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Steven and Heather Walters, members of Edisto Electric Cooperative, face the timeless challenge of running a family farm with a mix of optimism and marketing savvy.
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Steven Walters is among a new breed of young farmers bringing fresh energy and ideas to S.C. agriculture.
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Edisto cantaloupes and Chioggia beets are two of the specialty crops Steven Walters grows to sell to restaurants and South Carolina consumers seeking farm-fresh produce. He uses a hand-pushed planter to seed crops.
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Despite intense summer rainfall that ruined most of his crop, Walters was able to deliver a few boxes of micro-greens in September to chef Stephen Thompson at Charleston's Prohibition restaurant.
Steven Walters looks out at the fields on his family’s farm in Dorchester County, just outside the town of St. George, and sees what’s not yet there.
It’s a humid, buggy morning at the end of July during one of the wettest summers in memory for the South Carolina Lowcountry. In his short career as a farmer, Walters has never had to deal with too much water, and he’s behind on planting several crops because of the 25 inches of rain that has fallen in the past month and a half. With a boyish smile peeking out from his beard, he proudly points out emerging plants that promise to produce Roma II green beans, Crimson Sweet watermelons and Edisto cantaloupes, which have a loyal following.
“People are always talking about Edisto cantaloupes,” Walters says. “They say the flavor is better.”
Walters, 30, is a new breed of young farmer drawn to this challenging way of life not to grow mass quantities of crops for commodity markets but to supply high-quality fruits, vegetables and other agricultural products close to home in a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable way. Creative forces also drive Walters, who used to cook professionally and takes an artisan approach to food that favors growing heirloom and exotic varieties you wouldn’t expect to find at the supermarket.
Consider his selection of beets. “I don’t just grow beets. I grow golden beets, Chioggia beets, white beets, black beets. I grow one that’s called Cylindra—a cylindrical-shaped beet. We try to do a variety, so you don’t just have a round, red beet like everybody else does.” Named for a coastal town in Italy, Chioggia beets are striped like a candy cane. It’s easy for Walters to envision them on plates at top-tier Charleston restaurants, because that’s where much of what he grows winds up.
Supplying selective restaurants in a foodcentric tourist destination has played a key role in Walters’ success so far and has helped give him the confidence to give up his part-time landscaping job in May to focus on farming. Even so, it was a big step for the husband and new father, and Walters will need to hold onto his optimism to get through the challenges ahead.
Learning and growing
Turning the farm into a viable enterprise has been a bumpy path since Walters tried a crop of tomatoes for fun more than five years ago, when he still worked in the restaurant industry. His mother continues to live in the house that sits at the front of the family’s 200 acres and is letting him use the land and equipment, which has helped him avoid the struggles that many would-be farmers face in securing capital. When he started talking about farming as a way of life, she thought he was crazy, as did most of the people he told, but Walters says his mom sees more possibility in it now.
When Walters was growing up, his father and grandfather worked at the Naval Weapons Station full time and farmed on the side. Both of those men have died, so Walters does not have anyone in the family to go to for farming advice now. Rather, he has learned how to grow crops through horticulture classes at Trident Technical College, advice from the Clemson Extension Service, independent research and his own experiences.
He thinks about how he might have saved a crop of blueberries that he lost to stem rot. “I guess if you grew up with family that was into farming, you would know more things like this and how to handle these problems and have somebody you could go to and say, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with my blueberry plant?’ But I have to do it myself, and it’s all trial and error.”
He has also learned that being a successful farmer is about more than growing crops. It’s about selling them, too. Early on, he cultivated a crop of 2,000 watermelons only to go to market in Columbia and find tractor-trailer loads of melons from large farms with already established contacts, so he could only sell half of his haul and just break even. As a small farmer focused on quality, he would have to find other ways to turn a profit.
The new farming family
His wife, Heather, has offered her savvy in the business world to help him make that side of the equation click. While she grew up in a rural area of neighboring Berkeley County, her family didn’t farm, and before she met Walters on a blind date, she wouldn’t have expected to be a farmer’s wife. She was the first in her immediate family to go to college and turned an early love for writing into a successful career that currently includes full-time marketing work for a hospice agency plus additional work as a journalist.
She looks back to the start of their relationship and admits she had reservations about Walters’ dreams and how it would shape their lives together.
“I knew that I was proud of him, and I knew that I respected what he did, but I also knew that farming is not a 9-to-5 job, and I knew that farming is all-encompassing,” she says.
Almost two years into their marriage, her realistic approach balances his romanticism. She also pitches in with communications, business development and branding. With her guidance, Walters Farm has a logo, T-shirts and a website (waltersfarmcsa.com), which a friend helped design. And the arrival of Rhett, the couple’s redheaded baby boy, has inspired them both to dream of a line of natural baby foods they plan to label Ginger Baby.
