Hundreds of collard greens are evenly planted in rows inside a softly-lit greenhouse at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Food, Agriculture and Nutrition Innovation Center in East St. Louis, Illinois.These collards look surprisingly different from each other and from what you would typically find in a grocery store. Some leaves are smooth, others curly. There are even big differences in color, ranging from yellowish to deep green lined by bright purple veins.“But as varied as they are above ground, they’re also doing some really cool things below ground,” said Antonio Brazelton, a plant scientist who studies the roots of collard greens.
A Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, who also works in a lab at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Brazelton is coordinator for research partnerships at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation.
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St. Louis Public RadioAntonio Brazelton, a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University, stands amid hundreds of collard greens he is studying at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Center in East St. Louis, Illinois. He is interested in understanding the roots of heirloom varieties of collard greens, passed down through generations of families in the Southeastern U.S.
The collard greens he studies are heirloom varieties that have been passed down for generations, many named for the people who stewarded the seed.“Nancy Malone Wheat Purple is by far my favorite one,” Brazelton said. “I had never seen purple collards before.”Collard greens are a staple for many households during the holidays, especially for Black families, including Brazelton’s, but the majority of collards sold at grocery stores and even grown in gardens are one of just a few varieties.Brazelton’s work is part of a nationwide effort to change that. Collard enthusiasts across the country are coming together to study, preserve and popularize tastier, hardier varieties of collard greens that could also be better suited for the changing climate.Seed saversThe collard green varieties that Brazelton is growing and studying were well-traveled before ending up in his greenhouse.Many were first collected by Ed Davis, a geographer and scholar of agriculture at Emory & Henry University in Virginia.Two decades ago, Davis and some colleagues drove thousands of miles around the Southeastern U.S. looking for people growing unique collard greens.“We would pull up to a house and say, ‘Excuse me, I think you’ve got some interesting collards there. Those don’t look like they were store-bought seed,’” Davis said. “And usually people would just beam with pride.”
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St. Louis Public RadioThere are 18 varieties of collard greens in Brazelton’s East St. Louis greenhouse, many named for the people who stewarded the seeds over generations. Davis collected seeds from those savers two decades ago.
These proud gardeners are known as seed savers. Over the years, families would grow collards and keep the seeds to pass along to future generations.Across the South, Davis asked the farmers for a spoonful of seed and explained that it was for long-term preservation of the genetic diversity of collards. The seeds ended up in a bank run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, named for the places they came from.“Beyond preserving some of the genetic legacy in terms of seed, it’s also preserving some of the cultural legacy around the names and locations where these were stewarded, which is really cool,” Brazelton said of the naming convention.In the last few years, a group of people have been working on getting these family varieties onto more people’s plates through the Heirloom Collard Project.
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St. Louis Public RadioCollard greens are both extremely nutritious and have a rich cultural heritage for African Americans, said Ira Wallace, known as the godmother of the Heirloom Collard Project.
“You kind of think of seeds as something that comes in packets or pounds in the mail, but these are farmers who, through several generations, and many of them even since the end of slavery, had been carrying these varieties forward. It was amazing,” said Ira Wallace, who is known as the godmother of the Heirloom Collard Project.Collard advocates are lifting up a vegetable that is both extremely nutritious and has a rich historical and cultural significance for African Americans, said Wallace, who is also a worker-owner of the cooperatively owned and managed Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Virginia, which sells the heirloom varieties.“[The Heirloom Collard Project] has a tie to history, to people’s families, to going back South in the summer, for people of my age,” Wallace said. “To take and save all that genetic diversity, because in these changing times, we don’t know what kinds of resilience in our plant families we’re going to need.”In 2020, the project sent seeds across the country, asking farmers and gardeners to try them out and rate their collard crop for various qualities, like yield, taste, appearance and winter hardiness. The variety trial found some heirloom varieties performed better on some traits than more commonly-grown and eaten collards.Brazelton’s work is building on those trials, studying some of the same varieties to try to understand how the roots factor in. And further north, other scientists are investigating different aspects of the plant.Pushing NorthDavis’ trips collecting seeds eventually led him to co-author a book, “Collards; A Southern Tradition From Seed To Table.”“Collards makes a great sort of symbol for the South, because of its cultural richness,” Davis said.His work explored what he calls the “collard belt,” a region that stretches from Virginia through Mississippi. But there are plenty of collard greens outside of those states.“In northern cities, in Midwestern cities, I have seen collards popular, but as a kind of a remnant of Southern heritage,” Davis said. “And for African Americans, we know that would mean their Black heritage. And so it becomes a symbol for some people to celebrate.”When Shaffer Ridgeway and his wife started their Waterloo, Iowa, farm in 2019, collard greens were the first thing they planted.“We grew up in Alabama, we’ve always eaten collard greens,” Ridgeway said. “I don’t know a time in my life when I wasn’t eating collard greens. And so for us, it was about trying to make those available.”
