal, though, especially when framed with the proper historical and regional context. The dynamics of the Appalachian political economy have historically served to centralize wealth among energy, land and mineral company owners and dispossess community members of the means to fill even fundamental material needs. The region has produced a considerable quantity of the nation’s energy, yet has never seen a commensurate share of the profit, while at the same time experiencing an uneven distribution of environmental risk and job losses due to the mechanization of the main industry for many communities.

“In the 1980’s in coal mines, when they started to be able to mine as much coal with two employees as you used to be able to mine with 500, there’s 498 people that lost their job in a day, [and] not because because coal suddenly became a thing of the past,” Lowe said.

“That’s what makes it similar to the reason they want autonomous driving cars—not so that our commute will be easier,” he said, “but so that all the tractor trailers that are driving up and down the road can get rid of all those employees and save a tremendous amount of money. It’s not that the trucks wouldn’t be running, they just wouldn’t need people to do it.”

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With failing infrastructure and geographic isolation that prevents many families from meeting the employment requirements necessary for maintaining a steady stream of welfare, Appalachia could be a true test bed for the viability of a Universal Basic Income.

And in a small way, it already has. In 2016, rural Tennessee was victim to the deadliest wildfires in the state’s history—the Great Smoky Mountain Wildfires. The fires resulted in approximately 1,300 damaged homes. Soon after, the Dolly Parton Foundation launched the My People Fund, awarding individuals facing financial and emotional damages personal aid in the form of $10,000 each in payments over six months.

Dr. Stacia West, professor at the University of Tennessee College of Social Work.

Dr. Stacia West, a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Social Work, used findings from the program to explore what a guaranteed and Universal Basic Income could look like in an Appalachian microcosm and set out to understand the fund’s effects on the overall well-being of its recipients.

Among other results of the longitudinal study, West and Stacy Elliott, a PhD student in the college, found that the cash transfers, according to a majority of the respondents, were the most helpful form of support to mitigate their material and emotional damages after the fires, similar to the results of other UBI experiments in more urban settings.

In Appalachia, experts believe that by further reducing the cost of living through supplemental payments, the UBI could help mitigate the rampant issues of scarce job opportunities and fleeting businesses and could encourage greater regional equality for the region with the rest of the nation.

This story was co-published with Spotlight for Poverty and Opportunity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan site featuring commentaries and original journalism about poverty and mobility. Follow us on Twitter @povertynews. Read the story on their site here.

Lovey Cooper is a contributing editor with 100 Days in Appalachia and engagement editor at Scalawag magazine. Her work focuses on policy, justice, and the intersection of politics and culture in the South and Appalachia.

Liz Price studies Feminist Studies and Appalachian regional policy at Ohio State University where she is working on a manuscript on the racial logics of the American opioid crisis.

Reclamation Day: 'Fallout 76' Released to the Public

Imagine a world devastated by nuclear war. You’re one of a handful of lucky survivors who took shelter before the bombs fell and destroyed civilization as we know it. Your Vault-Tec bomb shelter is well-stocked and secure. You and your fellow survivors could live in the vault for years, decades even.

Life goes on in the vault much as it did before. Jobs are assigned, families form, civilization lives on. To pass the time, stories are told of the land that was and will be again. Songs of home and hill are sung with reverence to pass the time and find joy in the toil. Tales of resilience and heroism against impossible odds fuel the imagination. Stories about wild, wonderful West Virginia paint a picture of beauty and life, sorrow and struggle.

Children whose entire world is contained within this underground safe haven struggle to imagine a place that’s almost heaven, with hills bathed in glory. Sons and daughters of the mountains learn what it means to be a West Virginian without ever seeing the land they love. In the dark, tales of monsters and unimaginable horror haunt nightmares as well.

Years pass this way. Young and old eagerly await “Reclamation Day,” the day the vault doors open, and celebrate its coming every year like the homecoming celebrations of old. Reclamation Day is the day we’ll have a chance to rebuild the world that was lost, a world that lives on in the memories of some and the dreams of others, a day to remember that, no matter the struggle, Mountaineers are always free.

“For when the fighting has stopped, and the fallout has settled, you must rebuild. In Vault 76, our future begins.”

This is the world Bethesda Game Studios has created in “Fallout 76.”

If you’re from West Virginia, you can tell that it is remarkably different from other games in the “Fallout” series in one important regard. In the eight other installments in the series, those locked away in these underground fallout shelters view the outside world with suspicion, leaving the safety of their vaults to take on the dangers of the outside world only when forced to do so.

But in the trailer for “Fallout 76,” viewers see the remains of a party in one of these vaults– decorated with streamers and balloons, confetti scattered and completely empty. At the first opportunity, every resident of Vault 76 abandoned the safety to return to the home they love, even those who had never experienced it’s beauty before nuclear war.

