From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Happy Animals. Good Cheese.

Happy Animals. Good Cheese. Itook the back roads leaving Providence Canyon. Just before getting back on the highway, I saw a couple of quail hot-footing it along the road. Appropriate, since I was headed to Thomasville, the next stop on the map and the epicenter of Georgia bird hunting. Fifty or so plantations around Thomasville provide some of the best quail hunting in the United States. Since the end of the Civil War, wealthy industrialists have owned large tracts of land in South Georgia for hunting—and for just getting away from bitter northern winters. Bird hunting has become quite a gentleman’s sport. For a proper hunt, you need horses, dogs, dog handlers, a mule wagon, and, of course, lots of undeveloped land. Hunters walk across a field until they “flush” a covey of quail from the underbrush. Flush really isn’t a descriptive word because a flushed quail leaves the underbrush like Herschel Walker running through the Georgia line of scrimmage. But the small birds are even tougher to take down. Alabama and Florida hunters may disagree with the use of a University of Georgia running back in this analogy, but you get the point. If a hunter is not properly attentive, he has no chance of shooting the rapidly moving, small target. Even if properly attentive, the hunter must be a skilled shot to get one of these little scudders. Over the past fifty years, the Georgia wild quail population has declined substantially because of the loss of habitat and the proliferation of predators . My Uncle Jit, who has hunted quail all over the United States, 350 lamented the decline of birds in Georgia and declared that the bird hunting in Texas may be just as good now. Downtown Thomasville is doing well. The business district is mostly high-end shopping. On Broad Street, the main thoroughfare, occupied and well-maintained buildings line the main street. These buildings are not populated with rent-to-own appliance stores and cheap clothing stores that feast on poor people. The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore ; Hick’s, a clothing store; and the Gift Shop, which sits in a handsome 1885 Victorian building, are just a few of the shops. Name me one other town of less than 20,000 people that has two high-end outfitter stores. Stafford’s and Kevin’s meet the demand for hunting attire. But I wasn’t tracking quail on this hot July afternoon. I was tracking cheese. First the backstory: My wife and I were celebrating our thirtieth wedding anniversary in New York City at the Blue Hill Restaurant, a tony restaurant in Greenwich Village. (I didn’t realize just how fancy it was until a few weeks later when the news reported that President and Mrs. Obama had dined there.) Anyhow, we were in this fancy New York restaurant . I opened the menu and it listed a cheese from Thomasville, Georgia. My wife observed that one usually associates cheese-making with colder climates—not with the South—and I thought about how a South Georgia cheese maker had gotten on the menu of a fancy Greenwich Village restaurant. Then it crossed my mind that the Blue Hill restaurant wasn’t more than a few blocks from Billy Reid’s store; you’ll remember him from Florence, Alabama. If these are strange thoughts for an anniversary dinner, remember we’ve been married a long time. Sweet Grass Dairy is about five miles north of Thomasville on 140 acres that was once a cotton farm. The owners are Jeremy and Jessica Little, a couple I estimated to be in their late twenties. The Littles bought their farm a few years ago from Jessica’s parents, Al and Desiree Wehner. Jessica’s parents, well-known pioneers in sustainable agriculture, started Sweet Grass and two other farms in South Georgia over the past fifteen years. To understand what Jeremy and Jessica do, one first needs to know something about sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture is best described by what it is not: sustainable is not conventional or modern 351 agriculture. No one criticizes modern agriculture directly because it has delivered tremendous gains in productivity and efficiency. Food production worldwide has risen during the past fifty years and the World Bank estimates that between seventy percent and ninety percent of the recent increases in food production are the result of conventional agriculture rather than greater acreage under...