- Hi there, I'm Frank Graff.

Indigenous farming looks to the past to grow the future.

A North Carolina community looks to a cleaned-up river for the future, and a new look at a common insect, a new perspective on science, next on "Sci NC."

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[gentle music] - Hi again, and welcome to "Sci NC."

Organic and sustainable farming practices are growing in popularity because consumers want food grown with fewer chemicals.

Sanine Adives from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media takes us to a Lumbee farm.

- [Sanine] Milard and Connie Locklear are farming on land that's been with their family for a very long time.

- [Millard] Well, this land here, what we're sitting on is ancestor land that I inherited from my father and which he inherited from his, so we're sitting on this, we're the fifth generation living on this land.

- [Sanine] Lumbee people have a long history of farming in Robeson County.

Until the early to mid-1900s, many worked as sharecroppers for white farmers.

For their labor, the Lumbee sharecroppers received a small portion of the crops they produced.

As a result, many Lumbee people turned away from farming, but not the Locklears.

- When daddy was in the hospital and the daughter was talking to him and he told me and him we should be super healthy men since we till our own land on our own land, so we knew everything about our land and that really struck a chord in me that we control ourselves and our health by what we eat.

- [Sanine] Locklears use traditional indigenous farming practices to grow crops on their New Ground Family Farm.

They sell their produce locally to restaurants, grocery stores, and the UNC Pembroke cafeteria.

- We have mustard greens, Easter egg radish, watermelon radish, turnips, mustard, kale, cabbage, collards, broccoli.

That's what we're growing right now on the farm.

- [Sanine] In addition, Locklear is reviving an old collared variety that dates to the pre-Civil War era.

- This variety of collard is called a Lottie collard.

We were told that it was named Lottie because almost everybody's got an Aunt Lottie, so an Aunt Lottie always grew those collards.

- [Sanine] Connie says her farming experience tells her that Lottie collards will adapt better to climate change than other varieties.

Locklear has also adopted indigenous farming practices like companion planting, growing different plants in the same area.

That helps with pest control and adds nutrients to the soil, increasing crop yield.

- And on this particular apple tree, I have planted comfrey.

This is the comfrey.

And I've planted chives.

The comfrey is gonna help add nitrogen to the soil and aerate the soil because it has a huge root system.

And the chives is to deter insects from coming to the tree and going to your fruit.

- [Sanine] Locklear also grows herbs for her medicinal use.

She keeps a fully-stocked medicine cabinet with jars of ground herbs, tinctures, and salves, all of which she prepares herself.

- I grew up with a grandmother who taught us a little bit about herbs, and I've been studying on my own for the last 35 years.

God gave us a brain, he gave us plants to use and I started really digging in and studying.

And today I'm 64 years old on no medication whatsoever.

- [Sanine] One herb that Connie uses is mullein from the snapdragon family.

Ethnopharmacologists say the herb has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties.

- And this is another thing that we can use mullein for, and it's for atopic arthritis pain medicine.

- [Sanine] Locklear shares her knowledge about herbs with community members and students at UNC Pembroke.

The University Agriculture Program partners with New Ground Farms to teach students about sustainable farming practices and indigenous plants.

- Wow, this looks like eyes on the top too.

- [Sanine] UNC Pembroke Junior Unmai Arokiasamy says visiting New Ground Farms has cemented a connection to Lumbee farming.

- The diet that people have in Robeson County, because of what's accessible to us, is not as good as it was whenever we were farming and we were eating straight from the land and we were producing our own meat straight from the land.

Especially for me growing up, I just didn't have the opportunities to know about my culture in the way that I should have been able to and so having partnerships like this just give that specific kind of connection where the younger generation can see what the older generation is doing.

- [Sanine] Tutoring future farmers like Marlena Chieffo helps pass on the knowledge to younger folks.

- If you get in a situation where you can't go to the grocery store and buy stuff, you know, you know how to grow your own food, you'll be okay, and then you can pass that on to your kids and then they pass on to their kids and you just keep it going, so it's generational.

- Take them and leave them.

- [Sanine] For the Locklears, community is everything.

- We're Asian and we need to pass this down to our younger farmers and hopefully they'll come on into the field of farming because there's a lot to be learned.

What I love about this farm is the heritage, the lineage from one generation to the next, and I hope in my lifetime that I see one of my children step up and take on the legacy.

- Residents of Canton are looking to the future as well after the century-old paper mill in the community closed in May of 2023.

Valerie Jackson from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media explains how environmental science may show the way.

- [Valerie] Tucked into the mountains, 20 miles west of Asheville, sits the town of Canton.

There the Pigeon River cuts through the town center, passes by the closed down mill, and then flows more than 70 miles northwest to Tennessee, where it joins the French Broad River on its way to the Mississippi.

- My family was one of the founding families of Haywood County.

