ajc.com 2008 Holiday Guide

Ranger — Celebrating the harvest comes once a year for many Americans. At the Swancy family farm, giving thanks for the bounty of the earth comes with every sunrise.

After three decades on the land in northwest Georgia, years of promise and of lean times that threatened the farm's existence, the Swancys see a way to preserve Riverview Farms for children just starting to toddle around its pastures.

Joey Ivansco/AJC (ENLARGE)

Charlotte Swancy finishes with the cornbread batter made from fresh corn.

Joey Ivansco/AJC (ENLARGE)

Charlotte Swancy picks collards at Riverview Farms in Ranger. Charlotte handles the farm's marketing and drops off the boxes for its community-supported agriculture program.

RELATED LINKS: • Photos: Check out the family farm

As three generations of Swancys gather around the Thanksgiving table, Carter Swancy will give thanks for the latest addition to the family, granddaughter Iris Swancy, born in June. He'll say how blessed the family feels to have harvested crops despite extreme drought.

Then, like families across America, the Swancys will feast on foods steeped in tradition. Sweet potato pie. Collard greens and pink-eye peas. Corn bread dressing.

The most traditional Thanksgiving foods of all, turkey and cranberry sauce, aren't a certainty. If a friend passes along a turkey from his farm, a big, bronzed bird will join the buffet. It won't overshadow the star attraction, a pork roast that's a holiday mainstay.

Even on a fall day made for harvesting, just the rumor of pork roast and dressing for lunch pulls Carter and his son Andrew away from their work.

"I grew up not eating turkey," Carter says. "Nobody liked it anyway."

The pork roast, alas, is just a rumor, and the pig that will provide it is still on the hoof. They'll have to wait until the holiday for the family favorite.

Food doesn't get any more local than what the Swancys will eat at their Thanksgiving celebration. Corn grown and milled on the Gordon County farm turns into thick wedges of corn bread and corn bread dressing. The collards, still young and sweet, grow a few hundred feet from the homes of Carter and Beverly Swancy and their son and daughter-in-law, Wes and Charlotte. The pork roast comes from one of Riverview's celebrated Berkshire pigs, a heritage breed prized for its tender, finely marbled meat. Field peas, corn and tomato gravy, all from produce preserved from the summer, will make their way around the table.

"We are very fortunate to be able to eat like that because of the way we live," Charlotte says.

The allure of those foods extends far beyond the Swancys' kitchens. It is helping save the farm, with its gently sloping fields along a bend of the Coosawattee River, for the next generation.

The 400-acre organic farm sells most of what it produces directly to restaurants and consumers, eliminating the middlemen that leave the average farmer with just 20 percent of a crop's retail value, half of what a farmer would have received in 1975, when Carter Swancy purchased the farm.

Interest in eating food grown locally and sustainably has brought a steady flow of customers to the Riverview Farms booth at the Morningside Farmers' Market and to its community-supported agriculture program, which delivers a box of vegetables weekly to subscribers. Restaurants including 5 Seasons Brewing and Food 101 feature the pork on their menus. Since the farm converted from a conventional grain and livestock operation to an organic, direct-market producer, the economics of staying on the land have shifted in the Swancys' favor.

For the family's harvest celebration, they'll eat foods that regularly grace the table. The foods so associated with a Southern Thanksgiving, like sweet potatoes, winter squashes and corn bread, come from crops harvested in the fall. The Swancys will eat them throughout the winter, when most Americans have moved on to other holiday favorites that don't depend on the local growing season, like asparagus imported from Peru for Christmas dinner.

They can get a little tired of eating so much of the same things. Wes admits that regular servings of winter squash can be tiresome, but with 1,000 more pounds waiting in the shed, there's not much choice. Nobody ever seems to get enough bacon.

On a crisp fall day a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Wes and Charlotte take a rare break to prepare lunch in their sunlit kitchen. They moved a few months ago into the ranch house just across the road from the white frame house where Wes' grandparents once lived and where their 15-month-old son, Graham, was born.

Charlotte mixes the corn bread using cornmeal milled by Wes' twin brother, Brad, who started an organic gristmill on the farm last year. She takes care to push the cornmeal into the buttermilk rather than stirring it, to avoid dry corn bread.

Wes cuts up onions and slices pancetta, a cured, Italian-style bacon made from Riverview pork bellies. They hope to sell the artisan food one day. For now, as the smell of frying bacon fills the air, they're simply enjoying it, using it to season greens and butternut squash soup. Wes can't resist sneaking bites of the salty, thick slices.