Who but West Virginians would be eager to return to their war-torn world for the chance to rebuild it?

Who but sons and daughters of the Mountain State would keep the dreams and stories of what it means to be West Virginian alive for all that time?

Who but Mountaineers would celebrate “Reclamation Day” as a homecoming? Without help, working to make the world a better place with nothing but pure grit and Mountain ingenuity.

Twenty million players will learn firsthand through Wednesday’s release of “Fallout 76” what it means to be a West Virginian and what it’s like to live in the Mountain State – the beauty and the struggle, the identity and pride, the sacrifice and the joy.

They’ll learn what it means to be a Mountaineer and why Mountaineers are always free.

John Barton is a resident of Lincoln County, West Virginia, and runs 100 Days in Appalachia’s “Fallout 76” Reddit page. He and his wife, Christal, are the founders of WV Autism, a support group for the families of children with autism in the state.

Food editor Mike Costello shares his vision for Appalachian food. (It's complicated.)

“Food is political but not partisan.” This apt perspective came from Mike Costello in a conversation earlier this year as we imagined ways to expand 100 Days in Appalachia beyond political coverage, and he joined the team to lead our reporting on food and culture for the region. Mike has long been one of my favorite Appalachians — a printmaker, fiddler, storyteller, satirist, photographer, square dance caller, restorator, entrepreneur, food historian, gardener, forager, hunter … and brilliant chef. Mike is co-owner of Lost Creek Farm with his partner, Amy Dawson, and has led pop-up dinners throughout the region as a form of place-based, cultural performance. His storytelling dinners are so much more than meals, and we know his work for 100 Days in Appalachia will be about so much more than food.

The rest of the world will get a glimpse of Mike through Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, when it airs tonight, but as 100 Days in Appalachia likes to remind our readers … there is always more to the story. Here Mike talks about his experience with “Parts Unknown” and shares his unique vision for what he’s dubbed “The Seed Swap,” a collaborative way to tell Appalachia’s complex economic, political, cultural and human stories through food.

— Dana Coester, Executive Editor

This evening CNN’s “Parts Unknown” airs, and for a few minutes of the show, Anthony Bourdain is at Lost Creek Farm. You have what some might think is a surprising reaction to being featured on the show.

It’s hard to explain, but when something like this happens, you’re not just basking in publicity overnight. Sure, it’s an honor to feel like people are paying attention to your work, but it’s all pretty stressful, actually. When you’re from a place that’s been so consistently misrepresented, you feel a tremendous weight on your shoulders any time you’re picked out to represent the state and the region. In a way it’s kind of silly, because it’s out of your hands. It’s up to the editors and producers to decide how the story is framed, but you still want to do your best to make people here proud. You try really hard to tell a story that’s not just your own, but reflects some of the nuance and complexity that’s typically overlooked. It’s all a very heavy lift.

Lou and Jessie Maiuri, with Anthony Bourdain, at Lost Creek Farm during a taping of CNN’s “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.” A master seed saver, Lou, 88, passed several varieties of pole beans down to Mike Costello to grow at Lost Creek Farm.

Since September, as I’ve been thinking about this show, I’ve become very much aware of the pressure we put on ourselves when something like this happens. It’s so rare that national media asks us to tell our own stories, rather than showing up with a preconceived narrative and picking out characters to fit. But the reality is, even with a thoughtful, respectful production team, it’s impossible to fit every story that deserves to be told into an hour-long show. “Parts Unknown” gave us an opportunity to tell a few stories we don’t normally get to tell on national television, but it’s still incomplete, and that’s what we should expect. I think sometimes we fall into this trap, feeling like every news story or profile of Appalachia should encompass everything we like and nothing we despise about this place. Obviously that’s not realistic, and it just adds to the pressure we put on ourselves. I guess you could say one of the goals of “The Seed Swap” is to alleviate some of that pressure by providing a consistent outlet for homegrown stories. If there’s an article or video that didn’t include certain people or themes, let’s write another article, let’s shoot another video. Let’s add to the conversation and point to the body of work we’re willing to establish through conversation, rather than looking at each story as a high-pressure, get-it-right-or-else scenario.

What originally spurred this idea of launching a food and culture publication with 100 Days in Appalachia?