I mean, they came here because of the river and the valleys.

The river brought the paper mill and it will be the river that delivers us into our future.

- [Valerie] Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers reframes the mill closure as an opportunity rather than a disaster.

- I don't want our lasting legacy to be one of pity.

I want it to be one of hope, of finding that way.

That's who we've been for 115 years.

We've been Papertown, USA, and in the last decade known as Milltown.

And I think that we still can be a milltown without the mill.

- [Valerie] Canton has been in limbo since the company that owned the mill, Pactiv Evergreen based in Raleigh, announced the closure in March, 2023.

- The people were were devastated, many ringing their hands saying, "What are we going to do?"

This mill is a part of the Canton ethos, as well as the surrounding area, so it was bigger than a mill.

- [Valerie] The mill closure also meant the end of pollutants being dumped into the river.

Town Alderman Ralph Hamlett grew up in Canton.

He says residents got used to the contaminated river and air.

- Growing up, living in close proximity to the mill, coal dust was falling constantly, but you had the pollutants from the coal.

The water quality was awful as soon as it passed through the mill.

I remember chunks of foam from the bleaching process floating on top of the river and then the river was just black.

- [Valerie] With the mill closure, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality says its Divisions of Water Resources and Waste Management are working with EPA on the assessment and removal or cleanup of known contamination issues related to fuel oil and black liquor, which is a byproduct of the paper-making process.

Pactiv Evergreen, owner of the mill, declined to comment on the matter.

Despite impacts on Pigeon River air and water quality, the mill brought money to the town.

- Well, I mean over 115 years where a majority of the lifespan of this mill was in a time period where we did not have environmental laws as we do now.

We did not have conversations.

I mean, I don't think we appreciated what humans were doing to our environment.

[water gurgling] - [Valerie] But now the town has a chance for a fresh start.

- My name is Luke Etchison and I am a river conservation biologist.

- [Valerie] Etchison works for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

He and his team have been tracking fish populations downstream of the mill since before the mill shut down.

- And what we first noticed was just the density of fish that we were able to find.

There were some sites that we only found 15 total fish and we went back, we found hundreds and with many more species so immediately saw that there's just a lot more life around.

- [Valerie] Fish on this section of the Pigeon River include the Tennessee shiner with its bright orange coloring and the river chub, olive green on top with a dark green stripe running along the sides.

[water splashing] To catch and identify fish, Etchison pulses an electric shock of 250 volts that stuns but doesn't hurt the fish.

- This is a juvenile greenfin darter.

This darter isn't present anywhere that has really high pollution rates, so basically, if we see the species, we know that the river's typically in a pretty good place, especially if you see juveniles 'cause that means there's reproduction.

[water sloshing] - [Valerie] More fish means more business for the owner of Asheville Fly Fishing Company, Galen Kipar.

- As a fly fishing guide, one of the things that we look for is good water quality.

You're trying to find fish to give people as many opportunities as possible to catch fish.

Usually when you find trout or cooler water species in a river, then you know you have cleaner water because they can only survive in these margins.

With the paper mill closing, I think that in the long run it will be a positive effect.

With Western North Carolina being a huge tour destination for all sorts of outdoor activities, I think it's just a matter of time before it will thrive.

- [Victoria] In addition to fishing, visitors to Canton can follow a snorkel trail to see fish rather than catch them.

Species include darters, sculpins and smallmouth bass.

- You know, we see this as an opportunity to really bring out the best of North Carolina as we go forward, and especially in environmental realm.

And so there's a lot of grants for help us to understand the environmental side.

We've not been paralyzed by this.

There has been, you know, several just moments of just pure sadness and just, you know, but every time it happens, we find a way to pick ourselves back up.

- This Pigeon River is a special place and Canton is a river town and this'll give it the maximum opportunity for seeing its full potential as a river town.

It's already showing that if you give the river a chance, it'll find its way back.

- Time for a new perspective from Adrian Smith at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

- When I picture a wasp, I think of something like this.

This is the intimidating stare of a bald face hornet, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little nervous filming this one up close and in flight.

This wasp lives in a colony and defends its nest with a venom-injecting stinger, but social wasps like this represent less than 1% of all wasp species.

As I found out filming the rest of the insects in this video, most of them are creatures that live vastly different lives.

Most species of wasps like this Braconidae are solitary parasites.

Most of them qualify as parasitoids because they use their thread-like ovipositor to lay eggs in or on a host, usually another insect.

The eggs hatch and the wasp larvae feed off of and eventually kill their host as they develop into adults.

[gentle music] Here's what that can look like.

This is a tobacco horn worm moth caterpillar feeding on a tomato plant.

Those white things sticking up on its back aren't eggs, they're cocoons.

Wasp larvae that had been living inside and feeding off of the caterpillar burrowed out of its body and spun these silk cocoons.

