Rice So Good You Can Taste It

America’s obsession with mass food production is over. Today’s agricultural heroes are farmers like Johnny Hunter II, who is ditching pesticides and fungicides for radical farming practices that work with Mother Nature. Not against her.

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JOHNNY HUNTER’S RICE FIELDS HUM WITH BEES.

Here in the Missouri Bootheel, deer herds, racoons, owls and hawks thrive on the third-generation farmer’s 2,200acres of blended cover crops, popcorn, and long-grain rice.

“In the spring, when the cover crops bloom out, the bees come back,” he says. “The crops are like a homing beacon. They just find us.”