The Hidden Legacy of American Groundnuts
The LSU Groundnut Project with Dr. Bill Blackmon
This is a transcription of our audio interview with Dr. Bill Blackmon, released on August 8, 2022. As a transcription, the language can sometimes be a bit difficult to follow, but this fully captures the authentic voices of the speakers.
Andy:
When the first pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620, they found the indigenous people consuming the small tubers of a viney plant with beautiful red flowers, consuming the small tubers of a viney plant with beautiful red flowers. This plant, which took over the various openings in the forests due to the native stewardship practices, goes by many names, but one that has survived into the modern era is hopniss. The common name you might be familiar with is the American groundnut. Because of its widespread abundance, again because of the indigenous people of modern-day southeastern Massachusetts, groundnut is arguably the only reason European immigrants survived those first winters. Despite this being a foundational part of the landscape's history, no monuments to its significance exist. It's not the focal point of a national holiday, to its significance. It's not the focal point of a national holiday and it remains virtually unknown to most Americans.
The American groundnut represents a common thread in indigenous crops in North America and represents a pivotal point in the evolution of the diets of indigenous people. Like many crops, it had been selectively cultivated from warmer southern climates, and we can tell by the fact it cultivated from warmer southern climates, and we can tell by the fact it cannot naturally breed in northern climates such as, say Massachusetts, where they were harvested by the Pilgrims. We now know that there are varieties of persimmons bred for cooler climates and warm weather. Crops like corn had only recently reached northern parts of the modern United States. At this time, history imagines these stories to be static, but the arrival of the pilgrims acted like a cleaver against the unfolding thread of time.
Let's fast forward. Today we understand that groundnuts are not only flavorful, nitrogen-fixing, and perennial, they are incredibly healthy foods. Remember those clearings I had mentioned in the forests where indigenous people harvested the tubers? Planting nitrogen-fixing food crops on lands that had already been exhausted from annual crops seems like the best way to produce food while restoring the same site. While I've heard of no documentation supporting this theory and it's completely fabricated by my own inclinations, it would make a lot of sense and it wouldn't be the first application of nitrogen fixers that produced crops that we've covered on this podcast, despite this plant offering so many resources.
It wasn't until the 1980s when Louisiana State University developed a groundnut breeding program aimed at improving tuber size with the long-term goal of bringing a new crop to market. The program didn't last long, despite its very early on successes. Today, the remnants of these efforts exist in remote quarters of edible plant nurseries, where the LSU varieties are quickly sold to an increasingly interested public. The LSU story is a tragic one. Dr Bill Blackman oversaw the groundnut research project and moved away from Louisiana with the expectation the project would continue on without him. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
Through an extraordinary set of circumstances, I was able to speak with Dr Blackman to discuss the research and a bit of what he's up to today. Despite the fact that it's been nearly 40 years since his tenure at LSU and the fact he's nearing his 90s, he's still growing groundnuts and remains optimistic about the future of the crop. It was an absolute honor to have the opportunity to speak with him, and I genuinely hope he understands the reverberations his work has had on a new generation of farmers and myself. And with that let's go to the interview. I hope you guys enjoy this one. It's one of the most special conversations I've been lucky enough to have on this entire podcast
The Interview
Andy:
I know you were working on it for a while. Could you tell me a little bit about why you chose the groundnut when you guys started researching it?
Bill:
I had a research associate who just loved wild plants, research associate just loved wild plants and we got that and we just basically gave it a try and thought that it had a lot of possibilities. You know there's a good bit of it being sold now I've sent out a lot of samples to different people and there are some seed companies that are selling it. But we got interested in it because it looked like it had good nutritional value and it was a fun thing to work with. And then down in LSU, it grows everywhere. I mean down in Louisiana it grows all over the place and so we gave it a shot and our first results encouraged us. So we proceeded on from there.
When I left LSU I thought they were going to let Bert continue. Bert, because of his name, continued to work with this plant but they kind of moved him to doing something else else and I brought plants with me and worked with them some up here. But I'm not in a good position to carry on the work but I can't do a lot of replication but we made a lot of progress. Like I said, there's several seed companies at one time that were selling them and they have people that are growing them and they have people that are growing them and they're also working on them in Korea. I sent them some samples.
Andy:
Awesome. It sounds like you thought there was a lot of hope for it to be a viable crop for folks.
