Gilliard Farms

“We’re connecting all these pieces that are rooted in the soil, rooted in the planet, rooted in our mindfulness of our communities and families…We’re not going to break or fix the cycle within our generation or within our lifetime. However, it can be the start of something. It is the start of something that is really, I feel, needed in this country.”

– Tia Raiford

That is, the ecosystem and conditions of place – altitude, climate, seasons and microbiome – that inform the unique production qualities within a micro-region and the specific methods and subcultures determining how a crop is farmed, processed or produced. The concept of terroir has roots in French viticulture (wine culture), expressing the unique character of a grape crop based on the environment and farming practices that raised it, intended to transmit the integrity of the final product – a bottle of wine.

Matthew and Tia Raiford, self-dubbed CheFarmers– yes, chefs and farmers– reference terroir in their shared food philosophy, which acknowledges the myriad of relationships and energetic exchanges between land, farmers, chefs, and consumers that facilitate meaningful food experiences. When context, conditions, and connections are centered in food and farming, nourishment extends beyond the taste buds, and even the physical body, fulfilling a deeper longing in our whole being, a spiritual or energetic transmission.

Both leaders in the Slow Food and Regenerative Agriculture movements, Tia and Matthew bring robust experience of a combined 40+ years to the work of food. As executive-level chefs, leadership at Oceana, the US House of Representatives, the 1996 Atlanta and 2008 Beijing Olympics name a few examples of the culinary experiences they’ve directed. Add on to that community nutrition and educational initiatives, food and wellness product development, and cultural preservation as just some of their contributions to the food world. Theirs are stories of excellence and reclamation—following skill, craft, and intuition back to the Southern cultures and knowledge that shaped them in order to carry forth a revitalized vision for blackness in food and farming, and beyond.

The couple stewards and farms the land called Gilliard Farm in coastal Brunswick, GA, within the Gullah Geechee Heritage Corridor. They met as students at the Culinary Institute of America over 25 years ago, only to reconnect in Missouri for an event inspired by the racial reckoning instigated by Mike Brown’s brutal murder. There, the two chefs found themselves collaborating on a project with the Florissant, MO, School District, creating an agro-culinary training program within a racial equity framework. Impassioned discussions brought them closer, and it’s no wonder why. Matthew and Tia are profoundly conscious, independently and together, of the many facets of racism—structural and interpersonal—that impact our nation and how they live the landscapes of food culture, policy, health, and history in America. They reconnected at a time when they’d each been gradually exploring their own healing—from personal and inherited traumas.

Matthew and his sister Althea were the sixth generation to take on the family farm in 2012. Founded in 1874 by their great-great-great grandfather, then recently emancipated, Jupiter Gilliard, the farm is a cornerstone of the Brunswick community. Jupiter’s purchase of the 478 acres was a tremendous feat for a black man in the late 1800s. Then, Jupiter’s vision was an oasis for freed black folks. Fast forward to the present: Brunswick was also the home of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbrey, who was lynched in 2021. Clearly, Jupiter’s visions for black liberation are still being fought for. Matthew insists that the most monumental thing he’s done was garner the courage to return home to a Southern heritage he’d been raised to feel conflicted about. Despite the racist humiliation he suffered as a child in Brunswick, Matthew’s devotion to Gullah Geechee cultural preservation and Jupiter’s hope for future generations are reflected in his multimedia work and debut cookbook, Bress ‘n’ Nyam (“Bless and Eat” in Gullah Geechee), which carry many family artifacts and recipes.

To borrow from Heritage Works, a local organization led by preservationist Helen Ladson, a friend and partner of Gilliard Farm, “the story of the Gullah Geechee culture is so vast that one could not possibly be able to tell nor know all that there is about it.” The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of enslaved Africans who worked on and along the southern coastline and barrier islands in marshlands conducive to rice farming. Known for their unique creole and place-based culture, the Gullah Geechee are among the marginalized American histories and cultures that are being revived by preservationists like Matthew Raiford.

Over the course of her fast-paced career, she gradually attuned to racial disparities in health and wellbeing and the sidelining of Black women in wellness discourse. In her forties, she returned to embodiment and healing practices like yoga, herbalism, and home gardening with a new appreciation for how personal health and collective health were not separate.

