Why Nothing Is Too Hard To Handle for Farmers
December 15, 2021 There’s little I enjoy more than talking with a smart, creative, practical person. Just about every person we’ve put on our covers of American Vegetable Grower® magazine can claim that description, which makes my job fun.
Not all of them are formally educated. One of the most knowledgeable people I knew was my grandfather. He earned a football scholarship to Texas A&M University, and six weeks in, his family needed him back on the farm. He never returned to school.
But his bookshelves were always double stacked with history books, biographies, and a ton of Zane Grey novels. He could talk on just about any topic. And his practical intelligence was off the charts.
Not enough credit is given to those who can assess a problem on a farm and plot a realistic solution. A college degree can’t give you that kind of smarts.
I wrote this from Lake Tahoe, where we were hosting growers at our Fruit and Vegetable Grower ConnectSM event.
I listened in on how one Northwest grower is planning to switch up how trucks come onto his property to minimize damage from increasingly sloppy drivers. Another conversation centered around how to manage crews from vastly different cultures, making sure they can live with one another and be productive.
You can walk through a room of these growers and hear such a wealth of good, solid ideas.
Tony L. Slaughter Farms Is a Great Example
On a related note, this month’s cover story focuses on a grower in the Northeast corner of Tennessee. Tony Slaughter is one of those people who thoroughly enjoy the daily jousting of growing and of finding problems and then tackling them.
I don’t know if a grower without Slaughter’s cheerful intelligence could have made the enormous shift in production that he made. When he and Food City grocery stores decided to see if Slaughter could deliver produce directly from his field every other day to the stores’ shelves, his usual production plan had to go out the window.
A new plan needed a grower of Slaughter’s quality to be able to manage the rejiggering to smaller, more frequent plantings.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Food City selected Slaughter as its partner.
It’s been a long slog through this pandemic, but growers like Slaughter are showing us how to not just survive, but how to make a brilliant future, one smart decision at a time.
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