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ORAL HISTORY
Charlotte Swancy
Riverview Farms
Charlotte Swancy is a Georgia native, born and raised in Americus. Her grandparents farmed, and she remembers laughing at the potatoes rolling out of the ground and reveling in her grandmother’s rose garden. She attended the University of Georgia and pursued a degree in chemistry with medical school in mind. But after meeting her husband, Wes (a fellow chemistry major), plans changed. Wes’s father conventionally farmed 3,500 acres of farmland in Ranger, in the northwest part of the state. He was going broke.
In 2000, Charlotte and Wes packed up and moved to Ranger to start farming. They scaled back production and began to cultivate certified organic acreage. Slowly, they reintroduced to the pasture: first cattle, and then with great excitement, Berkshire pigs. Today there are about sixty sows, hundreds of piglets, and hundreds of cows and calves running freely on pasture. Along with vegetable and meat CSAs, Riverview sells to about twenty restaurants in the region as well as various farmers’ markets in and around Atlanta—and, for those who can’t make it to any of those locations, Riverview has its own Farm Mobile.