Of course 100 Days in Appalachia came from a desire to provide counter-narratives to themes of desperation or small-mindedness among white inhabitants of “Trump Country” following the 2016 election. Obviously, those of us who live here know there’s much more to the story — layers of nuance, complexity and diversity omitted from those tired themes. 100 Days really took off, and at the same time, there was a lot more media hype around Appalachian food. Just like the media coverage around the election, Appalachian food stories are often informed by stereotypical ideas, and stories about food are about much more than ingredients and flavors. Food stories are stories about people. When Appalachian cuisine is portrayed as nothing but biscuits and gravy, deep fried snacks and moonshine, there are potentially some pretty damaging takeaways. In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of hype around Appalachian food being “trendy.” That’s certainly given rise to some Appalachian writers, chefs and other food businesses, which is really important. But from time to time it’s also had this pigeonholing effect. If you look outside the region to the way Appalachian or southern food is interpreted, you’ll quickly notice it’s the stereotypical expectation of simple mountain food, not the complete story, people are after. In this regard, there’s a lot of similarity between a D.C. area chef who says “Let’s offer something Appalachian — spam and beans in a tin can, which we’ll call ‘best darn’ something-or-other,” and an editor in New York telling a reporter, “Go to Appalachia and write a story — make it about desperate, jobless white people who still don’t regret voting for Trump.”

Why is storytelling so important to your work with food?

I think to really grasp my passion for storytelling as it relates to food, you have to understand what it’s like to grow up with derogatory portrayals of the region in your face as part of everyday life. I’m not just talking about media, although stereotypes were and still are very much present on television and in the movies. I’d see these things all around me growing up. I remember going to gift shops in or around state parks and seeing trashy kitsch like single toothpicks wrapped up with labels that said “West Virginia Toothbrush” or little figurines of barefoot, toothless moonshiners. Even through these hokey trinkets, we were telling a story about who we are to the outside world. In turn, we’re also telling that story to ourselves about how much we value our own cultural assets.

Jonathan Hall gathers wild paw paws during the “Parts Unknown” shoot at Lost Creek Farm in September 2017.

We all process these narratives in different ways. There are plenty of people I know who, because of the negative connotations around Appalachian identity, moved away and left every morsel of association with the mountains behind. I can’t really say I blame them. But for me, all of those stories inspired me to chip away at telling different stories, with the hope that one day we might be perceived differently, and that young people in Appalachia won’t have to do a risk/reward analysis over embracing place-based culture and heritage.

There are a lot of us out there now, in organizations like the Appalachian Food Summit — a broad network of chefs, farmers, food writers, food justice advocates and so many others — who are sort of on this mission to flip the narrative, and make the story about Appalachian food is one about strength and resilience, rather than shame. I think there’s a lot of good that’s possible when we take food heritage, something we’ve been conditioned to run away from in some sense, and turn it into a source of pride.

Tell us about the name, “The Seed Swap.”

This is something we put a lot of thought into for months. We wanted something that transcended racial and ethnic lines, which can be tough with food. There are certainly dishes that have more cultural overlap than others, but when we looked at certain dishes, ingredients or cooking and preservation techniques, some of them sounded pretty catchy, but with most of those we felt they left people and communities out. That’s the opposite of what we wanted to do. Somewhere in the brainstorming process, “The Seed Swap” emerged as a candidate and it really just seemed to fit. Seed swaps occur when farmers and gardeners get together to share seeds that have been saved, sometimes for many generations. Whether it’s only two home gardeners or a hundred farmers and homesteaders participating, these events represent a sense of community I’ve always considered a trademark of mountain foodways. But seed swaps really go beyond the sharing of seeds, because folks are also sharing tips and tricks they’ve learned for growing certain varieties, and they’re sharing the rich stories behind the crops themselves. Essentially, a seed swap is an exchange of ideas, opinions, information, stories — and that’s what we wanted our publication to be.

How is the name “The Seed Swap” universal?

If you look at the crops that are most closely associated with Appalachia today, even what we grow on our own farm: Fat Horse and Logan Giant pole beans, Bloody Butcher corn, Cushaw and Candy Roaster squash, they have deep roots in Appalachia and Mesoamerica before that, long before the arrival of white settlers. Throughout history, there’s been a tradition of knowledge sharing here. I think a lot about the waves of immigration into the coalfields. You had people from different backgrounds sharing knowledge and resources over gardening to survive. During the mine wars, African American families who left sharecropping arrangements and former Eastern European farm workers were segregated in many ways, but they came together to share knowledge and resources, including seeds, as an expression of solidarity. They grew and preserved food together. Those gardens really became a tool of empowerment when they had enough food on hand to extend miners’ strikes and achieve historic victories for the labor movement. I’ve also witnessed the way seeds have provided entry points into deep conversations that allow us to discover common ground. Last year, I got to hang out with some folks from Oaxaca. When they saw these varieties of bright red and blue corn we were working with, their eyes just lit up, and they started talking about corn from back home in Mexico that looked identical to the varieties we call Bloody Butcher and Blue Clarage. All of a sudden, what started out as a conversation about seeds became a broader exchange about people and place, and that was very special.

