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October 27-28, 2023
Southern Foodways Symposium ⟶
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October 27-28, 2023
Southern Foodways Symposium ⟶

Oral Histories

The SFA oral history program documents life stories from the American South. Collecting these stories, we honor the people whose labor defines the region. If you would like to contribute to SFA’s oral history collections, please send your ideas for oral history along with your CV or Resume and a portfolio of prior oral history work to info@southernfoodways.org.

< Back to Oral History project: COVID-19 Project

ORAL HISTORY

Garver Akers

Rodale Institute Southeast Organic Center

Born in 1974 in Cleveland, Ohio, Garver Akers was raised in Ohio and studied at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems. He is a certified ecological horticulturist, agroecologist, farmer, and educator. Garver specializes in multi-scale, diverse variety, sustainable crop production.

Akers is a Farm Educator and Consultant at Southeast Center with Rodale Institute in Georgia. He farmed organically in states across the Southeast and recently took on the leadership of the Rodale Institute Southeast Organic Center in Georgia. He relocated for the job with his wife and children in 2020. Akers explains in this interview how plans for opening the new center have changed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Date of interview:
2020-06-02

Interviewer:
Diana Dombrowski

Photographer:

Download Transcript

“

"There were different dynamics when COVID started, because they had their own rules for how their farm crew—it’s more or less a property maintenance crew—would interact with each other, how they would interact with us. Then I had to think about anybody coming externally on to the property, as well as going to other farms or accomplishing other needs. I was willing—with my past, I know a lot about immunity and how to safeguard myself. I was willing to come and work at the farm as long as I had appropriate distance from folks. But it did get a little bit tricky, especially when I’d have to glove-up and mask-up and make Home Depot runs or whatever it took for the necessities of the farm. So it’s definitely affected our time, our timing going in, although I wonder if it is kind of a blessing in disguise, because essentially, for us, it’s a new startup farm, and it’s a startup farm—awkward point of the year to be starting up in Georgia. So it’s kind of a buffer to make sure that we’re walking instead of running into this, which I think is really good, because we are a big organization with one guy here, everybody out of state so far." - Garver Akers

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