The wasps spend their pupil stage like this, attached to the caterpillar until they're ready to emerge as adults.

If you watch here, you can see the emerging wasp cut a circular cap off the top of the cocoon and come out headfirst and ready to fly.

[gentle music continues] Here are adults of that species in flight.

They belong to the Braconidae genus Cotesia which has over 70 species, all of which specialize on infecting butterfly and moth caterpillars.

Speaking of caterpillars, these plant-feeding creatures aren't butterflies or moths, they're larval sawflies.

Here are the adults.

Sawflies are the most ancestral group in the ant, bee and wasp order.

In other words, every wasp, bee and ant evolved from a sawfly-like ancestor.

They mostly feed off of and develop on plant tissues.

And you can tell sawflies from wasps because sawflies don't have a narrow constricted waist between their abdomen and thorax.

This sawfly belongs to a group known as the wood wasp.

Here on the left you can see the lack of a constricted waist really well.

These adults deposit their eggs into dying or unhealthy trees.

The larvae bore into the wood where they feed, mature, and if they're lucky, emerge as adults.

One thing in the way of that process is this, a chalcid wasp.

If you look right here, you can see how this one has its ovipositor drilling down into the wood of a recently fallen maple tree.

These wasps specialize in injecting their eggs into the larvae of wood-boring insects and they go after two types, larvae wood wasps like the one you saw right before this, or wood-boring beetle larvae.

These are somewhat uncommon wasps with about 200 species described in their taxonomic family, but the key to finding them is finding a recently felled tree that wood-boring beetles and sawflies have already began to populate with their young.

In all these flight sequences, you may have noticed that while there are distinct front and hind wings, they're coupled together and flapping as a single unit.

That's because of structures here in the leading edge of the hind wing called hamuli.

Hamuli are a series of hooks that attach and hold onto a section of the forewings.

All ants, bees and wasps have these structures, and the ones you're seeing here are on the wings of this, a wasp belonging to the largest family of wasps, the Ichneumonids.

There are an estimated 60 to 100,000 different species of Ichneumonids.

This one in the genus Acotaphis is an ecto-parasitoid of spiders.

On the left, you can see a young ecotaphis larva attached to the abdomen of an orb weaver spider.

And on the right, an older and we larger larva still feeding.

Here's another spectacular Ichneumonid.

This one in the genus Trogis specializes on swallowtail butterflies.

They lay on egg in a young butterfly caterpillar and remain inside until its pupil stage.

Instead of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, one of these in this adult form chews its way out, ready to go off, mate and find another caterpillar to parasitize.

So those wasps in flight are only a tiny representation of what wasps are.

For instance, there are several groups that are completely wingless.

The last clips I wanna show you are of a wingless wasp I filmed over a year ago.

It does something amazing and I'll probably never have the chance to film it again.

This is a tiny wingless parasitoid wasp in the genus Lalaps.

Although I collected this one from the leaf litter in my own backyard, they're rarely encountered, so much so that this specimen is now one of only a handful we have in the state insect collection of North Carolina.

Here's what it can do.

These two sequences were captured at 40,000 frames per second.

What they show is this wasp is using its middle legs to power an explosive jump.

It only takes 2.6 milliseconds for it to get off the ground and it accelerates at about 215 meters per second squared, which is around what a leaf hopper can do.

Parasitoid wasps like this are special because they're the only insects that use their middle legs to produce high powered jumps like these.

So wasps are pretty incredible, right?

I hope your view about what wasps are has changed a little bit.

I know mine has after making this and filming all those species.

Thanks for watching.

- Mushrooms are not a vegetable, they're a fungus.

No seeds, no roots, no light needed to grow.

Rossie Izlar takes us to a mushroom farm.

- If your only experience of mushrooms has been this situation, then that might explain why you think you don't like mushrooms.

Most people can't digest raw mushrooms easily because they're built from chitin, the same compound that lobster shells are made of.

I'm not trying to dump on button mushrooms, but there are thousands of varieties of edible mushrooms out there.

Depending on the type, they might be floral, meaty, crispy, tangy, woodsy, whatever marketing term tickles your fancy.

But to get those unique variety of mushrooms from the woods onto your plate requires three levels of expertise, foraging, cloning and cooking.

Fortunately, these guys have all three.

- I'm Cathy.

- And I'm Ernie.

- [Cathy] And we're mushroom farmers.

[playful music] - But first, a refresher on mushrooms.

They aren't plants, they aren't animals.

They're fungi, which are somewhere in between.

They don't get their energy from the sun like plants, but instead absorb nutrients from other organisms like rotting wood or insects.

Also, the thing we think of as a mushroom is only the fruiting body.

Micaceus surface is mycelium, a web of thread-like filaments called hyphae.

They do all the work of ingesting nutrients and breaking down matter.