Graham flips through his mother's work tools: a cellphone and a Rolodex that holds customers' phone numbers. Charlotte organizes the farm's marketing, helps harvest some crops, holds down the booth on Saturdays at the Morningside market and drops off subscribers' produce boxes on Wednesdays at a half-dozen locations around metro Atlanta. Graham is learning about the other work involved in running a farm, stopping on walks to sit on every tractor and stare at machinery, like the bright yellow irrigation gun that kept vegetables growing during the summer.

Carter, 59, works nearby, preparing to harvest corn for livestock feed. Much of the acreage grows grain or pasture grass for pigs and cattle. The Swancys are slowly increasing the number of pigs they raise, aiming to bring 10 hogs to market each week. A year ago, they managed just two.

By raising livestock rather than devoting all of the farm to a more labor-intensive vegetable crop, the Swancys are able to manage Riverview almost entirely with family members.

The lineup includes Andrew, at 25 the youngest of Carter and Beverly's sons, who looks after some of the cows on his farm and also works as a firefighter. Like Andrew, Brad holds down a second job, tuning pianos in addition to his milling work on Riverview. Wes, 35, works on the farm full time, handling daily operations and the pigs, vegetables and cattle. He and Charlotte, also 35, moved to Riverview eight years ago. Beverly, a middle school teacher, provides a stable income that's not dependent on the uncertainties of agriculture.

"If you were going to define family farm, I guess this is it," Carter says.

He's pleased to have all three sons involved and hopes one day the four grandchildren will find a place there, too. For now, he's happy that the little ones, none older than 5, are getting an education on the farm beyond what they'll learn in school.

Tradition only goes so far, though. When Carter and Wes talk about past Thanksgivings, they speak of harvesting before they mention food. Sometimes, Thanksgiving is just another workday, hurrying to finish getting the crops in before winter weather. The feast may take place on a day when the fields are too wet to work. Carter remembers eating some Thanksgiving meals in the cab of the combine as he processed corn.

Yet it's hard to resist the call of pork roast swaddled in corn bread dressing. The pork loin that crowns the Thanksgiving meal started with Carter's mother, Mattie Swancy. She made her corn bread with lard and moistened the dressing with pork stock. Fall was butchering time, and the family always had hogs.

Charlotte's family celebrated Thanksgiving with the traditional turkey centerpiece, but it wasn't the main attraction, either. Dressing and garden-fresh vegetables stole the spotlight at the dinners her grandmothers prepared in Americus. When she married into the Swancy family, she learned to prepare the pork centerpiece with a few of her family's traditions thrown in.

Charlotte and Wes get up early on the morning of the feast to first bake the corn bread in two large pans, then put together the rest of the dish. She moistens the dressing with chicken stock, made with a farm chicken grown too old for laying eggs.

Wes jokes that he's the prep cook, a job that puts him within easy reach of the bacon. They'll make tomato gravy and apple pie, too.

Whether cooking for the Swancy dinner or at her grandmother's house in Americus, Charlotte serves the Southern dishes that dovetail with what's nourished in the soil around her, like her mother's sweet potato souffle and her grandmother's corn bread and dressing. She's put them together over the years, adding up memories and poring over Southern cookbooks to re-create favorites.

"My grandmothers had everything in their head," she says. "I kind of had to wing it."

On this Thanksgiving, Wes and Charlotte will be in Americus, celebrating at the home of her grandmother, Mary Catherine Thomason. They'll get up early to cook breakfast and then prepare Riverview Farms pork and dressing.

A few days earlier, the Swancy clan will gather at Riverview. Wes and Charlotte have renovated part of the kitchen in their new home, with an island that's large enough for them to work side by side.

It will be the first year they the host the dinner, their first in a home large enough to hold parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews. Beverly will prepare vegetables and sweet potato pie. Everybody will bring a favorite dish to share.

The family will gather around the gleaming cherry table that Wes made. Carter will bless the feast. If it's a typical Thanksgiving gathering, the constant work that comes with farming won't leave much time for lingering or reflecting after the meal. There's always something to do.

"We probably don't say enough of what we're thankful for," Charlotte says. "I'm thankful to be here, as hard as it is sometimes."

"The opportunity to farm good land," Wes chimes in.

"And the opportunity to do it with family," Charlotte adds. "Graham. And having fresh food all the time. You forget, when you go other places, how spoiled you are."

If the Swancys have found the right formula for preserving the family farm, they'll never be more than a short walk away from remembering their blessings.