- [Announcer] "TasteMAKERS" is brought to you with support from Missouri Pork Association and Global Foods Market.

(bright music) - When you think of a rice farm, you probably think of flooded fields speckled with green shoots.

But here at Castor River, they sow the rice directly into the soil and the soil's health is their first consideration.

(uplifting music) I'm Cat Neville and for the past two decades, I've been telling the story of local food.

In that time, American food culture has exploded in tiny towns and big cities from coast to coast.

In "TasteMAKERS," I explore the maker movement and take you along for the journey to meet the makers who define the flavor of American cuisine.

We're about to head off to the farm and when we come back, I am going to show you how to make chicken and rice soup with ginger and miso.

(gentle guitar music) - Castor River owns and operates around 2,500 acres.

My family, my father, and my mother bought this farm in the late '70s, early '80s.

This farm has a history of growing, obviously, rice, soybeans, cotton, milo, wheat, corn.

I even ran cattle here for a brief period of time.

My grandfather started 1954, and so I'm third, and I got the fourth generation on the ground.

(gentle guitar music continues) We're doing it way different than Papaw and Dad did.

I think we're all, you know, students of the time in which we live.

So, Grandfather's legacy was the formation of all this.

My father's legacy was to take that, the formation, and to mold it into something really productive.

My legacy is to take that same idea, that same field, and how are we going to create something that can go on forever, the sustainability of it all, so that my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren and so on and so forth, to guarantee that this land is gonna be here and be productive for the next 100, 200 years?

(insects chirring) - So you might be wondering, what exactly is rice?

Well, it is the seed of a species of grass, and it is one of the most widely planted and consumed foods in the entire planet.

(birds chirping) - Rice production on planet Earth goes back thousands and thousands of years.

(machine whirring) Rice is one of the, if not the most, consumed grain on the planet.

A lot of rice farming still relies on heavy tillage.

It relies on flooding.

And then a lot of it relies on burning your fields after the harvest is complete.

(fire crackling) And none of those for Castor River feels like it's in line with soil health.

And so we don't flood our rice fields, we're not tilling this ground, and we're certainly not gonna burn it after the harvest.

Our job is to try to farm with nature, not contend against her at every turn.

We've been doing regenerative agriculture for, you know, over 10 years now.

And what we find is that the more closely we can align with nature, the easier our life gets, and the more the soil produces for us when we give more back to the soil.

You know, it's very much a two-way street.

(truck rumbling) (machinery humming) - They're picking up, like, semi truckloads of rice.

How much are you producing?

- So on our 800 acres, generally we're gonna produce around a hundred and, you know, 40 to 160,000 bushels.

There's 45 pounds of rice in one bushel.

And so at 160,000 bushels, that's over 7 million pounds of rough rice.

- Wow.

- Now, you can't sit down and eat a big bowl of rough rice and be very happy about it.

(Cat laughs) Which is why the rice mill exists.

For every pound of rough rice that goes into that rice mill, 65% of that comes out as food product.

Right?

- Okay.

- Long grain, edible brown or white rice.

The other 35% is the rice husk, which, you know, we spread back out on the land as a soil emitment.

It's just more organic matter that we're putting back out onto the soil.

(solemn music) In 2012, we had a really, really bad drought here in the delta, here in the Bootheel.

What I found at the end of the year was that the management system I had in place didn't work.

We had a terrible crop.

We had a huge loss.

And so, you know, essentially as a farmer, I went ahead and I hit rock bottom.

The way that I was doing things wasn't gonna work anymore.

And I had to make a big change.

It was gonna be scary 'cause I didn't know what I was gonna do, but it wasn't as scary as having a repeat of 2012, I'll tell you that.

(solemn music continues) An insight is a thought that you have and you'll never think the same way again.

I had an insight.

My insight was, "I have destroyed my soil health."

My reality had collapsed.

Because this is how I was taught to farm.

I learned this in college.

This is what the industry was telling me to do.

And yet it all came crashing down.

And so when you lose your reality, you have to go find you a new one.

(solemn music continues) I went down a rabbit hole.

I found the end of the internet in terms of cover crops, soil health.

I found the end.

And along that rabbit hole, one guy kept popping up everywhere I looked.

Here he was doing this, here he was talking about that.

Here he was explaining soil biology and no one had ever said a word to me about soil biology.