Bill:
That yes, I do. I think if I had not left LSU it might be a crop now, oh wow. People are growing it in the garden and stuff. It might be a crop now. Oh wow, people are growing it in the garden and stuff. The thing is is it has a high nutritional value and a pretty good taste to it, but it's a viney plant and it's a little difficult to grow on a large scale. We were working on that and hoping to get some plants that weren't quite so viney.
Andy:
Yeah.
Bill:
But I was sorry that they didn't continue it and that nobody is really right now, as far as I know, trying to improve it Steven Cannon up in the Anna, I think. But he did some work with it but he was not in a good position. One of the problems we had and I'm jumping about a little bit, one of the problems with the plants that Bert and I developed is they were from Louisiana and it's so periodically sensitive so it's hard to do breeding work with those if you get further north.
Andy:
Yeah, that's something I know. I live in New England and they exist around here, but yeah, they don't breed naturally in this area. So you brought up the vininess, which is interesting because I've thought about as I've grown it, you know how would you do this on any meaningful scale? So, if you had been able to work on it for a longer time, was that you were looking to have it put more energy into the roots and the tubers, and was the goal to figure out a way to manage it or to actually try to select for less vininess?
Bill:
Well, we were working with it. When you do breeding, you take what you get and you see if you can adapt that A good crop for somebody that's in a garden and I don't know how hard it would be to mechanically, you know, to grow big crops of it. Now we also did some herbicide work with it, where we were trying to develop of course this was for the breeding more than anything else trying to develop a system where the weeds were not a problem. But the biggest thing that happened was that when I left I thought they were going to let Burt continue it and it didn't work out that way.
Andy:
I know you'd said that you've continued to grow it, not necessarily at the scale or the extensiveness that you were able to when you were researching it with the LSU program. Now, is there anything you've learned from the time that you've kind of been toying with it, seeing it evolve in a different climate? That makes you think differently about how to continue working with this plant?
Bill:
No, but you know I was always able to get good yields. I had plants that would give me six pounds of plants sometimes. Which was pretty, pretty significant, and I was uh. I didn't do as much research as I would have liked to have here along the lines that you're talking about. How's the best way to, you know, grow it and make it easy to grow. I was uh. What I wanted to do is just to keep the stuff going, and I think it went to the small gardeners, but I think anybody that wanted to scale up with it was kind of disappointed, because it's kind of hard to grow.
Andy:
Yeah, it's a beautiful plant and one of the things that I think about personally with the plant is indigenous people had utilized it for a number of years and they did have clearings in the woods where they would grow them. You know, you think about it as a monocrop I'm going to use the term monocrop pretty loosely here and it's an interesting crop that I think has a lot of opportunity and, as someone that's been around it for so long, I'm really interested to know what should people be doing if they're interested in continuing to try to bring it to being a crop that could be a meaningful part of people's diets, in terms of where you think research should continue with it.
Bill:
Well, you got several directions you can go in, and that's not an easy question. Just say, do this or do that, because you say you got one thing you want to do is develop products. Because you say you've got one thing you want to do is develop products. I was encouraging working with people to develop products, because if you get something that's really highly desirable, then it's worth a whole lot more effort. The other thing is to get plants that produce very well in the area you're in and I think they do pretty well for the small garden. If you just want to grow them for yourself in a certain area, now the other thing you can do is you can mulch them and that really takes the weeds down, and you can. You know, just you're asking. You know what we would like to have.
The trouble is we tend to focus so much on the Irish potato. We think, well, we ought to have something like that. The vine kind of changes that option. But the other thing we were looking forward to is it had one time somebody thought it had identified some anticancer compounds in it. We were working on that. So what I was in the position to do was if anybody finds a niche they want to explore. I was trying to divide them with germplasm. They're on it commercially. I don't know. You know big, big bunches of it. I don't know how hard that would be on, whether anybody's improved on that or not.
Andy:
As somebody that grows groundnuts, I've been thinking about like what you know, how does that over a longer term? Like, what is what should folks like myself that are working and researching it what we should be doing? And I think you know it's not, it's never easy and we do tend to fall into these traps of well, it's very similar to like an Irish potato and do we, do we try to grow it to be just like that, and I think that might not be the ideal solution. When you were doing the research at LSU, did they give you any feedback or guidance, or was it more of a free for all?
