I ARRIVE AT 9 a.m., just as the April sun starts to bear down over the eastern side of Gilliard Farms in Brunswick, Georgia. The owner, Matthew Raiford, waves to me as I park beneath a series of enormous moss-draped oaks, ubiquitous in coastal Georgia. We meet at the chicken coop, where Raiford is feeding the flock bright-yellow turmeric-infused rice, leftovers from a meal he made for his daughter days earlier. He talks sweetly to the chickens as he tosses the feed, just like he talks to me. He’s equally kind to the plants.
I ask about a small bonfire of burning brush in front of the main house. Raiford says he often cooks large paellas over the fire for parties. We spend more than an hour walking around a small portion of the 28-acre property as he tells stories of the previous five generations in his family who lived here. He points out the house where his mother was born and a once-upon-a-time one-room schoolhouse that until 1954 was the only school for 20 miles that Black children could attend. We walk through a patch of wild huckleberry bushes and amble through the muscadine vines.
Raiford pulls bunches of carrots from soft, black dirt in raised beds and then points out the massive iron-and-log sugarcane press gifted to his great-grandparents on their wedding day in 1919. After he explains how he roasts oysters on a panel of fire-heated corrugated metal, we end our tour near the back of the property, where he introduces me to his passel of long‑haired, spotted Ossabaw Island hogs, which he summons with a pitch-perfect “SOOEY!”
Throughout the morning, Raiford talks of the soil as “a living thing” that needs to be cared for and nurtured. He claims he’s more chef than farmer but says he’s finding his way. “I understand food and cooking, and I’m learning about farming.”
As we talk, he offers
