A family who farms together
I have spent my whole life on a farm. I didn’t know anything different. As a boy, most all the memories I have are a reflection of living on a farm. I remember riding in the back of a wagon behind a single row corn picker or pouring out a 5 gallon bucket of corn and then jumping on the back of a 500 lb sow and taking a ride, or chasing lightning bugs, playing “kick the can” with all the neighbor kids, picking wild blackberries by the gallons (one of my favorite past times), walking the 2 mile journey across fields to open the day fishing at the watershed. Of course there were other less pleasant times – like hoeing tobacco on a 95 degree sunny day with no breeze, or hoisting bale after bale of straw in the loft of a 100 degree barn or hauling 5 gallon buckets of water from the spring-fed creek to the hogs and hoping it didn’t freeze before you got there or shelling butter beans til my fingers bled (the worst).
But looking back, it was all worth it. I wouldn’t change a thing. As I got older and got ready to graduate from high school, I remember there was a strong inclination to get off the farm and make something of myself. Farm bankruptcies, drought, and low prices were all casting a dark cloud on farming. So I did what I thought was the sensible thing and went to college with no resistance from anyone. There was surely a better way of making a living. But I quickly learned what was meant by the saying “if it’s in your blood, it’s hard to walk away.” Along about my sophomore year in college, I could no longer resist the calling to go back to the farm.
I started out with the “less labor-intensive” crops of tobacco, straw and sweet corn. I met the love of my life my junior year of college, bought my first farm (my grandparents farm) the very farm we live on today, and started our journey on the farm.
Krista and I married in May of ’93 and our honeymoon was a quick trip to Nashville for the night and back to the farm to hoe tobacco by Monday morning. In 1995, we were blessed to have our first of eight children. While many have speculated that we might not have known what causes having children, others have said it was because didn’t have television, but the real reason was because my genius wife figured out that pregnancy and small children would keep her out of the tobacco field.
Fast forward 25 years later, out little family farm has so many wonderful memories. God has been so good – allowing me to do what I love with the ones I love. Children are truly a blessing and now they are getting to experience what I got to experience as a little boy. That’s who I am – a husband, a father and a farmer.
-Keith and Krista Harris
