Grits by Erin Byers Murray

Author:Erin Byers Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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While milling was an obvious place to look for female faces, another that didn’t seem obvious to me at first was women who were growing the corn. In the long, unbroken tradition of Native American cultures, women were the primary seed-savers and preservationists. Women were the agriculturalists and the providers. Women were often the land “owners,” too, the stewards who cared for the crops and the soil, sometimes maintaining the same lands for many generations.

In that vein, I set off in search of female farmers. There was Susana Lein, owner of Salamander Springs Farm near Berea, Kentucky, who was growing permaculture organic foods on ninety-eight acres in the Appalachian forest. She was using no-tillage and biodynamic practices, and her corn was grown with the three-sisters polyculture technique of growing beans, squash, and corn together in the same field. I came across a bag of her grits at the Berea farmers’ market one Saturday morning—freshly milled, they were nearly bursting with corn flavor and seemed to come alive as they mingled with boiling water.

Other dedicated female farmers like Susana kept cropping up in my search, but I also found that there are a few who had been given a special type of platform, one that celebrated the “Southern artisan” spirit that these women seemed to signify. The most notable was Jennifer Nicely, whose family had been farming in Strawberry Plains, Tennessee, about thirty minutes northeast of Knoxville, for four generations. I first read about Jennifer in a magazine article published by the Charleston-based glossy, Garden & Gun. The piece featured the family prominently, using styled, modern-day farm-girl imagery that painted a rosy portrait of a twenty-first-century return-to-your-roots Southern farming family.

The Nicely property sits in a crook of the Holston River; Jennifer’s grandfather James Nicely purchased the eight hundred acres in the early 1940s. Eventually, he had to lease or sell off parcels of the land, but the family still owned and farmed about four hundred acres. When Jennifer and her sisters were young, the farm served as a working dairy. The family had four hundred head of Holstein cattle in the high times—but by the late ’80s, when a surplus of dairy was putting operations their size out of business left and right, the dairy went under. For three decades after the dairy closed, the Nicelys leased out the land, mostly to commercial tomato farmers.

Though Riverplains Farm still officially belonged to their father, Frank Nicely, a Republican who sat on the Tennessee state senate, Jennifer and her two sisters, Anna and Rachel, had come back to the farm to help steward the land in various ways.

Jennifer returned to Riverplains in 2009, after living abroad and later trying her hand as a singer and songwriter in Nashville. Anna, her younger sister, had already returned with her husband, Dino, after they’d learned that he was struggling with health issues. Anna and Jennifer came together, partnered with a family friend, Misty, and started a small business selling farm-raised products—dairy, cattle, eggs. Jennifer had the idea to start growing Hickory Cane corn.

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