Marion “Rollen” Chalmers grew up in Hardeeville, South Carolina, a fourth-generation rice grower whose grandmother was still growing and milling rice to feed the family into the 1940s. He worked as a millwright and an electrical supplier before his love of the outdoors led him to start Weedmasters in 1996 (water-control installations, wildlife food plots, recreational farming), and that work grew into a passion for perfecting heritage rice and other heritage crops.
Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills and Richard Schulze Jr. gave him the chance to grow Carolina Gold and Charleston Gold at Turnbridge in Hardeeville, the ground where Carolina Gold had been brought back from a seed bank in the late 1980s. He has grown it there since 2010 and is now counted among the most experienced field growers of heirloom rice in the country. He grew Carolina Gold on Daufuskie Island, the first rice there in more than a hundred years, and planted a Carolina Gold field at the University of Georgia’s Wormsloe center in Savannah so others could learn from it. His rice ends up in the kitchens of chefs like Mashama Bailey and BJ Dennis.
In April 2023, Rollen and his wife Frances, his business partner of forty years, opened Rollen’s RAW Grains in the Levy community of Hardeeville, a few miles from where he was raised and ten miles from the nearest grocery store. It carries his rice, rice grits, Sea Island red peas, and other grains alongside fresh produce and niche health foods, with a small rice plot out in the parking lot so customers can see exactly what they’re buying.