Bill:
No, we were the ones that were doing all that. We started it, we were just allowed. That was our research part of our research program. We had it in tissue culture. We could regenerate it from there and you then had some people working on products with it, Some people trying to make flours, Some people trying to. You know how you're going to cook it.
We had a lot of help with different people getting involved with it. The university kind of developed the program and within the guidelines they let you go with it. And I'm not planning on leaving LSU. My wife got another job up here and I have another project that I work on and I thought they were going to continue with the program and so I left and came up to the mechanics field and I brought the material with me in case I wanted to hold it, and I've had it perpetuating it for about 20 years.
I made some selections up here too and I've gone out and it grows around a lot of places up here. I've gone out and gotten wild feed and there was one guy over near Charlottesville that was working on it for a while. He found some around the uh, I think it was thomas jefferson's house, but they had nothing to do with jefferson growing and I think it just happened to be that some plants had gotten started there and he got interested in and I thought he was going to work on it, but I hadn't heard from him in a while. And there's a seed grower down in I think it's in North Carolina that distributes it, not seed growers. It's been distributed and somebody's growing it for him. There's several people out there and I hadn't thought about it in a while.
That's the reason I can't give you all these names right now.
Andy:
Sure, sure You've been working with this plant for what? 50 years now, give or take. Do you think there's anything that people you know? It's become kind of a hot topic in my experience the last decade or so around, like the perennial crops, permaculture, those circles.
Is there anything you think people might not know about it that, just because you've been around it for so long, you think is important to know?
Bill:
Well, I think what you need to do. There's some people out there that just kind of are interested in this stuff and I at one time had tried to start what I call the APS Tribune and I was going to use that as an exchange, and I really only did about one issue of that. But the idea of that was to get different people writing and, you know, giving their thoughts and the history of it and all that. And anytime something came up, it was supposed to be there. I mean, the thing is is we've got to learn how to produce it in an efficient manner. We've got to find a use for it that people are really craving and I think there are a lot of people out there.
But the biggest impediment to me is being able to produce it efficiently. You know, grow it efficiently. Well, there's two things you can do is growing the plants from the south, and the north is no problem Breeding them up there is a problem because they don't get to a place where the seed are produced the earlier.
Like the plants around here that I brought and the ones that were, I sometimes had to be very careful. I didn't put a cover over them to get seed set for them because they were my good plants, whereas I can go out in the wild here and collect seed. So what we were trying to do early in the game was what you're actually expressing the desire is okay. How do you really get people interested in it? What's the most important thing? And so we were trying to get a productive plant that people would want to grow, and we made a tremendous amount of progress when you consider what the wild ones look like. We couldn't find any evidence actually, that the Indians they used to plant them in their campsite, but no evidence that they really cultivated them that much. Now they were introduced into Ireland during the potato famine. That didn't really stick. When the disease-resistant potatoes came back, they stopped growing. I don't know how far along that got. If you take the potato out, then people would be more interested in it.
Andy:
And on a larger scale, aside of groundnuts, when you're thinking about like crops that I think, especially things like groundnuts, sunchokes, kind of those perennial crops that indigenous folks were harvesting in some capacity are there any traits that you think, just from your experiments, that people should be paying attention to the most when evaluating a plant's potential for being basically a new crop?
Bill:
I don't feel like at this time I'm in a good position to give you a reading on that. I used to be into all of that, keep up with it and we had a variety of crops. I can't remember just which ones we had, but we thought this one had the most potential at the time. So we focused again just focused on it. If you're kind of somebody that's got a farm that's growing a lot of these different things, first of all you want to be able to make a profit on it, if you're trying to do that for a living. But the other thing is what are people interested in? Now I'm not in the loop too much on that. I've kind of gone in another direction. One of my side projects was challenging things in mainstream science that I don't think could be true, but everybody accepts. Oh, that's awesome. That's what I've been spending. Where my efforts are now.
Andy:
Could you tell us a little bit about that, like maybe one of your specific projects you've been working on?
Bill:
You know they argue about what the nature of time is. It's hard to tell. Well, let me, let's just go back. I'll just fake the special relativity, I'll just drag that out. Okay, it says that the speed of light is a constant to all observers. And that means if somebody is sitting on the other side of the pasture and you're sitting here, you measure the speed of light. It will be a constant, it will be a certain value, but if you run towards him and he runs towards you, the light constant will stay the same. And I don't see how that could be.
