By Paul Shea
It’s an early fall morning a decade ago on Andy and Hilda Byrd’s Whippoorwill Hollow Farm near Walnut Grove, an hour east of Atlanta. Vendors and organizers for the annual Field of Greens fundraiser are beginning to arrive.
The 5 Seasons Brewing Co. food truck — a 1975 Mercedes fire engine tricked out to serve beer and food at the festival — pulls up to the farm’s entrance, and the driver asks Andy where he should park.
“Just follow me,” Byrd shouts, and he takes off across a large pasture in his own customized vehicle — a battered, all-wheel drive, thick-tired wheelchair built for the rough terrain of a 74-acre farm. The fire truck gets in gear and takes off after the farmer — a parade that would make you smile.
“He just blasted ahead, as always,” said Suzanne Welander, who worked at Georgia Organics at the time and helped organize the early Field of Greens festivals on the Byrd farm. “He took any preconceived notions you might have and made them disappear. The wheelchair never seemed to slow him down. There was nothing stopping him.”
John Andrew (Andy) Byrd died March 27 at age 62.
Shelley Mitchell, an outpatient case manager at Shepherd Spinal Center in Atlanta, began working with Byrd in 2002, more than 20 years after a diving accident at a lake caused a cervical injury that left Byrd a quadriplegic.
“When you work with a patient at Shepherd, you don’t see the chair, you don’t see the disability. You see the heart of the person,” Mitchell said. “He was compassionate and funny and a deeply moral man. He was very thankful, and committed to helping other people.”
Welander, who now works at Riverview Farm in Ranger, called Byrd and his wife Hilda, who died in 2009, anchors of the organic food movement in Georgia.
“Organic farming was not popular when he started,” Welander said. “He had an indomitable spirit. He has hardships but never let that slow him down. He stood up for what he believed in. He led the way to bring healthy food to people.”
Andy and Hilda were childhood friends in Walnut Grove and married later in life, after Andy was injured in 1980.
Andy was a city councilman in Walnut Grove and ran several businesses over the years before he and Hilda decided to buy the land that would become Whippoorwill Hollow Farm in the late 90s. The farm was certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2002.
In a 2008 article for the Shepherd Center’s magazine, Hilda Byrd said they bought the land to build a house, “but we became organic farmers instead.”
The Byrds began selling their produce to restaurants and helped start Ѵwo farmer’s markets in the Atlanta area — the Morningside Market and the Decatur Market.They also worked for many years in Georgia Organics’ farmer-to-farmer mentoring program.
Celia Barss, who works at Woodland Gardens farm near Athens, came to Georgia in 2003 and met Andy at the Morningside Market.
“He was so welcoming right off the bat when I moved here,” she says now. “The sense of community he tried to build on the farm, he seemed to care about that as much as about his own growing. The farm really kept him going. I was blown away with what he was trying to accomplish.”
For the Byrds, organic farming was the only way to go, Karen Adler said in a 2009 article for Atlanta’s Finest Dining magazine.
“They uncovered fruit trees, cultivated the fields, and enhanced the vitality of the soil,” Adler wrote. “Along the way, they resurrected their connection with heritage plants such as the whippoorwill field pea that Hilda remembers her father growing, and the heritage black peanut that her brother carried forward from an aging farmer.”
Adler, who worked for Georgia Organics and Woodland Gardens and is now at the Organic Farms Research Foundation in California, said that growing high-quality produce wasn’t the most important yield of the farm. Whippoorwill’s primary mission was inspiring the next generation of stewards and farmers to take care of the Earth.
“Our future is our children,” Andy Byrd said in Adler’s article. “They’re the ones with the opportunity to change our environment and policies, and the way we look at farming from now on.”
As leaders in Georgia Organics’ mentoring program, the Byrds provide the invaluable hands-on experience and local knowledge base that new organic and sustainable farmers can’t learn from books, Adler wrote.
In 2010, the Byrds were awarded the Georgia Organics’ Land Stewardship Award.
“They taught the tricks of the trade to many people,” Adler says now. “What inspired [Andy’s] life was his wellspring of desire to be independent and to succeed, but above all, to share whatever he had, and help others. It’s hard to find adequate words — they all seem understated — to express Andy’s incredibly inspiring, encouraging, and nurturing presence.”
Cynthia Head, Andy’s sister, said that after Hilda was diagnosed with cancer, Andy broadened his research on how organic foods could help people with illnesses.
“He wanted information for her and to give to other people — what to eat that might help,” she said. “He wanted to know how it could heal your body.”
These were Andy’s own words in the 2008 Shepherd Center magazine article by John Christensen: “If you look at things as how I can’t do it, it’s not possible. But if it’s, ‘How am I gonna do it?’ you don’t have any barriers there. That’s kind of the way I look at things. If there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Andy continued: “People come to me and say, ‘Andy, you’re such an inspiration’ to a cousin or a friend or someone. And they’re thinking, ‘If he can do it, I know I can do it.’ Up to this day, I still have people tell me that, so I feel that’s what God left me on this earth for.”
Paul Shea has been a member of Georgia Organics since 2004.
You can read more about Andy Byrd in this story from The Walton Tribune.