This is part of a story from the Savannah (GA) Morning News. Appeared today in the metro Atlanta newspaper.
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Pete Waller is a business man by trade but a farmer by heart. The 89- year-old runs an insulation business where he earns most of his living, but his real pride and joy is cultivating the 150-acres of fertile soil that is Ottawa Farms, one of the last remaining farms in Chatham County, GA.
Waller spends his mornings herding cattle, running the lengths of green pastures in his tractor and spitting chewing tobacco into a red Solo nestled in the cupholder of his truck.
He doesn’t need to be working out in the fields, but he does it anyway.
“I like to smell that dirt when you plow it up,” Waller chuckled. “I enjoy cutting that hay and rolling it back.”
He’s wearing a dress shirt and polka-dot suspenders. But for the purposes of farm work, he’s in denim jeans and sneakers.
“It’s in your blood, you can’t get it out.”
But Waller, a third-generation farmer, recognizes the changing agricultural landscape. He watched the 150 acres of land his grandfather first purchased in 1873 grow to around 800. Now he’s back to 150, as plans to lease and develop the remaining acreage into warehouses come to fruition.
“The math is not there to hold onto the land today,” said Waller, speaking of skyrocketing property values pushing out smaller-scale farmers like him. “It’s the writing on the wall.”
Waller, however, is business savvy. He said there’s no plans to sell the land outright as he still owns the parcels.
“You don’t sell the goose that lays the golden egg; we leased the goose,” Waller said with a laugh.
The fight to rezone the land from agricultural to industrial took nearly two years. At the end of that controversial battle in 2021, Waller entered into a contract with the Florida-based McCraney Property Company. Nearly 600 acres of land abutting the green plains of the farm will be razed and turned into warehousing, to the dismay of residents.
“Everybody don’t like change. They want to see a farm,” said Waller, “but they don’t own it … they don’t pay taxes on it.”
Waller stood watch as flocks of black and brown cattle roamed in the tall grass toward the shade of a tree draped in Spanish moss. The rule of thumb is you can’t fall in love with them, he said of the beef cattle.
Once the 10-year warehouse project is complete, the pasture will be gone.
When Waller took over the farm in his teens after his father’s death, the land had been in his family for at least 70 years. He quit high school and went to work in the shipyard as a machinist, hustling during the day and farming at night.
Even then, farm work was no way to earn money. He found himself in the insulation business. Then, by 23-years-old, he wound up overseeing 700 men at a cement company in North Carolina. Three years later, he returned home.
Waller started running his own insulation business in the early ‘60s while he still worked the farm. But the landscape was shifting.
“We saw what was happening,” he said, “after the I-95 went up.”
Pooler, still one of the fastest growing cities in the region, began to balloon.
Anticipating the risk of Bloomingdale being annexed into its neighboring cities, he, along with four other residents, worked to incorporate the town.
“I took the charter to Atlanta,” Waller said as he recalled his first ever plane trip.
In his office, he pointed to a black and white photo of himself, three other men and then-governor Jimmy Carter smiling with the charter in hand. In 1974, Bloomingdale was incorporated.
Development continues to explode in the region, transforming the once-sprawling agricultural town. Manufacturing and logistics in the area boomed as the Port of Savannah expanded, growing into one of the busiest ports in the nation.
Today, industrialization is at the heart of residents’ concerns. For Bloomingdale, a city of about 2,600, existence is always in flux. City officials say they’re trying to balance the financial flush warehousing can bring with the quality of life of residents.
Waller knows farming isn’t what’s sustainable here. In 1957 he bought an acre of land for $57, he said. Now that same acre is worth $150,000. The writing is on the wall for all farmers. Even those more inland as growth spills into nearby counties.
To further supplement his income, Waller opened up the fields to another kind of business – agritourism.
“We were doing this before we realized what it was called,” he said, “We plant about five acres of strawberries every year, three acres of blackberries and five acres of blueberries, all pick-your-own operations.”
The annual strawberry festival is set for this weekend – April 2nd-3rd – and normally attracts up to 10,000 people, said Waller.
Ottawa hosts other attractions as well, such as sunflower picking. For school field trips, he’s installed a giant metal slide, a note he took from the farms up in North Carolina. Nearby is a general store that sells farm-made goods.
A goat that pops its head over a wooden fence is, perhaps, the main attraction. Waller grabs a handful of tobacco and feeds it to him. The goat laps it up, its mouth grinding side to side with sounds of cows mooing in the distance.
“Back then we didn’t have to fence them in,” Waller recalled when his father was alive, “We used to have an open range. Where Home Depot is, we used to run the cows. Where Lowe’s is, we used to run the cows.”
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