At one point in the episode, Powell (voiced by Danny DeVito) berates his staff for suggesting that the company name a new car "the Persephone," after the Greek goddess of reviving crops who was condemned to the underworld after eating pomegranate seeds.
The efforts to revive the crop in Virginia are somewhat ironic, said Yost, who aside from being a delegate is the executive director of the Giles County Historical Society.
In "The Mind of a Chef," at 4, Sean Brock of McCrady's and Husk restaurants in Charleston, S.C., works with Glenn Roberts, the owner and operator of Anson Mills in Columbia, S.C., and David S. Shields, an English professor at the University of South Carolina, to revive lost Southern crops.
Now the county's century-old Valencia orange industry is in trouble, reeling from its worst season in decades but banking on a counterattack underway aimed at reviving a crop that has come to symbolize California's golden age of agriculture.
The storm was coming too late to revive their devastated corn crops, but a good, soaking rain could replenish wells, water their brown pastures and help prime the fields for winter wheat planting.
Clothing company Timberland, for example, is working with the Smallholder Farmers Alliance SFAA) to promote agroforestry, which essentially blends trees with cash crops to revive soils.
In addition, the provincial authorities were able to revive an important cash crop that had been declining as a result of severe pest attacks.
Many farms that sell at the Greenmarkets in New York City work with chefs to develop new crops and to revive old ones.
The threat to Europe's wheat crop revives memories of the drought in the Black Sea region in 2010, which ravaged local crops and prompted Russia to block exports and Ukraine to impose export quotas.
The crop has helped revive the country's agriculture.
