Relinda Walker: woman on a mission

Relinda Walker: woman on a mission

by LeeAnna Tatum

If you talk about local, organic food in Southeast Georgia, you have to talk about Walker Organic Farms and Relinda Walker. Relinda is a pioneer of organic farming in the region. As a farmer, a Georgia Organics board member, a market organizer and now market manager - Relinda has been and continues to be a passionate proponent of organic agriculture.

A Screven County native, Relinda left rural Georgia as a young woman to attend college and pursue a career, never imagining that farming would be in her future. After finding success, first in teaching and then in the tech industry, Relinda found her thoughts turning toward her Georgia roots and the soil her father had worked throughout his lifetime.

While living in New York, Relinda had beenintroduced to Joan Gussow, author ofThis Organic Life.

Book and author made an impression.

Her newly piqued interest in organic food, the loss of her mother and her father’s failing health all came together to make a compelling case for the move back to the farm. So, shortly after her mother passed away and her father had been diagnosed with a disease similar to Parkinson’s, Relinda made the decision to move home. But she moved back to the farm with more than just her father’s health in mind - she wanted to grow food.

“So, I was like, yep, I need to go home and learnhow to farm and how to grow good food - healthyfood,” Relinda explained.

So, in 2002, in her 50s, with a successful career in the tech industry behind her, Relinda returned to Screven County to learn as much about farming from her father as she could and to bring him some comfort and companionship in the time they had left together.

Her father, Alston Walker, had a lifetime of farming experience to share, but it wasn’t all in line with Relinda’s own plans.

When asked if her father had used organic methods, Relinda responded emphatically, “No, no. And we had many head-buttings over that because in the beginning he was very doubtful. I think many traditional farmers ... chemical farmers take it as a criticism or an insult when you say you want to farm in a different way.”

And it wasn’t just her own father’s skepticism Relinda had to navigate, other area farmers had similar reactions to her unfamiliar ideas. While she may not have won them over entirely to her way of thinking, in the end, she did get a lot of help and support from her community.

“I had a lot of the local farmers who did support me. And while they scratched their heads and made occasionally derogatory remarks, at the same time, they were there for me to loan equipment or advise me. Because there’s a lot to be learned about farming, even from people who are not doing it organically.”

Relinda and her father had eight years together on the farm before he passed.

“My dad farmed all of his life, it’s all he ever did. And loved it, absolutely loved it … When I came back … We really bonded over the farm. It turned out I had a love for it that just sort of blossomed late. And we had so much connection over that - it was a really positive thing.”

Father and daughter learned from each other and they learned new things together through their shared time on the family farm. Though he had his doubts in the beginning, he was proud of his daughter and enjoyed showing off her work on the farm to his friends. He was so excited when she bought her first tractor, that she let him take it for its maiden spin.

“One of the things that he really enjoyed ... was my work with Ag professionals and entomologists and others ... they would come to the farm ... and it just tickled him to death to have those folks sit down at our dinner table and talk to them about farming and talk about what they knew.”

“In the end, he was very proud and I think he did get a lot of satisfaction out of it...He said to me towards the end, ‘I think you got into this at the right time’.”

While Relinda was learning to farm organically, she did a lot of reading, attended conferences and worked closely with Georgia Organics. Part of that work included organizing workshops which

By 2005, Relinda was devoting her time fully to farming and had got the first 20 acres of the farm certified organic. Ultimately she was able to achieve certification for 67 acres, giving her a substantial organic farm that was much bigger than average but still much smaller than the large-scale commercial operations out of California.

This left Walker Organic Farm in an unusual situation that didn’t exactly set it up for financial success. Too large to manage weeding by hand efficiently, labor costs quickly began to add up. At any given time, approximately 20 acres were rotated out of vegetable production for cover crops including grain, but that still left significant acreage to be managed for weeds.

Relinda never found a shortage of customers and always buyers for the food she produced. But with labor costs eating away at the bottom line, financial sustainability was difficult to achieve.

Admittedly, Relinda went into farming being driven by the desire to produce good food and establishing a viable business plan had not been a priority.

