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Cash Crop

Season 9 Episode 906 | 10m 43s

In Southern Virginia, Black farmers like Cecil Shell balance their interests in honoring their tradition of tobacco farming against the onset of solar energy farms exploding across the region. Through Cecil, the film explores one rural county’s shifting economic interests and his own efforts to steward the community, including Black landowners, through changing times.

Aired: 05/12/24
Support for Reel South is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Center for Asian American Media and by SouthArts.
Extras
Juan Mancias fights for access to Boca Chica, an important cultural site for his tribe.
Joyce Dugan recalls her resolution to purchase land that was important to the EBCI.
Cecil Taylor shares his family history of tobacco farming.
For the Whites, supporting Black farmers is a family tradition.
The Rio Grande is plagued by drought, taking away a source of cultural connection.
Indigenous and Mexican ancestors explore the history and disappearance of the Rio Grande.
With eyes toward space, Texas restricts access to an otherworldly beach.
How the Eastern Band of Cherokee reclaimed their land.
A Black farmer in Virginia wrestles with tradition and the changing needs of the economy.
A Black scientist in Arkansas guides farmers through agricultural challenges.
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A Black scientist in Arkansas guides farmers through agricultural challenges.
Indigenous and Mexican ancestors explore the history and disappearance of the Rio Grande.
How the Eastern Band of Cherokee reclaimed their land.
With eyes toward space, Texas restricts access to an otherworldly beach.
Out of time and money, a newspaper editor fights to keep her paper alive in rural Texas.
The only doctor in Clay County Georgia must confront the possibility of losing her clinic.
Families torn apart by Georgetown’s sale of enslaved people reunite six generations later.
Marshallese migrants in Arkansas explore the US nuclear legacy.
A historian revisits the oral history of a 1920s school teacher in the Mississippi Delta.
Members of a rural Virginia town are exposed to contamination from a nearby Army plant.