And the guy I kept running across, His name was Ray Archuleta.

I took a chance and I wrote Ray Archuleta an email about this long.

Ray told me he receives thousands and thousands of emails every year, and he only responds to the ones that he can really get to and really believes in.

And he responded to mine, and we talked for over an hour and a half on the phone.

And that phone call absolutely changed my life.

- Explain to me, in layman's terms, what is regenerative agriculture?

- Regenerative agriculture, in a really simple way, and I like to convey this to people is, how do we emulate nature's design?

Its architecture, its patterns.

If we emulate nature, it'll start to work more efficiently, more effectively.

All of us have a common thing in our soils.

They're driven by soil life, by fungi, all these soil bacteria, all these incredible organisms.

There's a plethora, a myriad of organisms.

- And you can't see them.

- You can't see them.

They're under a microscope.

But they're also driven by the plant community in the top.

If you imagine the prairies, thousands of species and different colors and pollinators and insects.

Same thing with our forests.

They're always covered with diversity and they always have animals.

It's that kind of beauty that we wanna bring into the farm.

Not monoculture, bare ground.

We wanna bring that type of design back into the farm.

That's what it really is.

- But that's, I'm sure, scary for a lot of farmers because the idea that you would be bringing insects and other maybe competing, you know, plants and things like that.

So how do you square farming, which is where you specifically wanna grow one type of plant or a handful of types of plants with biodiversity?

Like how do they compliment each other?

- We were taught that (gentle music) we have to control nature, have to force it with our tillage, our chemicals, our fertilizers, genetically change it.

Now, we realize that the organisms in the soil, the insects, they regulate themselves.

I tell farmers for every one pest there's 1,700 beneficials.

If we work with the natural system, it will regulate itself.

It will provide the nutrients, it will help infiltrate the water into the soil.

Only if we mimic the natural system.

- [Cat] It's not just about saving money on inputs.

It really makes it so that the crops that you are planting in that healthy soil are more resilient.

- Exactly, I think nature's very resilient against drought.

Well, what builds that resilience?

Redundancy of biodiversity.

So as your farm becomes more redundant with all the right organisms and more organic matter, it can tolerate the drought.

So that's the beauty.

It's all connected because all these things connect right at the soil surface.

- I think a lot of people, they look at soil, it, you know, it's brown, it's dirt, it, you know.

What is healthy soil?

- Usually conventional.

They're pale, there's no smell in it.

When you go to a regenerative soil, it looks like chocolate cake and these little BBs hanging in there.

Beautiful, it's got an elegance.

It's got a smell to it.

(gentle music continues) And I always use the distinct differences between the two to get farmers to understand.

Then they go, "Oh, you mean my tillage, and my spraying, and my chemicals is doing this?"

I said, "Yes."

(fingers snapping) They get it.

The neatest thing is just like when you get a tablespoon, everybody understands a tablespoon.

And they see these little soil on top of it.

But who would have thought there's 7 billion bacteria?

But in that same, there could be millions of species.

50% of biodiversity is in the soil.

And the reason we missed it, 'cause we could never see it.

And now that we have microscopes and electron microscopes, you're going, "Wow."

It is the most elegant complex system in the world.

And that is our foundation of the rest of the planet.

One of the most difficult things I have to teach farmers, it's alive, careful with it.

(birds chirping) - So how does Johnny care for the soil?

Well, there's no tilling, no burning, no flooding, no fungicides, and no insecticides.

What he does use is cover crops, which he tills directly into the soil.

(gentle guitar music) - Modern agriculture is driven by yield.

We want more bushels, we want more volume.

At Castor River, we want more quality.

We want more nutrient density in our rice.

When I just give this field rice, I'm saying, "Here's a potato, hope you enjoy it."

Now in the off season, when I'm coming in and I'm giving it rye, I'm giving it fetch, I'm giving it clover, I'm giving it radishes, I'm giving it oats, I'm giving it turnips, I'm opening up the buffet.

Each variety of cover crop is bringing something different to the table in terms of what is excreting out into the soil in terms of sugars or carbohydrates, or just, you know, the life that it attracts on top.

- The idea that the plants themselves would be feeding the soil, and that by putting different things in that you're able to give the soil like different nutrients.

I think that's a foreign concept to a lot of people.

- It's a foreign concept to a lot of farmers.