A remarkable thing happened two weeks into Matthew and Tia’s marriage: they discovered that Tia’s 3-times-great grandfather Bill McDonald was also born in Glynn County, just eight years after Jupiter Gilliard. While Bill was eventually sold and moved to Alabama, both of their ancestors had roots in Brunswick, perhaps even calling it home. This story of Tia’s past, one of hundreds of thousands of untold stories of African American personal history, affirmed her present. She was surprised by her own adaptability to living in a rural area for the first time and recognized the imprint of her ancestry in her ease on the farm.

Married during the pandemic, the couple now possesses a mutual clarity on the importance of how they uphold and center healing in all they do: for the land they steward, for themselves, for their descendants, and for their relations. “One of the things that I really like about what Matthew and I are doing is that we're... connecting all these pieces that are rooted in the soil, rooted in the planet, rooted in our mindfulness of our communities and families... We’re not going to break or fix the cycle within our generation or within our lifetime. However, it can be the start of something. "It is the start of something that is really, I feel, needed in this country.”

The lens of culinary art equips the Raifords with not just an appreciation but an aptitude for identifying opportunities to enhance food experiences through the value of place. As culinarians with intimate familiarity of the food cycle from seed to plate, Gilliard Farm allows Tia and Matthew to practice a holistic approach to regenerative agriculture in every choice they make – from selecting partners and

collaborators based on common values, to sourcing from local purveyors in their food programming, to cultural preservation of historic foodways, to the language they use to describe what they do. If cooking food was once a labor of love that recognized the alchemy of elements, conditions, and care, they are reclaiming the healing potential of food.

A clear sense of responsibility to their various communities guides them in this work. So, it is only natural that an arrival at Gilliard Farm begin with a tour of the land to honor the stories of six generations of freed Black farmers who worked it and the living history present throughout it. The three-hundred-year-old oak tree, adorned with Spanish moss, in the center of the property and Union School, the first schoolhouse available to black children in the area from 1907 until the end of segregation in 1955, are milestones on the tour. After a decade of events and visitors, the welcome tour now serves as an appropriate grounding in the layers of unique racial, social, and personal history present on the farm and in Brunswick.

Gilliard Farm produces heirloom varieties of rice, sugar cane, rye, legumes like Sea Island red field peas, corn, beans, and squash. Matthew and Althea, who still reference a centuries-old family farmer’s almanac they inherited from their grandparents, place specific importance on growing in what they commonly call the “old ways.” This simply refers to old ways of growing, tried and true pre-industrial practices, and knowledge of soil and sustainable growing that were born of intimate study and practice in the family for generations. Companion planting of the “four aunties,” okra, watermelon, beans, and corn, is one example.

Prioritizing community interdependence is another expression of the old ways in their approach. In addition to maintaining crops that are native to the region, Gilliard Farm produces for like-minded businesses like Simple Man Distillery, who will use Gilliard’s culantro and hibiscus in their Gullah Geechee Gin and host educational and dinner events on site. Tours also feature the experimental garden and medicinal herb gardens, including a body sovereignty garden, Tia’s response to recent legal infringements on women’s body sovereignty. The herbalist of the couple (though Matthew is currently in training), Tia continues the kitchen medicine of her people by working with medicinal plants such as mullein, turmeric, aloe vera, calendula, and goldenrod, some of which are featured in her tea line, Zazou Teas, and SR9’s beauty product line, Lewa Beauty (Lewa is Yoruba for beautiful).

Gilliard Farm is four miles from the Satiller River and 10 minutes from the ocean, part of Georgia’s unique marshland coastline. Leaning into the terroir of this unique bioregion of the Gullah-Geechee, where sea and freshwater meet, the Raifords have been careful to situate the farm in a thriving local ecosystem of cultural and historical preservation and evolution. Currently, twelve olive trees are growing on the farm, paired with beneficial companion plants, eventually to be cold-pressed to produce a hyper-regional olive oil.

With Heritage Works, they are working to create economic development opportunities, including training local docents as griots (oral history keepers, in the African tradition) to tell the rich histories of Brunswick. 100 Miles and On The Fly Outfitters are just a few members of the dynamic community helping to keep Brunswick’s physical and historical landscapes thriving. Whether through local oysters, deer and pheasant hunts, or fly-fishing excursions, together with other local purveyors, they maintain Brunswick’s food system.