Hurricane Florence targeted Campbell Coxe’s farm. Days earlier, the 2018 storm had rapidly intensified in the Atlantic Ocean, and now Darlington County, South Carolina, was in its way.
Coxe had to make a quick decision: which of his family’s crops would he save?
“If you only have 24 hours, you choose the most valuable,” Coxe recalls.
He chose Jimmy Red corn, an heirloom known to generations of moonshiners for its nutty, sweet flavor and high oil content. But scientists also know it as one of the few plants that can help society grow food amid the climate crisis, as temperatures warm, fresh water becomes scarce and storms intensify.
In what would normally take a week, Coxe frantically, in daylight and darkness, harvested his 50 hectares of Jimmy Red just before the storm hit, destroying the remaining crops.
He delivered what he saved two hours away in Charleston to his only Jimmy Red customer.
“Not only did I count on it, but High Wire Distilling absolutely counted on it,” Coxe explains. “(Florence) sobered us up and startled us into thinking, ‘Hey, this is too much for one man and we need to spread (Jimmy Red Corn).’”
It wasn’t the first time Jimmy Red had to deal with catastrophe. In September 2008, nearly two decades before Florence hit the Coxe farm, Ted Chewning stood in a store in Colleton County with two ears of the blood-red corn.
“I was fascinated by it,” says Chewning, a farmer and heirloom seed collector. “It was a beautiful corn on the cob.”
They were Jimmy Red’s last two ears.
A local moonshiner – and the last known grower of Jimmy Red corn – had just died, and the family no longer wanted to grow corn for whiskey distilling. They gave the ears to the store owner, who thought Chewning could do something with it.
“I held it all winter, saved one ear and planted the seeds of the second in the spring,” Chewning said.
Years later, scientists realized that Chewning likely saved Jimmy Red from extinction, and with it a genetic code that could help commercial corn growers combat a rapidly changing climate.
The past can determine the future
It’s not just the climate that is changing; the world’s population is growing explosively, reaching 8 billion at the end of last year and expected to peak at more than 10 billion in the 2080s. The world will need to grow more food on half the land with half the resources, says Brian Ward, a research scientist at Clemson University.
“The genes in heirloom corn can help us do that,” he said.
Jimmy Red declined because it is not the type of corn that is edible straight off the cob. It must be dehydrated to retain its flavor and high oil content – ideal for making moonshine, but not valuable for large commercial agriculture.
Its value lies in genetics.
Heritage grains, fruits and vegetables have developed properties that make them less vulnerable to climate change, Ward said, because they have been grown under vastly different conditions for hundreds of years.
These traits can be used to breed cultivars that can withstand harsher growing conditions.
“An heirloom may contain a gene that can produce well under extreme conditions,” Ward explains. “We have a geneticist who is growing an heirloom snap bean. It may not be the prettiest pod or have the highest yield, but it can produce in the heat and eventually we will breed it into a higher yielding variety.”
Ward has been growing Jimmy Red corn for just over a decade to better understand its viability and biosecurity, or how well it resists disease. It can be grown with less water, Ward said, and requires less fertilization. The root system is incredibly stable, making the plant less prone to toppling over during storms. According to Ward, the plant originated after enduring strong coastal storms for years while growing on James Island, South Carolina.
“If the only plants that survive and bear fruit are the plants that (farmers) saved seed from, generations later you will have a plant with qualities that can withstand high winds,” Ward says.
Now that they know the genetic trait of Jimmy Red corn, scientists can now cross-breed that genetic code into other commercially grown corn varieties that have been sensitive to high winds.
Ward also pointed to his research on another heirloom grain, Carolina Gold Rice, as an example of using genetic breeding to combat high-salinity water in South Carolina and the Mississippi River Delta, where most of the rice in the USA is grown and where there is extreme drought. has pushed salt water upstream from the Gulf of Mexico.
“Japanese scientists have found a number of genetic markers that encode salt tolerance,” says Ward. “Carolina Gold has some salt tolerance. But we are now breeding him to keep the characteristics of Carolina Gold, but with a higher tolerance. We are building on their research.”
‘The Old Ways’
In September this year, Coxe harvested his 50 hectares of Jimmy Red at his normal pace.
He is no longer the sole grower of High Wire Distilling, which has turned about 1.1 million pounds of red corn into a whiskey that co-founders Ann Marshall and Scott Blackwell call extremely complex, with those familiar nutty, sweet flavors.
“I call it reverse pioneering,” Marshall said. “This grain is tens of thousands of years old. It has survived a lot and done so without human input. We are returning to the old ways and there is much to learn.”
High Wire has been sending kernels to farms in the region to reduce the chance that one natural disaster, such as a hurricane, will wipe out Jimmy Red entirely.
Ward believes that having a company like High Wire driving demand for heirlooms will allow scientists to study the past for answers to an uncertain climate future.
“If we lose that genetic material, we can’t replace it,” he said.
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