Lorelei Tenney bottles freshly boiled sorghum syrup in Tallmansville, West Virginia. Originally from the Philippines, Lorelei and her husband Donnie, a Tallmansville native, grow and process several acres of sorghum cane each fall.

What kind of content can we expect?

Over the past several months we’ve been building a team of incredibly thoughtful, talented contributors who’ll be working to produce content in a variety of media. I love sitting down to read great writing, for sure, but I really want to look at how we can use other media, too. Of course, video and audio make sense, but what are some other ways we can tell stories? We have some ideas. Stay tuned.

In terms of themes, we’re not a public relations magazine, which is often expected from food media. Some readers anticipate boastful profiles of chefs and restaurants, and reviews of products from whiskey to barbecue sauce. There’s a place for that, for sure, so I’m not disparaging existing publications, but we’re just going to be different. Will “The Seed Swap” feature farmers and chefs? Sure, but in doing so, I want to look at broader social issues affecting these individuals and their families. I really don’t care for lists so much, but I hope, if we ever run lists, they’ll look less like “Top five new, hip craft breweries that’ll knock your socks off,” more like “Community leaders share five policy ideas to improve food access in Appalachia”. If such a list comes about, we need to really dig in — to learn about the complexity of the issues and celebrate the people doing the work on the ground. And that idea, that the real heroes of our region’s food stories aren’t in restaurant kitchens, but they’re out there in their own homes and communities, doing incredible, largely unnoticed, work is a central theme to “The Seed Swap.”

Can you give us some examples of what that would look like, to look at broader issues through the stories about food or farmers or chefs?

One of the issues that comes to mind for me is access to affordable healthcare. That’s not always something people connect to food, but there are a lot of farmers and entrepreneurs who are only able to do what they do because health insurance suddenly became affordable within the past five years. Now, when we’re looking at perpetual threats to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, there’s a lot of worry and uncertainty among farmers and independent business owners about where they’ll be next year. Recently, I read an op-ed from a very conservative state official who said we needed more full-time farmers in West Virginia. That would be nice, but unless affordable health care and other facets of a certain social infrastructure are in place, it’s unrealistic to think that’s a possibility.

Another issue I think about a lot, especially this time of year during ramp season, is how extractive industry affects foodways. Right now we’re looking at several major pipeline corridors, some of which will end up in the middle of working family farms, treasured hunting grounds and ramp patches foragers have been frequenting for almost their entire lives. We’re hearing a lot about the economic boost from pipeline construction, but what do farmers and foragers stand to lose? Who’s telling their stories?

Jonathan Hall carries a freshly killed and dressed deer following a hunt at Lost Creek Farm in November 2017. Hall wrote about his experience as a black hunter in West Virginia for “Explore Parts Unknown.”

“The Seed Swap” will be a publication that largely focuses on Appalachian food, but what, exactly is Appalachian food?

It’s a tough question, and I’m not going to answer it. “The Seed Swap” won’t make an attempt to define it, either. I always say, Appalachian food is up for interpretation, because our experiences as Appalachians vary too widely to arrive at a point of consensus. I know what it means to me, and I know how the people around me have shaped my experience, but Mike Costello’s story is not the story of Appalachia. Heck, if you just talk to ten families in North Central West Virginia, you might get ten different answers as to what Appalachian food heritage means, and you’d get another ten answers about how today’s Appalachian food has evolved. It will be interesting to dig in and explore those differences, painting a broader picture of regional identity than many would expect.

Aside from exploring how we each define “Appalachian,” I hope we can look at food as more than just a combination of flavors and ingredients. These stories are really about people doing amazing work, whether around diversity and inclusion, economic development, food security and a host of other critical issues facing the region. When people hear “Appalachian food” now, they typically think of dishes they consider to be emblematic of the region’s cuisine. I’d like for the associations with Appalachian food to be about the people behind foodways work in the region, just as much as the food itself.

As a chef and journalist, I want to create an outlet that stops short of defining exactly what Appalachian food is, and recognizes that our foodways are constantly evolving with an ongoing shift in social demographics. Most importantly, I want it to legitimize Appalachians as the storytellers of our region. I don’t want to create an environment that discourages others from seeking out stories or discovering our traditions. In fact, some of the most thoughtful, sensitive, community-minded work around Appalachian food and culture is done by folks who came here as outsiders, yet they show this unwavering commitment to the region that deserves recognition. At the same time, I think there’s room to look at certain interpretations of Appalachian identity, especially when they’re commodified for economic gain outside the region, with a critical eye. Going back to the original mission of 100 Days in Appalachia, we’re very much interested in creating an outlet for stories about Appalachians, told by Appalachians.

Food editor Mike Costello (@costellowv‏) is a chef, farmer and storyteller at Lost Creek Farm in Harrison County, West Virginia. Through his cooking and writing, Mike strives to tell important stories about a misrepresented and misunderstood region he’s always called home.