It was foreign to me.

But the fact of the matter is, is that I think we have a better understanding of how the surface of the moon works than we do about how exactly the soil works.

This is an extremely alive and an extremely complex system that's out here.

I try to understand the basic principles of it and just follow those fundamentals.

And so far I've been rewarded for it.

- That's amazing.

(insects chirring) (birds chirping) This farm is unique because Castor River Farms has built a brand.

They do everything here from planting and harvesting to milling and packaging.

(upbeat music) - Beyond growing grain, we are food manufacturers.

Today we're in probably somewhere north of 3,000 stores.

We're working with restaurants, we're working with universities, we're working with institutions.

And so it's evolved into, "Hey, we want to be a rice supplier" into now we get calls every week where people are like, "We need to improve the sustainability of our menu.

We have a menu problem and we need you to help us solve it."

And that's the partnerships that are emerging now.

(upbeat music) - And now we are here at Whittemore House, at WashU in St. Louis.

We're gonna get in the kitchen with Chef Nick and see how he utilizes Castor River Farms rice.

Rice is one of the most widely grown products in the globe.

Why is choosing a local product important?

Like, what's the impact of choosing local?

- When you think about a rice coming from, you know, another continent or another place, where is that rice coming from?

How long did it take to get there?

There's even cases of like unscrupulous producers who have put adjuncts into the rice to make it look like rice, but it's actually not rice.

So getting that local product just ensures that we are getting exactly what we want.

- And you have relationships with the people.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Like, you know them.

- Well, it's great because then not only can I educate the guests on local options, but then Castor River lets us take field trips down there and I get to take my staff down, and they get to see where the rice is grown.

You know, we're an agrarian society.

We grew everything we used to eat.

And I think there's a move back there where like, let's grow everything that we need right here.

And it's nice to get 'em as close to home when we can.

- Well, and the fact that it's grown with regenerative agriculture, which is not something that's easy to do, that I would think your students would, like, walk away being inspired by that.

- Yeah, I think it's something that's important not only to me and to the students, but to everybody.

And Castor River should be lauded for that, for the work that they do.

(gentle jazz music) - [Cat] So you're gonna show us a curry dish?

- Yeah, I'm gonna do a green curry that is very popular on the Whittemore menu.

And then I'm gonna serve that with a coconut rice that utilizes the Castor River Jasmine rice.

There's a couple of aromatics that go into the coconut rice.

One is some five star anise.

This is just some citrus rind that I've removed.

And so I have some lime.

This is some Meyer lemon, and that's orange.

(gentle jazz music continues) This is two cups of coconut milk, and we use vegetable stock here because it is a vegetarian-based dish.

We're gonna throw all that in the pot, boil it up.

I'm just gonna heat the curry up.

The curry is essentially like a mirepoix base.

So this is carrot, celery, and onion, and then a little bit of grilled squash and zucchini.

(gentle jazz music continues) So that's about ready.

Four cups of rice.

- [Cat] You're not putting the rice into the liquid, you're putting the liquid into the rice.

- [Nick] Correct.

And this is something that when you're using those aromatics, it's gonna help to kind of enhance that flavor in the actual final product.

(gentle jazz music continues) - Oh my gosh, that smells like heaven.

Mm.

The texture of the rice is really transformed by the coconut milk.

Like, normally when you cook rice with broth or water, it's fluffy.

- Yeah, and maybe you add some butter at the end to get some fat into there, but the coconut just enhances that with the fat in the product.

So the rice is just gonna absorb that.

- Yeah.

- And give it that extra unctuousness that you get.

- Thanks, Nick.

- Yeah, my pleasure.

(insects chirring) - So we're standing next to a little patch of ground that Johnny is rewilding.

And I think a lot of people generally might think, "Why in the world would you take, you know, land out of cultivation?"

But, I mean, you have a good reason to do that.

- It just never felt like this corner really needed to be in grain production.

And so what we ultimately decided we wanted to do is like, "Hey, let this corner go back to nature and let's see what the ramifications of it are."

And so when you look out here, we haven't planted anything in here.

- Oh, really?

- No, this is all just nature doing what nature does.

And so, like, that's the cool thing for me, is we're creating habitat below the surface of the soil for all the biology.

And we're also creating habitat above the surface of the soil, you know, for all these other creatures.

