Ever wonder how some of your favorite fruits and vegetables grow? Are mushrooms grown underground? Is each apple unique? Are caufliflowers actually flowers?

If so, you should be watching How Does It Grow? on YouTube!

I discovered this channel when researching garlic (and you should totally watch their garlic video) and instantly became hooked. Hosted by Nicole Controneo Jolly, the program is entertaining, insightful, and takes you deep into the orchards and homes of the farmers who grow the food you eat.


I took a few moments to chat with Jolly about her work and how she crafts her fantastic videos...

What was the impetus to begin a Youtube Channel that examined how fruits and vegetables grow?

I've been a journalist for over a decade and a film producer for five years, so I'm a storyteller with a naturally curious mind. I'm also an avid cook. A couple years ago it dawned on me that, while I know a lot about the preparation of food, I knew very little about food production. (The "great epiphany" happened while I was in the kitchen, actually: I poured a bag of lentils into a bowl to soak, and I thought, hang on, what does a lentil plant even look like?) Instinctively, I looked for videos online that could teach me how my food grows, and I was shocked to discover that no one had tackled this topic in a substantial way. Along with my husband, Mark, who is also a journalist and my filmmaking partner, we saw an opportunity for create something important: a beautifully-produced, broadcast-quality series that could reconnect all of us with our food sources.

 

The "How Does it Grow?" series is part of a big vision: to create the first universally-accessible, online platform for teaching/learning agricultural literacy. Each video examines how a particular crop grows, yes, but it also includes other major agriculture and food system issues -- for instance, in our cauliflower video, we touch on food waste and organic farming techniques. We want to create and curate lesson materials around these themes and make them available on our howgrow.org platform along with the videos. 

The videos themselves are designed to be equal parts entertainment and education, which allows us to both serve and reach beyond traditional educational platforms. So the videos live on social platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, but they're also picked up by major media like Yahoo and The Huffington Post. They're used by teachers in the classroom, by home-schooling parents, and by leading education organizations like Food Corps.

Do you have a background in food or agriculture? (If so, what is it and how did it influence this series?)

As a journalist, I've written about food -- restaurants, culinary destinations, food trends, etc -- for The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic Traveler and others. Back in the earlier days of food blogs, I had one that got some attention, called New York Girl Eats World, and I did a lot of recipe development there. I'd seek out produce that was exotic to me, research its history, test it in the kitchen — so I guess I was always curious about food on a more elemental level. That interested me far more than reviewing restaurants! I consider myself today a student of food — always reading, always researching, always looking to learn more.

How do you decide what piece of produce to follow?

In these early days, a lot of our decisions have to be dictated by budget: what's in season, of course, and how easy (read: affordable) it is to get a crew there to shoot. We're a nonprofit project, and our initial funds were raised through Kickstarter. Now that our audience numbers are thriving (400,000 across all our various platforms/channels), we're looking for sponsorship partners to help us sustain the series. For our latest video about apples, we partnered with Red Tomato, a wonderful northeastern-based produce distributor with an ethical mission. 

When choosing our subjects, we initially look for that one golden fact that really blows our minds. For apples, it was that every seed will produce a different apple from the one it came out of. For cauliflower, it was that farmers have to do a labor-intensive extra step to accommodate consumer preference (and only consumer preference): to keep cauliflower from turning yellow in the sun, they rubber-band the biggest leaves of the plant over each head. Facts like these really hook the audience, because they're actually learning something they didn't know before -- it means we're adding value to their lives in exchange for their time investment.

How does a video's production come to fruition, start to finish?

Once we've identified the crop, we look for a farm that has a good story to tell and one that can show us as many stages of the crop's growth as possible. I put on my reporter's cap, so to speak, and get on the phone with the farmer to pick his/her brain for every last detail of the crop's cultivation. (These phone calls have been known to last a couple hours!) I'll also do my own research, which sometimes turns up discrepancies between what I've read and what I've learned from the farmer, so then I call in further experts. For instance, in preparation for our cranberry video, we interviewed a few different farms before settling on Lee Brothers. The handful of farmers I talked to all had different explanations for what triggers a cranberry to turn red. I settled the issue by talking to a scientist/researcher at Rutgers University's cranberry and blueberry research center. (Unfortunately, after all that research, the fact didn't make it into the final video!) I know you've seen this in your own work -- there's so much misinformation regurgitated around the Internet. It's important to us that our series is rigorously fact-based, especially since these videos are being used in educational environments.

After I have all the information, I distill it down to a four to five-minute script. My husband/partner works with me on editing, and together we come up with a shot list and shoot day schedule. It typically takes one full day to shoot a video -- we get to the farm early, shoot all day, and usually end with the in-the-kitchen, quick cooking tip scene. Then we go through multiple rounds of edits before we present the finished product to the public. It takes many weeks to make a single episode.
Are there any particular fruits and vegetables you want to explore in future, "How Does it Grow?" videos?
 
Oh, this list is very long indeed! We want to cover everything under the sun, so that "How Does it Grow?" really becomes a visual record of modern agriculture. But our top priorities are some of the foods people eat the most, including wheat, corn, rice, sugar, coffee, tea, bananas. We want to take the series global. We think it's important to film in countries that are top producers or which have strong cultural connections to the crop. We want to cover all the nuts, all the spices. You name it, we want to do it.

What are some of the most interesting or bizarre facts you have learned about produce during your filming?

The use of penguin poop in large-scale organic farming is probably up there on my list. "Penguin poop" is certainly one of the funniest things I ever got to say on camera! Lakeside Organic Gardens, where we shot our cauliflower video, is one of the largest importers of Peruvian seabird excrement. Evidently you can't beat it as a natural fertilizer!

The whole process of growing commercial mushrooms was a revelation, because it was nothing I'd ever seen before. Mushrooms really are magical creatures: they double in size within just 24 hours, and they contain 16 billion (yes, billion!) spores. Can you imagine: 12 billion, and you can't even see them because they're microscopic!
You do a lot of interviews with growers who have years, and in some cases, generations of knowledge about farming. How do you find these modern day sages?
 
I am always humbled by the breadth of their knowledge. It's thrilling to give these farmers the spotlight, because there is so much they can teach us. Whether it's about food system issues -- food waste, sustainability, etc -- or simply about being closely tuned to nature. 

Any interesting stories about filming that would live on a bloopers reel?

Oh, there's always something to add to the blooper reel at the end of each shoot! Most of it is silly, like one of our cinematographers tripping in a flooded cranberry bog, and no less than three people lunging toward him -- not necessarily to help him but to save the camera! (Our cinematographer was quite the hero, actually: as he went down he held his camera over his head and kept it from going into the water with him.) Many people don't realize that when you're wading through a cranberry bog, you're actually walking across the cranberry vines (hopefully, gingerly!). So it's really easy to get your foot stuck underneath a vine, or lose your balance. Just walking into the bog can be a dangerous affair: the bogs have an eight-foot-deep moat around their edge, with only a couple of ramps that cross them. When the bogs are flooded there's no way to distinguish where the ramps are (or where the moats begin or end) except by these sticks that the farmers have placed to mark the ramps. Steve, our featured farmer at Lee Brothers, was always very nervous when the crew was getting into or out of the bog. You can see him take me by the hand in the video. Luckily, no one took the eight-foot plunge!