Remembering the River People

Looking back, four years after the 2014 Elk River chemical spill

There’s an old-time method I use for preserving trout. It’s a simple process — coating fresh fillets with coarse salt until the moisture is withdrawn and the flesh stiffens. Prior to the 1920s, salting of red-bellied speckled brook trout was a thing of ritual in highland communities. At some point, the tradition slipped away. That didn’t happen because the convenience of electric refrigerators made salt-preservation unnecessary. It happened when reckless logging operations ruined high-elevation streams. To make salt trout a century ago, you’d need access to a healthy supply of catchable fish, and native trout don’t survive in tainted waters.

Buried in the story of salt trout is an important lesson — not about ingredients or technique — but about the relationship West Virginians have with land and water. It’s about place-based cultures, unbridled greed and our forebears’ ghostly heartache that deepens each time streams are diminished in the name of extractive riches. When endless clearcuts led to fish kills high in the mountains, more than a protein-rich culinary provision went absent from kitchens and earthen cellars. For people who drew sustenance from those rivers, and those of us who follow in their footsteps, an important piece of their heritage — our heritage — suddenly went missing.

I know about these things, how a connection to resources shapes our identity. I was born into a long line of Appalachians whose livelihoods depended on waterways. They were river people, you could say. Most of them passed on long before my time, but I’ve seen their striking images in family albums, and I’ve heard their stories. I want to believe the plight of river people — my family and others like them — can inspire us to avoid life-altering disasters that occur when we compromise precious resources for economic gain. It’s why I’m compelled to share the lessons of salt trout and other stories about river people — stories, I feel, are important to remember.

I remember what happened to river people four years ago this month. I remember when toxic chemicals spilled from a corroded storage tank near Charleston; when 300,000 West Virginians lost access to potable water; when small businesses in nine counties were forced to close; when residents were told the water was safe to use again … although it actually wasn’t.

I remember social media posts from friends back home, how they evolved from vignettes of annoyance to panicked concerns about young children whose rashes and vomiting intensified in the days after the spill. I remember watching politicians who’d made careers of de-regulating industry fumble their way through a hastily-conceived response. I remember feeling cynical, furious and helpless. I remember looking ahead in the weeks and months after the spill, thinking to myself, “Is any of this going to matter in a few years?”

When I first heard the news of the incident on the afternoon of January 9, 2014 it all felt so familiar. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that chemical spills in a place dubbed “The Chemical Valley” aren’t exactly unheard of. I’d routinely seen coverage of them as a kid, and this was the third since 2009. We’d been here before. Or so it seemed.

Industrial disasters in the Charleston area typically occur along the Kanawha River, from looming vestiges of a once-prominent industry — aged tanks and chemical manufacturing facilities like the DuPont Chemical plant where both my aunt and my grandfather found work. But this spill occurred on the Elk, just a few miles from where I grew up. This time, it hit home.

To say the Elk is a lifeblood of central West Virginia is not an understatement. Winding over the Central Allegheny Plateau, it’s a river to which my ancestors and I are inextricably linked. I’ve never gotten a tattoo, but I’ve often thought about it — what it would look like and where it would be drawn. I’ve pondered it long enough to know a map depicting the Elk, from start to finish — all 170-some miles — would be fitting.

The map I’ve envisioned would be simple and discrete, made up of thin lines beginning near my right shoulder, running up and down the inside of my arm. It would start where pristine headwaters tumble down the mountains of Pocahontas and Webster Counties, where I learned to fly-fish, watched black bears traipse through rocky stream beds and came to appreciate the infinite rewards of nature’s solitude. The sketch would meander over the slope of my bicep to the crevice of my elbow, where, in the relative lowlands of Braxton County, the river passes slowly and quietly, translucent, with a mesmerizing emerald hue. There would be a notch representing the modest house in Sutton where my grandmother was born, then another downriver at Gassaway, the birthplace of my grandfather. I’d mark the tiny fishing camp in Clay County, where, during her childhood years, my mother’s summertime meals included catfish snagged from metal Jon Boats and legs of bullfrogs gigged from shoreline reeds. Some of the Elk’s tributaries would be drawn, too — Birch River and Middle Run, where my great-great-grandfather baptised faithful souls in frigid waters, or the sycamore-shaded alcoves of Blue Creek and Little Sandy, where my friends and I watched our youthful innocence fade into the nascent trials of adolescence. Back on the mainstem, my lower forearm would show my hometown of Elkview in the stretch between Falling Rock and Mink Shoals, a twelve-or-so-mile segment that includes my former elementary school, middle school and high school, each building situated within yards of the river. Finally, the map would end near my wrist, as the Elk meets the mighty Kanawha, where I came into the world in 1983.

