A Passion For The Land

Being successful in farming today is a combination of hard work, technology, and keeping your finger on the pulse of consumer choices. Well, one farmer in Georgia has had a great deal of success by paying attention to all three.

Bill Brim will tell you that he considers farming more than just a career...it's his passion.

He explains, "Agriculture is a great, great life to live. I mean you're doing great things for other people, you're feeding a nation. It gives you a sense of heroism. It makes you feel like you're doing something for the country because you're feeding other people."

Since 1985, Bill and his partner, Ed Walker have run Georgia's Lewis Taylor Farms. It was an operation co-owned by Ed's dad and by Bill's father in-law. Originally the farm grew row crops and tomato transplants.

Today, the farm has grown to more than four thousand acres and the crops have become much more diversified. Bill lists his crops, "…squash, bell peppers, cucumbers, egg plant, tomatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, broccoli, collards, cabbage, kale, turnips, mustard…"

Miscanthus gigantus switch grass to be burned a fuel and 18 million pine tree seedlings to be sold for reforestation. Yeah, that's diversified.

In addition to open fields, you'll find a half million square feet of crops under glass. Produce here makes it way to supermarkets all across the eastern seaboard and the farm sells vegetable transplants to other farming operations in the southeast.

As with many operations, the complexities of modern agriculture demand more from farmers than in the past. Bill says, "We have to be a financier, we have to learn the law, we have to be a mechanic, and we have to do all kinds of things."

Harvesting multiple crops year round, Bill employs hundreds of part time laborers monitored through a federal program that legally provides him with foreign nationals as guest workers. Bill explains, "Which allows us to bring people in from Mexico, or El Salvador, or Honduras, or wherever we want to bring them in from because we just can't get domestic workers here in the United States."

Consumer demands have prompted a greater use of technology. The farm's Hydro-cooling facility allows field crops to be temperature stabilized quickly for faster shipment and a longer shelf life.

And equally important is a growing focus here and elsewhere on food safety issues. Supervisor, Peter Germishuizen says, "We don't want anything to leave here that isn't perfectly safe. Even if it causes one sickness, that's one too many as far as we're concerned."

Peter says the program is two fold and one component involves a tracking system that allows clients and consumers to trace crops back to their source. He explains a tracking system on a sheet of paper, "The "6" refers to Zone 6 from the north farm. "16" refers to zucchini, and we can see they are green zucchini squash." Peter adds, "So, we are now in a position, each box has this code, and if somebody knows that code we can tell exactly which day that was picked from which field and what the problem is."

Additionally, from fields through processing, food handlers are required to wear gloves. Packers and shippers wear hair nets. And the protocol demands regular hand washing. It's an agricultural investment of time and money. Peter goes on, "If you think about nails and even in the crevasses in your fingers, there are a lot of germs, which are carried from one place to another. And we try to get out that information for everyone."

Bill says, "We try to everything we possibly can here to make sure, and it costs us, at my farming operation is probably costs us another 25 to 30 cents a package to do food safety. 25 or 30 cents a package doesn't sound like a lot, unless you're doing three or four million packages a year. Then that means a lot of money."

The farming operation has garnered state and national recognition. For Bill and the others here, it's a confirmation of a plan that's working. Bill says, "We wanted to build this business and to have something to be proud of and say, ‘We started from nothing and this is what we've got.'"