But there is evidence, our measurements. Sometimes, you see, I used to think light. Well, let's go back way back, when they used to think that the Earth was the center of the universe. I mean, that went on for a while. And the Catholics? That was part of their religion, almost, because that's what the Bible says. Then they found, made some measurements, and some of the first people that were doing that, they kind of restricted them. They were not allowed to talk too much. But now it's accepted the sun is the center of our solar system. But it was because somebody came up with some measurements that were sensitive. You go through a phase where you analyze them and say is it right or is it not right, then you've got to think of an experiment that you can test that. The experiment I'm proposing and I don't know whether it will work or not is Jupiter has a moon that keeps going around and when the light signals come from that.
On one side it's going towards you. On the other side it's going away from you. One side is going towards you. On the other side it's going away from you, and I think if we can take our measurements carefully enough that we can evaluate it, okay, let's test it. So now, what would be the implications of that in terms of how that would impact the rest of science?
Then we've got to change our foundation for science. That's always been happening. I mean you go back and you start understanding things better. I mean you can do things. A lot of times, I mean a lot of scientists say I don't care whether the theory is right or not. If it works, I'm happy with it. And there are some people that want less. What is reality? You know why? Is there something rather than nothing? What is the basic unit of the something that we have? To me, the more I look at it, the more I think there's got to be a God in that mix. But we're focusing on the science part of it.
Andy:
Bill, you're a man of many different interests.
Bill:
I will say that Talking to you now, and I've been interested in that since I was in graduate school. When I was doing enzyme kinetics, we were talking about energy and then I got going well, what is energy? And then first one thing and then another, and then first one thing and then another, and I've done a lot of stuff. The interesting thing about being with the university and then moving is then you become an outsider, and a lot of times the people that are in the main clique, they don't want to talk to you too much. So it's a fun thing to do, and this is a story from when I was about five years old.
My uncles beloved uncles told me that my grandfather had caught two snakes eating each other and closed them in a box. When he opened the box the next day they were gone. They'd eaten each other up. Well, I couldn't see how that could be so, but it had to be true because my uncles told me it was true, and as a kid I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out, and science is a lot like that. Now, yeah, that's I mean, sometimes you come up with things that they say this is true. You don't see how it could be.
Andy:
Yeah, it's funny how some stories just stick with you, like that Something that you know you probably set off the cuff and you know it stays with you forever and it stays with you forever. I've got to ask, looking back, for folks are there any final thoughts you would like to say regarding the groundnut crop for folks that are into it today and are hopeful for its future?
Bill:
The one thing I'm not into is I can't evaluate how many people were the first that we were going to try to get interested in it with a small gardener. I figured they could handle it. I don't know. You know, if anybody's manipulating that and how that's going on. I think if you're going to sell it, you need to develop a technique for them to produce it and get them interested in it. And if enough people get interested in it, it will become a crop and, like I said, I don't know how widely it's being grown. Now I know that I have sent out thousands of tubers. Apparently the seed companies were dispensing them and now I think they've got some growers that are growing the line. But that doesn't increase, you know. Improve, like the tomatoes. You know they're always growing new tomatoes. The research is not being done on the breeding end. You’re in Massachusetts? You can grow them up there, but that's difficult to do any breeding work.
Andy:
Yeah, yeah, I'm stuck with what I get. Bill, before I let you go first off. Thank you so much. I know you weren't expecting this. It was a total shot in the dark to see if I could get you on the phone. So thank you so much for taking some time to chat with me. I don't think you know how many people are going to be interested in hearing your thoughts on groundnuts, because you know they. Like I said, they've made a huge swell of interest in the last five to 10 years. Everyone asks who's got LSU groundnuts. So to hear from the man who was involved with it himself, they're going to appreciate it.
Bill:
Well, I'm glad you're interested in it. That's what I wanted was for people to get interested in it. So I had a reason. I had brought the stuff with me and I'm kind of being phased out now because I'm just getting. I got too many things going on.
Andy:
Before I let you go, I just want to ask was there anything that you would want to bring up about groundnuts that you think is important? That I didn't ask about that maybe people don't know.
Bill:
I can't think of anything. I just think that you're the kind of person that I want to get interested in it. You were the kind of person I was growing the tubers for, so you started. I mean, I've sent them all over the place.