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Provided When Shaffer Ridgeway and his wife started their Waterloo, Iowa, farm, Southern Goods LLC, in 2019, collard greens were the first thing they put in the ground. Ridgeway’s son, Jacoby Ridgeway, helped with the planting.
Their farm is called Southern Goods LLC and specializes in southern produce like collards, purple hull peas, mustard greens and okra. Ridgeway grows an heirloom variety of collard greens called Ole Timey Blue that has deep purple veins, which he finds fascinating.“They’re kind of cool, the novelty of them. People like that,” Ridgeway said. “I have a lot of 80-year-old customers that grew up with some of those in the South, and so they’re very interested to see those around as well.”To grow the collard greens in Iowa, Ridgeway waits until about April to plant. Even with an occasional frost, the greens still thrive on his farm.“I have no problem growing them here, to be honest with you,” Ridgeway said. “They grow really, really well here. And so we’re excited about that.”In Wisconsin, Philip Kauth is working to learn even more about cold-hardiness and collard greens. Kauth, who used to work with Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa and helped study collard varieties with the Heirloom Collard Project, is now executive director of the REAP Food Group in Madison, Wisconsin.The organization got a two-year grant from the state to study collard greens in the upper Midwest.“That’s what farmers up here are looking at,” Kauth said. “They’re really looking at varieties that will thrive in their local environments. And it’ll take several years in order to do that, but that’s the ultimate goal.”As climate change warms Midwestern winters, Kauth said it is making it easier for farmers to grow collards in the colder climate. He said that’s kind of frightening, but it could also lead to more collard greens on farms outside of the South.Scientific traditionIn Brazelton’s East St. Louis greenhouse, after years dreaming up this experiment and preparing for it, he and a team at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee center are ready to collect data.The collard green plants that are ready for study are sporting white labels.“It’s really, really, really rewarding now to see it finally,” Brazelton said. “I have a 11,000-square-foot space full of collard greens that we’re about to actually dig up and actually take root images on.”“I feel like I might be a root scientist now, today,” Brazelton added with a laugh.First, the group pushes down on the leaves to rip them off the stem. Next, they place a wooden circle on top of what’s left of the plant and carefully dig around it, trying not to cut off too many roots.
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St. Louis Public RadioLansdowne UP’s Jamarco McCoy and Robert Hopkins tag collard greens at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Center in East St. Louis, Illinois. After the data collection, the center donated the plants for community food programs.
At a table outside, they hose the dirt off the underside of the plant. Then the bunch of roots heads to a scientific photo booth so Brazelton can take a data-rich image for his research to help answer a host of questions.“What particular traits lend to plants that do better, or plants that are healthier, or plants that are better able to sequester water and nutrients?” he said. “So I think we’re still finding some of this out and we’re figuring it out as we go.”This work is part of a long tradition of African American science and agriculture, according to Ira Wallace, going back to Historically Black Colleges and Universities and famous researchers like George Washington Carver.“I think of this as the modern child of that early work, which got a little bit interrupted with the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the North,” Wallace said. “But it’s amazing, because we’re going to need scientific work to figure our way out of this climate crisis that we seem to be in.”It’s a tradition Brazelton is thinking about, too.Before coming to Washington University, he followed an academic path with many similarities to Carver’s. Brazelton got an undergraduate degree at Tuskegee University, where Carver taught in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and a master’s at Iowa State University where Carver also studied.“I think Carver saw science as an opportunity for service,” Brazelton said. “… and so it makes me feel like maybe I learned something at Tuskegee and have a really good opportunity to carry that banner.”After Brazelton and the team weigh the collards, the leaves’ research role is complete — now they’re headed to people’s dinner tables.The center partners with local food pantries and has an after school program that feeds kids from the East St. Louis School District 189.Brazelton said a few will come home with him, too.This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
