"By mid-June, most of the greens at Bamboo Creek Farm had gone to seed. Left untended, heads of dinosaur kale and heirloom lettuce sent up scraggly, flower-crowned stalks toward the sky, rendering their own leaves too bitter to sell or eat. Near the silty creek that snakes around the southern edge of the farm, a handful of fat, dusky Cherokee Purple tomatoes sagged on the vine or dropped from their bamboo stakes to rot on the ground. No respectable farmer would neglect their own healthy, lush crops in the middle of market season. Especially not one who’s been working with the land since he was an adolescent, as Steven Than Ceu has. But after a series of storms in April, when Snapfinger Creek rose up, washed away the farm’s topsoil, and left a loamy layer of sand in its place, the crops were possibly contaminated and definitely unsellable. The flood also took with it the primary source of household income for Ceu and two of the other four families who farm these 15 acres in Stone Mountain. Ceu had farmed rice and corn in the Chin state of Myanmar (formerly Burma) from the time he was 14, when the country’s government shut down his school. As violence escalated, Ceu fled in 2010 at the age of 36, seeking refuge with his wife and four children in the United States. The family was resettled in Atlanta, where Ceu initially found work at a poultry-processing facility—he calls it “the chicken factory.” The following year, he discovered Global Growers..."