For the moment, they are busy building the farm’s Consumer Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Through a CSA, consumers purchase a share of the farmer’s crops in advance. This gives the farmer seed money and allows consumers to obtain seasonal food directly from the farm, which distributes produce on a regular basis through the harvest season, often using a network of drop-off sites. The CSA concept has been growing in popularity for the past 25 years and has started to take hold in South Carolina in recent years.
“We researched the market,” Heather Walters says, “and we found out that people were hungry for it.”
At the same time, Walters Farm has benefited from GrowFood Carolina, an emerging Charleston-based food hub that serves as a go-between for local farmers and potential customers, big and small. While Steven Walters previously tried to line up restaurant orders one at a time and still deals with some directly, he consolidates much of that sales work through GrowFood, which is a huge time-saver for him and the restaurants.
“GrowFood was a way to make it work,” he says.
Small farms, big business
State agricultural leaders see the potential for new farmers like Walters to cultivate the increasing demand for fresh, local food while boosting the state’s economy and the health of its people and communities, especially in rural areas.
In December, the South Carolina Department of Agriculture (SCDA) released the comprehensive report “Making Small Farms into Big Business,” which urges expanding the state’s local food infrastructure and supporting collaboration among small farms to increase their overall odds of success. It recommends establishing 15 to 20 “food nodes,” or clusters of small farms that share resources, such as irrigation systems, packing facilities and greenhouses that can extend growing seasons. It also advises the addition of three more food hubs like GrowFood Carolina.
Agribusiness in South Carolina is already a big factor in its economy, the study explains.
Together, the state’s top 20 farm commodities accounted for $2.4 billion in sales revenue in 2011. But most of that revolves around top commodities, such as peaches, tomatoes, tobacco and broiler chickens, all of which are mostly sent out of state. At the same time, South Carolina residents spend an estimated $11 billion on food each year, 90 percent of which is imported. With easier access to fresh produce, education and effective marketing, the report asserts, South Carolina residents and restaurants could be encouraged to purchase more local farm products and keep that money at home. Many consumers are already motivated to buy fresh and local, not only because they believe it can be healthier, safer and better for the environment, but also because it can be tastier and less expensive.
These shifts in food consumption are leading more young men and women to careers as farmers, too, but the newcomers are typically coming to it without the benefit of family background, experience or money to leverage into land, equipment and other start-up costs, according to the SCDA report. In addition to infrastructure, they need training like that provided by the South Carolina New and Beginning Farmers Program, which Clemson University associate professor Dave Lamie started in October 2010.
Lamie’s program covers principles of land stewardship as well as marketing plans and other skills to help participants become successful entrepreneurs.
“There’s a real need for this,” says Lamie, who also strives to connect participants with established mentors. “The average age of farmers in South Carolina is 59 now. Trying to find replacements for current farmers is a big issue.”
Carrying on
Walters knows firsthand that farming requires fortitude. He has watched over his crops in the dark hours of the night to scare off hungry deer. He has endured Lyme disease that he believes he contracted from the bite of a tick he picked up in the fields, and he suffered a gash in his leg in a freak equipment accident. It’s not unusual for him to change his T-shirt three times a day. That’s how sweaty and dirty he gets in the fields. And now he knows that hard work, planning and investment can quickly be washed away through no fault of his own.
The Lowcountry’s severe rains stretched through the summer, and in mid-August, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley surveyed the damage at another Dorchester County farm less than 20 miles away as the state applied for disaster relief funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With the deluge keeping him from the fields, Walters wound up taking extra work as a crop insurance adjuster to help make ends meet. Yet, he does what he can when it’s dry enough, and by mid-September, he delivered two boxes of microgreens to a longtime friend’s restaurant on King Street in historic Charleston. It’s lucky for him and the rest of the state’s farmers that South Carolina’s climate, while sometimes fickle, usually allows for a year-round growing season. With the fall, he reaped a large crop of greens in spite of a frost scare and started making regular deliveries to GrowFood again.
“I don’t even see it as work, I enjoy it so much,” he said while standing in the fields, midsummer. “I just see the end product in my mind and think, ‘If I do this, I’m going to have the best tomatoes in Charleston, and we’re going to make some money.’ I don’t know. You just have to love it.”
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Get More
Walters Farm: waltersfarmcsa.com or facebook.com/WaltersFarmlowcountry
GrowFood Carolina: growfoodcarolina.com or facebook.com/GrowFoodCarolina
South Carolina New and Beginning Farmers Program: facebook.com/SCNBFP
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