Lessons from Collard Greens: Celebrating Connections between Food & Place and Protecting the Invisible Helpers Below

You get home from school and see a large pot of leafy greens on the stove. The smell awakens a rumble in your stomach as you go find your mom to ask when dinner will be ready. If you grew up in the Southeast, that pot was likely filled with collard greens. These delicious leafy vegetables are a core component of Southern cuisine filled with rich culture and history. Mallory Choudoir, Ph.D., NC State assistant professor and extension specialist, recently got into the tradition of making a pot of collards from her CSA veggie box every week and, while enjoying a plate, inspiration struck. What if she could combine her love for collards with her research interests as a soil microbiome specialist? Choudoir set out to dig deeper (figuratively and literally) into the crop to learn more about the unique microbes below ground promoting its growth. Through funding from GOHA’s 2025 Local Engagement Seed Grants, Choudoir collaborated with an NC-based nonprofit to investigate the ecological relationship between soil microbial communities and different collard varieties. This project highlights the intrinsic relationship between soil microbes, food, and farming practices and emphasizes the need to practice microbiome stewardship to enhance valuable food systems and support climate change resilience.

Microbiome Stewardship

As a soil ecologist, Choudoir is a big advocate for microbiome health. She’s a co-Investigator on  the Microbiome Stewardship Project, which emphasizes the importance of protecting microbes for the maintenance of human, plant, animal, and environmental health. Choudoir defines microbiome stewardship as a set of insights, responsibilities, and practices designed to maintain microbial diversity and microbiome functioning across microbial habitats. Now you may be wondering, “What even are microbes? And why are they so important?” Choudoir describes microbes as the “microscopic connections holding One Health together.” Microbes are microscopic organisms that help drive belowground nutrient cycling, contribute to  soil carbon formation, and improve the uptake of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other nutrients that are required for plant growth. Microbes also have the ability to support soil structure, contributing to water filtration and access. While some microbes may be harmful, most are not, and through a robust and active microbial community, the invasion of pathogens can be prevented. Through these and other functions, microbes play a vital role in sustaining human and environmental health. However, external factors like land degradation, intensive agriculture, and climate change threaten soil microbes and the important ecosystem functions they support. Practicing microbiome stewardship and conserving Earth’s precious microbes is one way to promote a healthy food system. And what better way to practice microbiome stewardship than to engage with local growers, especially those of a Southern staple – collard greens?

A Resilient Past

The Heirloom Collard Project recognizes this rich history and strives to give collards the recognition and respect they deserve as a staple of American food culture. This project consists of a network of farmers, chefs, seed savers, gardeners, and artists who engage in collard cultivation and storytelling. Choudoir explains, “Through the Heirloom Collard Project people are sharing and growing these diverse collard varieties while learning about the history of the seed savers who cultivated them, and I think that’s really beautiful.” Chris Keeve, seed keeper, geographer, and collaborator of the Heirloom Collard Project, is leading a storytelling and  collard atlas project to share information about the different collard varieties, including their history and seed status. “We don’t have the same communities of practice for microbiome stewardship as we do  for seed stewardship ,” explains Choudoir. “Yet in understanding the connections between microbes and collards, we have the opportunity to rethink our relationships with microbes.”

Collaborating and Gathering Data

At an event at Burkett Farm for another popular Southern crop, okra, Choudoir was introduced to Chris Smith, Director and Founder of the Utopian Seed Project, an organization committed to trialing crops and varieties in the Southeast United States to support diversity in food and farming. Smith is also a core collaborator of the Heirloom Collard Project. Choudoir and Smith realized quickly that they had similar interests and could collaborate. Smith had connections to local collard growers and Choudoir could provide microbiome approaches and insights . “I do think there is this intrinsic value in understanding that there are microbes unique to your soil that help grow our food,” shares Choudoir. 

When asked what made her want to pursue this project, Choudoir explained that the reason was twofold. Firstly, Choudoir saw this as a perfect opportunity to generate environmental microbiome data and get acquainted with vegetable systems. Secondly, Choudoir wanted to connect the network of farmers and growers engaging in seed and heirloom collard stewardship, and share valuable microbial information with them. Small production farmers are uniquely positioned to support microbiome stewardship because they are the pillars of local food systems and also leaders for developing sustainable agricultural practices for climate resiliency. Practicing soil and land stewardship (e.g., crop rotation) provides opportunities for also considering microbes and for developing best practices to protect microbiomes while preserving the diversity of important crops. These efforts, in turn, will contribute to the resilience of local food systems.  

The questions Choudoir set out to answer were: 1) Does cultivation of the two different varieties recruit different communities of microbes? and 2) Does that vary between locations and farming practices? Through partnerships with Chris Smith and Chris Keeve, Moses Smith was selected as the heirloom collard variety and Champion as the standard collard variety. Smith and Keeve grew starters of these two varieties and, together with Choudoir, put together a collard starter growing kit to send to local farmers in the western region of North Carolina. After a few months, Choudoir worked with research assistant Madaris Serrano Perez to distribute to the farmers a survey about their growing practices and a kit to gather samples from the rhizosphere (zone of soil around the roots) from each variety as well as a “bulk” soil sample. Once all the samples were returned, Serrano Perez extracted soil and plant microbial community DNA, prepared sequencing libraries, and generated sequence data to look at the bacterial community composition and structure of the microbiomes of the two collard varieties.

Collaborating and Gathering Data

Preliminary results reveal that taxonomic structure varies between location and samples, and microbial community richness differs across different farms. Importantly, microbial communities were different across all locations. While these findings represent well-established patterns of microbial diversity, Choudoir explains, “This was an important foundational survey to characterize  the microbial dynamics between locations, growers, and collard varieties.” These data form the basis for exploring how different practices of preparing beds, adding different  soil amendments, or rotation practices impacts the microbes that are associated with collards, and how these microbes contribute to the plant’s success.

Through future studies, Choudoir hopes to collect functional data on the microbiomes, with the hypothesis that locally-adapted microbes contribute to ecosystem resilience in the wake of external factors like climate change and environmental change. Through her research, Choudoir aims to exemplify how stewarding microbes and cultivating them with locally-adapted plant varieties allows for the production of more resilient crops, particularly for heirloom varieties. 

Collard greens are a true staple of Southern cuisine, but without the little microbes underground keeping the crop healthy, this delicious meal would not exist. Microbes are the foundation of plant, animal, and human health. Therefore, it is vital that we protect these precious microscopic organisms and develop guiding principles to conserve local soil biodiversity. By highlighting the relationship between microbes, food, and farming, Choudoir’s research supports microbiome stewardship and ultimately promotes a healthier, more sustainable environment for all.