NC Farm Family Faces: A Desire to Farm as a Family

Meet the Gray Family! Brandon is a CPA and his wife, Jessica is a part-time nurse and full-time mom to their 5-year-old twin girls, Delaney and Emalyn. They are also hog farmers. They weren’t born hog farmers, and they didn’t inherit the business. They made the decision to buy a pre-existing hog farm in Wayne County a few years ago.“We purchased this farm as a family endeavor, and it’s been really nice. The community has been really receptive and the neighbors have been great. It’s been a really good thing,” said Brandon.In addition to pigs, the family also grows collards and sweet potatoes on their 125 acres.There is no doubt this is a family endeavor. Jessica keeps most of the books, and Brandon, with help from his dad, Rayburn Brown, cares for all the pigs and crops.Even at 5 years old, Delaney and Emalyn help out too. Special trips have to be made to visit the pigs for the girls.

Brandon came from a farming background. His grandfather was one of seven, and they were all farmers. Many of their children (and grandchildren) also became farmers. Jessica, on the other hand, is not from a farming family. She married into it, but she loves it!

“The pigs are my favorite part. I like watching them grow and get big. The girls enjoy the pigs, and whatever they enjoy I try to follow behind and support them,” said Jessica.While the Gray family loves their farm, it isn’t always easy. They live about 20 minutes away from the actual farm. This doesn’t mean they don’t have to visit as often. Rather it means a lot of extra miles on their vehicles.“We check the pigs at least twice a day, every day. We eat dinner as a family, then go to check on the pigs once more to make sure everything is alright,” said Brandon.Of course, the normal uncertainties that accompany farming are also hard. One never knows what the weather will do or when equipment must be fixed. There are also finances. For the Grays, the decision to purchase the farm was both easy and hard. The desire was strong, but the burden of finances was also strong. Ultimately, they decided to go for it.One aspect that does help the Grays is their relationship with their integrator, Maxwell Foods. The integrator provides a support system for the family to help them with things like providing the best healthcare for the pigs. Without the integrator, the farm would not have the resources they do.Although owning a farm can be stressful at times, the Grays enjoy being part of something bigger. They may not have the largest farm, but it does feed people, and the Grays love being a part of that.A full-time CPA, part-time nurse, full-time parents, and full-time farmers (because farming is never part-time)…life is busy for the Grays, but it is fueled by a  desire to farm as a family.Photos by: Marisa See 

How to Help and Advocate for Hog Farmers

Many of you are aware of the lawsuits affecting our hog farm families. The support from the community has been overwhelming. Often, the question, “what can I do” is posed. Here are a few suggestions on how you can make a difference:

1. Stay informed—stay up to date on the facts and current developments. Perhaps the most important thing to stay informed about is how a hog farm operates. Knowing how your farmers run their farms allows you to pick out any misinformation you may hear.
2. Share your story—one of the most powerful ways to help our farmers is to share your own experience with them. Is a farmer your child’s coach? Maybe you sit next to a farmer at church. Or perhaps you are a local business owner that knows the positive impacts these farms have on you and other business owners.
3. Share their story—share facts, data and stories from reputable sources that tells the farmer’s story.
4. Be polite—emotions are high. Folks are scared and even angry. We get it! However, it is so important to maintain the higher ground. We cannot claim to be good neighbors if we are telling people they are not welcome or should move. We are better than that. Let’s stick to the facts and share the positive stories. Not everyone will agree with you, and that’s okay. Learn to walk away from those situations.
5. Pray—thoughts, support, and prayers go a long way in situations like these. Knowing that farmers are not alone gives those involved hope.

These steps may not seem like a lot, but they make a difference. We have gotten to this point because of a lack of dialogue. Let’s fix that. Take a moment and reflect why you support farm families. Now, share that. Most of all, stay respectful. Let’s be encouraging, not inflammatory when we stand for hog farmers.

Nobody wins

In a recent article by Lisa Sorg @ NC Policy Watch, she says, “After a long day working with patients, all Joyce Messick (plaintiff) wants is to lay her burdens down at her doorsteps, sit on her porch and drink a Sun Drop.”  But she can’t, Sorg added, because she lives near a hog farm.When you return home after working all day it must be nice to be able to leave your burdens at the door, but that’s something that farmers across North Carolina are seldom able to do.  You see, when a farmer walks through the door of his home after working a long day, the crops are still in the field, the animals are still in the barns, and the burdens of raising the food we eat are still on his shoulders.Of course, you have to take Lisa Sorg’s article with a grain of salt.  She’s not a reporter for a newspaper or TV station – she works for an arm of an activist group which has longstanding ties to Mona Lisa Wallace, who’s one of the lawyers suing Smithfield Foods.  And, in her article, Ms. Sorg repeated the same litany of the attacks we’ve heard lawyers make in Raleigh courtrooms over the past few months – attacks which have farmers wondering how people have become so disconnected from the realities of farming.  For instance, Ms. Sorg wrote that “Theoretically, a person could run a hog farm without ever stepping inside a barn.”  That kind of nonsense leaves farmers shaking their heads.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The standard in pig husbandry is simple: Keep an eye on every pen – every pig – every day.  Monitoring the pig’s environment and ensuring the animals have food and water can’t be accomplished from outside the barn.What can be done outside the barns is careful management of one of the most effective and economically feasible systems in the pork industry, the lagoon and spray field.  When managed correctly, when effluent is applied within state rules and regulations, the benefits are many and the chance of harm is minuscule.  The nitrogen contained in manure is absorbed by crops at much higher rates, and is not as easily leached into groundwater, as the nitrate forms in most synthetic fertilizers. (Dr. Pius Ndegwa, Ph.D. 2014)Regardless of these facts, Lisa Sorg asked NC Commissioner of Agriculture Steve Troxler at a press conference Friday, “Why isn’t Smithfield upgrading the waste management systems in North Carolina since there has been a lot of discussion about it in the trial?”  A better question to ask would have been, “Is the picture of hog farmers being painted by lawyers in these trials accurate?”  Because, at the end of the day, the reason for these trials is simple: Lawyers filed these lawsuits against Smithfield Foods to make money. And in the courtroom last Friday they succeeded.  The jury returned an outrageous $473.5 million-dollar verdict.  How on earth could one hog farm in one rural county do almost half a billion dollars in damages?  Is that justice?  It defies common sense.We are thankful that on Friday, several miles down the road from where the verdict was being read in Federal Court, dozens of national agricultural leaders convened at the Gov. James G Martin building on the NC State Fairgrounds.  Their goal was to better understand the threat of nuisance lawsuits to all of agriculture and begin work on putting protections in place to protect our right to farm.  Otherwise, nobody wins.