News Other countries USA: U.S. farm income has represented as little as 4.6 percent of total annual farm household incomeSharing Farm Life With The Big City
Jake Carter was only 6 years old when his father sold off the 200 dairy cattle from the family's Henry County farm in 1986.
Jimmy Carter had served two years as the executive director of the Georgia Milk Producers and ran the farm for more than a decade, but small dairies were becoming rare and the Carters opted to focus on beef cattle.
At one time, there were a lot of dairies scattered across Georgia, but today the philosophy seems to be, ‘Go big or go home,' said Jake Carter.
Those family dairy farms are a part of Georgia's heritage, and Southern Belle Farm shows kids from urban Atlanta and its suburbs what that heritage means.
When the Carters opened their farm to visitors in 2006 and began to do milking demonstrations and host a corn maze, it seemed to go against everything that was happening in suburban Atlanta at the time.
It was the height of a housing boom, and Henry County is less than 30 minutes from downtown Atlanta. Within a couple of years, the county had 200,000 people and fewer than 300 farms, most of them inactive.
With the population boom at the time and seeing how disconnected our kids were from agriculture, we saw an opportunity with even our own kids to show what we grew up with in the dairy business, said Carter.
When he asks school kids on tours of the farm where we get milk, their two guesses aren't good: Kroger or Publix.
The family has owned Southern Belle Farm since the 1930s, when J.A. Carter bought some of the land he was farming through share-cropping. The farm got its name years later when his grandson, Jimmy Carter, was raisingHolsteins for a school project and had to give a name for the farm. He wanted Georgia Belle, Jake said, but that name was taken so he settled on Southern Belle.
Over the years, developers offered Jimmy Carter ungodly amounts of money, his son said, but he wasn't interested in seeing his farm become a subdivision at any price.
In this area, the farm is really unusual. When we started, every other farm was getting sold and developed, Jake Carter said. The kids that we are getting come from Fulton and Clayton counties. These kids have never stepped foot on a farm before. Their parents may have never been on a farm.
We feel it's really important to educate them while they are here.
The farm has a few cows – all called Belle – a milking barn and silos that show a bit of life on the dairy farm, but Southern Belle Farm also has activities popular with the growing agro-tourism industry in Georgia.
In addition to a fall corn maze, the farm has acres of blueberries, strawberries, blackberries and, in a couple of years, peaches.
The family enjoys sharing farm life with visitors who otherwise wouldn't get the chance to pick fresh berries or learn about the dairy, Carter said.
Since he was so young when his dad closed the dairy, Carter had to learn as an adult how to milk a cow as an adult– a fact his older sisters won't let him forget. And he's learned a lot about how hard dairy farmers work.
I know enough to know, I'm glad we aren't still in the dairy business, Carter joked.
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