As we've mentioned, you know, we don't use any insecticides or fungicides out here.

- So the birds and the possums and all those guys, they're gonna be eating all the bugs.

And the beneficial bugs, they start to outweigh the ones that want to get at the crops.

And so it does create that balance.

- You gotta have it.

- Yeah.

- You gotta have it.

Every organism, you know, on this farm and, you know, in this habitat, it serves a purpose.

(insects chirring) (gentle music) - [Cat] The drought that really pushed you into this type of farming in 2012, you just experienced a drought like that this summer.

And you know, the farm actually was incredibly resilient this time.

- It really was.

It's the power of regenerative agriculture.

10 years after 2012, here we are with another major drought, and we couldn't be happier with the crop that we have.

(machinery humming) It's one thing to talk about it, but you know, this is Missouri, this is the "Show-Me" state.

- (laughing) Yes.

- Regenerative agriculture really showed me this year how beneficial it can be for the soil.

(gentle music continues) We are regenerating soil.

Our soil is gonna be better every year because of what we do.

On a microscopic level, this land, it has more organic matter, it has more biological life.

The fertility of this soil is better.

One of Ray Archuleta's many stipulations, when he agreed to help me, he said, "When another farmer comes to you and he's in the same shape you're in, you have to help 'em."

And that's a promise I've made good on many, many, many times.

(gentle music continues) I'm just somebody who's been there and done that, that they can call when they're having trouble.

And when they're too scared to make the leap, sometimes they just need a voice from another farmer saying, "Hey, it's gonna be all right.

You just do it."

You don't have to be a soil scientist to get this right.

You just have to understand there's life in the soil and let's do everything we can to promote it.

(gentle music continues) - So now I am going to make a chicken and rice soup using Castor River's long grain rice.

And I'm going to enhance it with miso and ginger and garlic.

If you have a cold or just wanna warm your bones, this soup is going to do it.

And the way that I started it out was last night I poached a few pieces of skin-on, bone-in chicken quarters, like, the hind quarters of the chicken.

And I seasoned the water with just some herbs and salt and pepper.

And then I left the chicken to cool in the water overnight.

And then I shredded it this morning.

And then I'm using the broth that the chicken poached in as the base of the soup.

So I have my chicken here, I'm gonna set that aside.

(upbeat music) And I have my broth kind of simmering over on the stove.

Now I'm gonna just dice up this onion.

Chop up my ginger and garlic.

Now I'm gonna head over to the stove and get the soup going.

(upbeat music continues) So here's my broth, simmering.

You can see all the steam.

Now I'm just gonna add in those beautiful aromatics.

In goes my chicken.

And now a cup and a 1/2 of rice.

And I have three quarts of broth in here to a cup and a half of rice.

As the rice is cooking, and it's gonna cook for about 20 minutes, it's gonna absorb a lot of that broth.

(soup sizzling) Okay, so it's been about 20 minutes or so.

This is about three tablespoons, maybe four, of just regular yellow miso.

You can use really any kind that you want, but it's gonna add just a beautiful depth of flavor to the soup along with a lot of amazing nutrients.

(soup sizzling) And it smells fantastic.

So now I'm just gonna dress this bowl up.

If you don't have any of these garnishes, the soup is going to be delicious on its own, but I am going to add some chopped scallions.

(upbeat music) Some serrano pepper.

I also am going to add a squeeze of lime juice.

Acidity always wakes up other flavors, kind of serve this on the side.

A little bit of cilantro.

I'm gonna add just a tiny bit of chili crisp right on top.

I pair all of my dishes with wines that are made with hybrid and American varietals 'cause a lot of folks just aren't familiar with them.

This is Seyval Blanc, and one of the parent grapes is Sauvignon Blanc.

So it has like a beautiful tropical fruit acidity to it.

(upbeat music continues) I love all of these flavors.

The garlic and the ginger just beautifully matched with the chicken.

And then all of that is heightened with the spice of the chilies.

And of course you have that wonderful mellow miso in there.

Paired with Seyval Blanc, it's delicious.

This will cure what ails you.

And if you're looking for the recipe, you're gonna find everything on our website.

Thank you so much for joining me and I'll see you next time.

Connect with us online at wearetastemakers.com or through social media on these handles.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] "TasteMAKERS" is brought to you with support from Missouri Pork Association and Global Foods Market.