Whether or not I’ll ever hire an artist to apply their inked needles to my skin, the Elk will always be imprinted upon me. The river is part of me, and what happens there is part of my story. The qualities I’d expect from a tattoo — pride, pain, permanence — they already exist as products of a complicated relationship with place.

The memories of my upbringing along the river are overwhelmingly fond, but we can’t pick and choose which parts of our place-based legacy we inherit. When I think about my grandfather teaching me how to clean and gut a fish, I’m obligated to remember my great-grandfather was a logger no doubt responsible, in some way, for the demise of fragile trout streams. And with every dose of feel-good Elk River nostalgia come acknowledgements to the contrary — families displaced from homesteads to construct Sutton Lake and Dam, recent floods destroying much of my hometown, and, of course, a heavy dose of poison making the Elk River infamous four years ago.

Crude 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol, commonly known as MCHM, is the substance that trickled out from a 46,000 gallon storage facility operated by Freedom Industries on January 9, 2014. The chemical’s primary use is for washing coal, ironically, to reduce pollution during its combustion in power plants. While some elected officials went to great lengths to absolve the coal industry of any perceived responsibility, others chalked up the incident to the “heavy lifting” expected of West Virginians, a people supposedly blessed with opportunities to provide cheap energy for the rest of the nation. The idea that diminished water quality simply comes with the territory of being a coal state was a hard sell, but it’s easy to see why politicians might offer it up. After all, when you’ve been blessed with opportunity, it’s rude to complain.

To some who’ve dealt with the coal industry’s direct impacts on water quality for decades, the hype surrounding the 2014 spill probably seemed a bit overblown. There are plenty of coalfield residents who never have and likely never will receive safe, drinkable water from their taps. This is an Appalachian phenomenon, but not uniquely so. This country has always found a way to pave highways toward environmental disaster, situating them among our most vulnerable populations. The same patterns found in McDowell County, West Virginia can be seen on Navajo lands, where abandoned uranium mines led to heavily-polluted water sources, in southern California, where long-closed battery factories still tarnish water supplies in Latino communities, and in rust belt towns like Flint, Michigan, where largely African American communities suffer the ongoing effects of lead contamination in public drinking water systems. We shouldn’t, but we tend to forget these communities when they’re out of sight and, therefore, out of mind.

But when an incident eliminated the water supply for hundreds-of-thousands in and around West Virginia’s largest city, when quality of life for state lawmakers was affected, its impacts became tough to ignore. In front of glaring lights, rolling cameras and the watchful eyes of national media, political leaders soon began to respond.

Senator Joe Manchin went on national television to label the incident “a wake-up call,” promising strict new regulation to prevent similar disasters. He pledged to make West Virginia known as a safe haven for clean rivers, not as a place where water quality gets in the way of purported industrial progress. Both chambers of the state legislature responded to an outcry from residents and business owners, passing comprehensive above-ground storage tank regulation and new laws requiring public water utilities to complete source protection plans. They were steps in the right direction, but it all seemed too good to be true.

Time went on, and the same question surfaced in my mind, again and again. “Would any of this matter in a few years?” I wanted to stay positive, but I had my doubts about what would happen when the cameras were turned off and the media left town.

As we now know, lawmakers’ love affair with shiny, new water quality safeguards would be short-lived. Most of the regulation pertaining to above-ground storage facilities has been repealed, and further weakening of storage tank rules is expected in this year’s legislative session. Manchin’s water-friendly rhetoric has mostly dried to a trickle. He did introduce legislation to improve rural water infrastructure, but his press releases have routinely touted the weakening of the federal Clean Water Act and a number of administrative water quality standards.

When the anniversary of the spill hit on January 9th, I decided I should revisit that question I asked myself four years ago, and capture some of what came to mind. I paid close attention to news of the anniversary, hoping to read something, anything, from elected leaders upholding their then-boisterous commitments to protect water, to do things differently, to heed the lessons of 2014. If the news I’d hoped for exists, I missed it.

I read headlines about an oil spill from a sunken towboat on the Big Sandy, and about the impacts of two proposed major gas pipelines crossing the Elk along their routes. I read about plans to open state parks in the Elk River watershed to logging for the first time ever, and about Governor Jim Justice issuing a moratorium on all new regulations in the name of “individual, family and business freedom.”

There was, in fact, mention of the water crisis in the press that week, but in the context of a $151 million class-action lawsuit close to being settled. It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it was an appropriate reminder that the battle continues for leaders who stood up for those most affected and who don’t intend to sit down.

Politicians who would inevitably backtrack from promises might have grabbed the biggest headlines in the wake of the spill, but the story of recovery is no longer about them. It’s about the diverse, organized community members who pulled together to refute the notion that clean water’s sacrifice should be accepted as a casualty of our “heavy lifting”. Their inspiring public response should teach us something about the way we all depend on rivers — how West Virginians are all river people.

