Rice farmer Rollen Chalmers has been integral to the region’s heritage-grains revival, and now chefs and home cooks are becoming loyal customers.
Rollen Chalmers has been integral to the region’s rice revival, and now chefs and home cooks are becoming loyal customers.HARDEEVILLE, S.C. — In late October, Marion “Rollen” Chalmers stood next to a rice field ringed by pines and palm trees. He pointed out roseate spoonbills as the birds launched from their perches, trails left by alligators’ tails as they crisscrossed a dike, and, with clear satisfaction, to new growth sprouting from Carolina Gold rice stems.
The previously unsung farmer now has chef fans and a growing number of loyal home cooks, and for Chalmers, the state’s most visible Black rice farmer, each pot he fills is a quiet triumph of culture. Chalmers says he believes members of his grandparents’ generation stopped farming rice when they could no longer source seeds. Frances Chalmers suspects that when folks got factory and pulp mill jobs, they no longer had time to farm on the side. They could also afford store-bought rice, a show of rising family fortunes. “To grow your own rice was considered low class, low rent. It was a pejorative,” Roberts says.
Socci explained that Maria was Chalmers’s great-grandmother. In 1871, she married William, who was raised in Bluffton, and the couple had four children: Errol, Sarah, Sabina and William, Chalmers’s grandfather. “It’s unbelievable,” says Chalmers, whose paternal grandfather died young of an injury suffered while clearing a just-purchased plot of farmland. In his family, “no one knew anything about them.
Rice, Bailey says, is the foundation of her cooking. “I grew up on it. I love cooking it; we ate it every day growing up.” Rollen’s Raw Grains is bigger than food, though. In May 2023, when Chalmers’s Carolina Gold rice plants stood just a few inches tall, he posted a video to Instagram with the text “POV: Living out your ancestors wildest dreams.”
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