The mushroom itself only pops up to spread spores, the fungal version of seeds.

Another side note, technically the largest known organism in the world is actually a mushroom.

It's made up of more than 2,000 acres of genetically identical hyphae and organ.

Okay, back to forging with Ernie and Cathy.

- Being at the foot of Pilot Mountain, the forest that we have on the slopes of the hill on our farm are pretty old so we've got basically old-growth fungus in a way.

- If we could just sit out in the woods and forage all day, I'd be down with that.

- It's like hunting for sea shells on the beach.

- [Ernie] You're just always sure if you go around that next big tree, you just know there's something on the other side of it or maybe just past that creek.

- Disclaimer, one should never put an unknown mushroom in one's mouth.

It's a good way to get sick.

- There's literally nothing on earth that if you have to say, "I wonder what this is," that you ought to put it in your mouth, right?

- Most mushrooms that Ernie and Cathy find in the woods are mycorrhizal, meaning they grow in collaboration with trees.

Trees give them mushrooms sugars.

In exchange, the mushrooms transfer nutrients to the trees.

But tree-loving mushrooms like chanterelles are tough to raise in captivity so forging season may be the only time you see them.

For the rest of the year, mushroom farmers rely on cloning, not foraging, for their livelihood.

[birds chirping] So cloning a mushroom is literally what it sounds like.

In theory, anyone can take a little piece of mushroom, feed it nutrients, and eventually it will grow up to be an identical genetic copy of the parent mushroom, but it's a little more complicated than that because in the process you have to make sure that molds and bacteria don't grow alongside the fungus that you want.

- 'Cause we're gonna be starting with filthy mushrooms that just came out of the woods.

We wanna make sure that we're not gonna be introducing contaminants onto the ager itself.

Eventually it covers the surface of the ager So once it's grown out on the plate, we can basically cut little pieces of ager and use them to inoculate sterilized rye grain.

You can see that the mycelium is growing out, so they're little clones of the exact same thing and they are bombs that are ready to be dispersed into whatever we want the mycelium to grow in.

So it's like if you threw a bunch of feet and hands and arms and legs into a bag and shook it up and they connected together to form an individual.

- Creepy metaphor, but it works.

After cloning and letting the mycelium grow out, Ernie and Cathy add it to bags of sawdust packed with nutrients for the final stage of the process.

With the right amount of humidity and light, the mycelium fruit into a mushroom.

The cool thing about cloning is that if you find a delicious-tasting mushroom, you can cultivate that exact same mushroom and keep it for the future.

- [Ernie] Every wild mushroom you find there's genetic diversity, there are gonna be differences in flavor and nutrient profiles, and you might find something really cool that could be exceptional.

- We farm mushrooms because we like to eat mushrooms.

[pan sizzling] You want chanterelle?

- You're gonna do chanterelles, I wanna do pink oysters.

- Okay, so chanterelles are a firmer mushroom.

They've got that good nutty earthy flavor and a little bit fruity, so when you smell them, they smell a bit of apricots and you get a little bit of that flavor when you eat them.

Cook them at least a few minutes.

They'll release some water and then cook it until most of that water absorbs again.

Give me some butter.

Add butter at the end, or olive oil, it's delicious.

- Pink oysters are a really flashy species of oyster.

Term robbery is not a term I would use, but they're a little bit like that.

They've got a almost a pork-like flavor.

Get 'em just a little bit crispy so that you get a little bit of crunch with 'em and then it burst almost like eating bacon where you get that burst of fat coming out when you bite into it.

They're spectacular.

- [Cathy] Pioppinos are another one of the firmer mushrooms and they've got a good just woodland, nutty, earthy flavor.

- If you need a mushroom for meso soup, pioppinos are the way to go.

- Also, with pasta, especially if it's a very light sauce, and a little goat cheese.

Little goat cheese.

- A few more things, you really can't overcook mushrooms because they're built with those tight webs of hyphae that don't absorb or release water easily so they won't dry out and they won't get mushy.

Also, you may have heard that you should never wash mushrooms, leading you to spend an annoying amount of time painstakingly wiping down individual mushrooms and using a horrifying amount of paper towels.

But with most mushrooms you get from the store, it's fine to dunk them in water.

They have special proteins that make them water-resistant, which is why they don't immediately rot after a rainstorm in the woods.

Also, it's okay if you don't like mushrooms, but you're wrong.

- I think I would probably just be a puffball.

I think I'd be a puffball just waiting for some kid to come stomp and make a lovely cloud to dance in.

- I would be a destroying angel just because- - Terrible answer.

- They're tall and elegant.

- Not that tall though.

You're elegant.

- Is it poisonous?

- They are deadly.

[Ernie laughing] - And that's "Sci NC."

I'm Frank Gruff.

Thanks for watching.

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