As I looked back on the anniversary of the spill, the Elk was heavy on my mind. I spent time writing salt trout into upcoming menus, looking at old family photographs and mulling over the possibility of a tattoo. I talked to friends who’ve been on the front lines since the water crisis of 2014, and thought about the resilience of river people. I wondered if it will mean something when their stories are remembered.

Contributing editor Mike Costello (@costellowv) is a chef, farmer and storyteller. He and his partner Amy Dawson operate Lost Creek Farm in Harrison County, West Virginia. Through his cooking and writing, Mike strives to tell important stories about a misrepresented and misunderstood region he’s always called home.

Are Black Walnuts Ready to Boom?

The first car arrives over two hours before the hulling station officially opens in Jeffersonville, Kentucky. By the time that Renee Zaharie appears and…

The first car arrives over two hours before the hulling station officially opens in Jeffersonville, Kentucky. By the time that Renee Zaharie appears and starts the hulling machine, four more vehicles have pulled in and are waiting under the darkening evening sky.

The steady murmur of conversation (and the occasional guffaw) hums beneath the tent protecting the machine from the elements, as walnut hullers shoot the breeze after a long day of picking. Occasionally, a plaintive mew announces the otherwise-silent arrival of one of the 40 cats that Renee and her husband, William, foster. Out front, cars zip by on the busy county road. All around, the soft chirps of crickets sing their nightly chorus.

It’s the first weekend of the annual black walnut harvest that takes place each October, and the air is festive.

Money That Grows on Trees

Credit Eileen Guo / 100 Days in Appalachia

100 Days in Appalachia

During black walnut season in October, the tree nuts rain down everywhere. For homeowners, they present a nuisance that can damage lawn mowers. Mike Foight of South Shore, Ky. enlists his grandchildren to clear his yard (pictured here) and earn some spending money.

Black walnuts are native to North America (including six Appalachia states) and, unlike many other tree nuts, grow in the wild. The green, tennis ball-sized nuts rain onto fields, roads, vehicles and sometimes, people, presenting a nuisance to cars parked beneath them and a danger to lawn mowers everywhere.

While some may dread black walnuts for these reasons, for many others, the annual harvest is a welcome time of the year: a sign of the changing seasons, the return of a beloved baking ingredient, and, perhaps most importantly, an opportunity to earn extra cash.

Black walnut harvesters gather the nuts locally—from their yards, nearby yards, roadsides and forests—and bring them to one of 238 hulling stations in 14 states across the country. There, hulling operators use specialized machinery to removes the hulls (which can make up to half of a black walnut’s weight), weigh the hulled walnuts, purchase them, and send them to Stockton, Missouri for shelling and further processing. Stockton, the unofficial black walnut capital of the world, is home to Hammons Product Company (HPC), a family-owned business that has been shelling black walnuts for the past 71 years. The company sets the price for black walnuts every year. This past October, they paid $0.15 per pound to walnut pickers, and an additional $0.05 per pound to hulling stations.

Brian Hammons, the company’s president, says that they produce an average of 23 million pounds annually and are expecting a bumper crop in Appalachia this year that will push that figure upwards of 30 million. After shelling the nuts, HPC sells them raw in grocery stores and specialty retailers, as well as directly to chefs and ice cream makers (black walnut ice cream is wildly popular in certain parts of the country). There’s also an ever-increasing selection of black walnut products, like black walnut oil, and even myriad uses for the shells, which can serve as eco-friendly ingredients in sand-blasting agents, water filtration systems and even sports fields. Every part of the nut is able to be used.

Credit Eileen Guo / 100 Days in Appalachia

100 Days in Appalachia

At Gerlach Farm and Feed in Wheelersburg, Ohio, Paul Riggle receives cash for his load of black walnuts. This year, Hammons Product Company is offering $0.15 per pound, the highest price that they’ve ever paid.

Black walnut harvesting is also a unique business because it’s low-risk for the hulling operator, say Christina Gerlach-Armstrong and her husband, Darryl Armstrong, who run Gerlach Farm and Feed, the only remaining family-owned feed store in Scioto County, Ohio. In October, their store also hulls black walnuts. In good years like this one, as much as 25 percent of their business activity will be dedicated to the hulling.

HPC reimburses the hulling stations for their payouts to individual harvesters, pays the hulling stations a commission, and handles the nut delivery by scheduling regular semi-truck pick-ups. On years with low yields, they’ll even connect the hulling stations with other buyers, which saves them on trucking costs while giving the hullers a market and benefiting the buyer.

A few years ago, Darryl and Christina recalled that Hammons connected them to West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources, whose forestry division used the nuts as squirrel feed.