“I was driven by food and wanting to grow food and to grow clean food. This was not like, oh this is a business opportunity, it was a mission - no question. And unfortunately, it took me quite a few years before realizing I needed a sounder business as a foundation. So, I dug myself a pretty big hole.”

There are certainly lessons to be taken away from Relinda’s experiences on the farm.

Her advice to anyone starting out is to have a good business plan in place and check frequently to see how the reality is stacking up against the plan. She also stresses the importance of knowing your customers. Who are you growing food for? What are the needs in the marketplace?

But it shouldn’t be all about hard work and strategic planning. She also suggests that you grow what you yourself like to eat! And to make sure that you find the joy in it along the way.

“Enjoy. Make sure that you’re doing it in a way that you’re experiencing the joy of it. For me, that’s a kind of dichotomy. There’s the financial side - and you have to make sure that works - but at the same time, you’ve got to make sure that you feel like you’re achieving your mission and you’re really reaping joy out of the process.”

When it comes to organic farming, Relinda admits one of the biggest challenges is weeds!

“Figuring out an economic model that’s really sustainable is probably ultimately the big challenge. On the ground, it’s weeds. And day to day, it’s managing what needs to be done and having the people to carry that out.”

Having spent most of her career in a predominantly male environment prior to getting into farming, Relinda was already used to being the odd woman out, so to speak.

“I think there were biases,” she said when asked whether or not being a woman in agriculture came with any particular challenges. “But I have always kind of worked outside of the traditional side of things. I was a manufacturing manager in technology companies. So, I guess I was sort of accustomed to people’s first reaction maybe being negative, but I always felt like I could hold my own.”

“And there is a strong component of women in organic farming,” she continued. “Among local farmers, I couldn’t tell if they were more skeptical if I was a woman coming to do this or because I was doing it organically,” she said laughingly.

“Probably, they started out giving me the benefit of the doubt because I was my father’s daughter,” Relinda said of the farmers in her community, “and ultimately were like, ‘she seems like she knows what’s she’s doing.’ I almost can’t overstate the amount of help I got from fellow farmers even if they were skeptical about my methods.”

“There’s just something about the fact that people who are trying to make a living growing things - there’s a commonality there that you have to support each other.”

What Relinda loved most about farming was the relationship with the food and with her customers. She developed particularly strong relationships with area chefs who truly appreciated the superior flavor of the produce she grew.

“Walking through the fields and tasting the food and sharing that with people at the market or with the chefs - people who could really appreciate how fantastic that was,” is how Relinda described the aspect of farming she most enjoyed.

“Sometimes it would be under the shed when we were harvesting and we had this whole table full of just gorgeous food and I’d go around tasting it. The local crew who worked on farms before, but not organic ones, just kept shaking their heads because I would walk and eat ... I would eat everything raw, I would taste it in the field. And they sort of learned to do that eventually. Okra tastes no better than when you first just break it off the stalk and have a bite like that!”

With Walker Organic Farms no longer being actively farmed, a big hole has been left in the marketplace for local, organically grown vegetables. This is one of Relinda’s biggest regrets, coupled with the feeling of having let down her faithful customers.

But Relinda is still working as an enthusiastic proponent of organic farming and local food here in Georgia - through her work with Georgia Organics and as the market manager for the Statesboro Market.

Relinda was instrumental in getting the market going early on as one of the founding vendors, both at the Statesboro Market and Forsyth Market in Savannah.

She is also committed to helping new people find their way to farming because she believes the market is there, the demand for organic produce exists.

“There’s plenty of market out there,” Relinda explained. “What we don’t have enough of - and it’s because of the economics primarily - we don’t have enough people who are willing to do farming. We don’t have a society that values farming and is willing to see that farmers make a decent living.”

She has recently begun collaborating with a few other market administrators to see what they can do to encourage new farmers to join the system.

“We’re interested in trying to get more farmers, get more people growing food on land that’s available. Like my farm for example. And bringing people in, including people from out of the country, who are willing to come and live a farming lifestyle and grow stuff! We need more farmers.”

“I guess that’s the new mission,” she said, “to findand help create and nurture - to cultivate the nextgeneration of farmers.”

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