Lola’s Legacy An organic farmer in Georgia renews the land her grandmother worked. Miss Lola
by Scott Meyer T photographs by Leah Overstreet
New Farm
22
credit tk
, a sharecropper in Glenwood, Georgia, in the 1940s, was offered the rare opportunity of buying the land that she had been tending for years. “My mother and her five brothers worked so hard to help raise the money—cleaning house, cooking for folks, doing outside farm work, whatever they could. My grandmother even had the community moonshine thing going on,” says Jennifer Taylor, Lola’s granddaughter. “When the landlord came to see if she had the funds to buy the farm, she did.” Lola’s farm flourished, producing abundant harvests of poultry, vegetables, peaches, pecans, sugarcane, dairy items, and more. “She made and sold soap and canned goods—a lot of what we call ‘value-added’ now,” Taylor says. When Lola’s children and grandchildren moved away from the farm, she sent them baskets of her harvest. And she earned a reputation for sharing food with others in her community. As Lola grew older, she could no longer do the farm work, and the land lay fallow. In 2010, Taylor, along with Ronald Gilmore, her husband, returned to her grandmother’s farm and relaunched it as Lola’s Organic Farm. Taylor studied agronomy at Florida A&M and Iowa State universities, ultimately earning her doctorate degree and a position teaching organic farming at the former, in Tallahassee. She’s now the coordinator of the Florida A&M Statewide Small Farm Program. “I was raising a family and studying farming,” she says. “I envisioned my grandmother’s farm as a place where I could grow healthy food for my family and teach others about organic growing.”