Portraits of the Black Walnut ‘Village’

In addition to the financial benefits of the harvest, Gerlach-Armstrong also finds it meaningful to be part of a process that takes “a village of people from many states.”

That village includes a variety of motivations, as well. There are harvesters like Annabelle Richie, who returned to walnut picking after a long hiatus to make money for her husband’s Christmas present. Some simply enjoy spending time outdoors, like retiree Paul Riggle, and others want to teach the next generation the value of hard work, like Mike Foight, who takes all of his grandkids out walnut picking. Full-time walnut harvesters like Penny Hednell spend September picking pawpaws, October culling black walnuts and, in the spring, wild ramps that are also native to many parts of Appalachia.

Then, there are those who simply need to clear their yards.

For many of the hullers, interacting with these community members is part of the appeal. Such is the case for Chris Chmiel, the owner of Integration Acres and a county commissioner in Athens County.

“I like providing this service to people,” he says, even though his main passion is not black walnuts, but Ohio’s native fruit, the pawpaw. He organizes the annual Ohio Pawpaw Festival, and found his way to the black walnut business because of the overlap between the two. In addition to both being native fruits, a lot of Chmiel’s pawpaw foragers also collect walnuts. Pawpaws, it turns out, grow well beneath walnut trees.

“It becomes part of who you are in a way,” he says of black walnuts. “It’s [one of] your seasonal traditions and rituals.”

Reconnecting to the Earth and a Simpler Way of Life

For the Zaharies, who run the hulling station from their modest five-acre property, black walnuts are the only source of income for both themselves and the animal rescue that they run on site.

Credit Eileen Guo / 100 Days in Appalachia

100 Days in Appalachia

The first customer of the night watches as her walnuts are weighed in Jeffersonville, Ky. This year’s price is $0.15 per pound of black walnut.

The couple started out as walnut pickers themselves, but the nearest hulling station was more than an hour’s drive away. When they bought their property, they decided to begin hulling at home. In the 11 years since starting, their hulling operation has become the most productive in all of Kentucky, and many neighboring states as well.

The Zaharies live simply. They own their property (lowering their overhead costs), drive older cars, and eat a vegan diet. “We like to do things in a natural way,” Renee notes. “This is a nice way to be able to make ends meet and give back to the earth.”

While the duo’s dependence on hulling as their income is not the norm among hullers, they are not alone in their desire to challenge the dominant economic and food systems.

“Native plants are a more efficient and more cost-effective agricultural crop,” Chmiel says. “In these hills of Appalachia, we’re not going to grow soybean and corn. Diversity is part of the resiliency of Appalachia.”

John Stock of United Plant Savers—an organization dedicated to protecting native medicinal plants—agrees with Chmiel’s assessment. “The real value is the intact forest and the diversity. In these communities, that’s what we’re trying to instill.” But he recognizes that money talks. “We are trying to find ways to demonstrate that [the value of native plants] in a monetary way, even though the bigger value is beyond money. We can’t exist without these ecosystems.”

The Future of Black Walnuts

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, $7 billion worth of tree nuts are grown in the United States annually. But unlike black walnuts, most tree nuts are grown and harvested in large-scale, monocultural orchards concentrated in California. Orchards mean a much more stable supply of crops, and the improved varieties typically grown also improve nut yield and profitability. However, orchards are more resource-intensive, and their lack of genetic diversity makes them less resilient against disease.

Credit Eileen Guo / 100 Days in Appalachia

100 Days in Appalachia

Chris Chmiel of Integration Acres writes out a check to Penny and Larry, his first two customers of the season. Penny and Larry are retired, and spend all of October picking black walnuts from around the county.

Brian Hammons believes that black walnuts have the potential to become a much bigger industry—his annual net sales are in the range of $12-14 million. Black walnuts also meet many of the current demands in the food industry, which is placing greater value on native and foraged products, as well as sustainability and health.

But getting there is a problem of supply, not demand. Because the vast majority of black walnuts are foraged, and naturally-occurring black walnuts produce low yields of nut meat, the company has partnered with various agricultural extension programs to develop a faster growing variety that produces more walnut meat. Today, a small number of black walnut orchards are already producing grown, rather than foraged, nuts. (Still, these represent less than 1 percent of the annual harvest.)

Hammons does not believe that orchard-grown black walnuts will negatively impact the wild black walnut harvest. If anything, he says, the increased market will benefit everyone.

And, with the number of nuts that lie unpicked every year, he may be right.

Eileen Guo is an independent print and audio journalist covering communities and subcultures on the fringe. She has reported from both urban and rural America, as well as Afghanistan, China, and Mexico. Follow her on Twitter (@eileenguo) and visit her at eileenguo.com.