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FEAR NOT, FAIR READER, there’s still plenty of time to set out on that summer trip you’ve been meaning to take. But the season is winding down, and it’s almost time for our young farmers to head back to school. In this issue, we feature a school where the farming fun never ends. Milwaukee’s Vincent High School is returning to its roots and getting kids ready for agricultural careers thanks to a grant from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You can read about the program’s revival on page 28. Over in Pennsylvania, the Emmett family is just starting its summer break. Mom Rachelle home-schools her four school-aged kids, and they take a late summer break to learn the family business: apples. Rachelle tells her family’s story starting on page 44. There’s…
My mother wanted to broaden her children’s horizons. So, when I was a kid, she got our family involved with a program called the Fresh Air Fund. Farm families sign up through the program to host kids from the city during the summer; our Fresh Air sister, Precious Broner, first came to visit in 2003. Each and every summer for the next seven years, Precious returned to visit our family and the farm. In a way, we all grew up together. One year she took the train from New York City to spend Christmas with us; another time, our family took a trip into the city to visit her, and we got to meet her mom. I grew up on a dairy farm with lots of animals and pets, so…
This barn has stood in rural Knox County, Indiana, for over 100 years, and it has been in the Vories family since my dad, Harvey, purchased the farm in 1964. My brother, Duane Vories, and our uncles C.B. and Ronnie wanted to restore the barn to look the way it did when it was originally built. All told, the three of them worked for nearly 600 hours to make our old barn new again. In its heyday, the building housed cattle and horses. Today, it’s used primarily for storage. I know my dad would have been very proud of what my brother and our uncles have accomplished.…
Nothing compares to riding on a running horse. I had always wanted to learn to ride, but my family knew we needed a safe, kind horse as much as we needed a fast one. It turns out they’re hard to find. My mother, brother and I went to look at a horse for sale. The seller was Mrs. Nelson, a substitute teacher at our school. Though this was not the horse for us, Mrs. Nelson told us we had just missed the last horse she sold—one she thought would’ve been just perfect. We spent months looking but had no luck. One day, Mrs. Nelson told my mom that Rocket, the gelding we had missed, was for sale again. We drove to see him the next day. Rocket was nothing to…
Our moist flower beds must have looked like the all-you-can-eat buffet of its dreams. “I’m going to have to kill it,” my husband, Roger, muttered with all the seriousness of a judge handing down a death sentence. I swore I could hear The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme song as we stared down a foot-wide hole that disappeared under our home’s foundation. We had been noticing increasing damage to the yard for several mornings, but this was the final insult. The armadillo had to go. Now, I loathe killing anything that doesn’t need killing. To qualify for my short list, a critter must be a danger to humans or to another animal I love or need to protect. I can kill fire ants, wasps and black widow spiders…
As a girl growing up in the “swamp of south Georgia,” in a small town called Douglas, country music star Jennifer Nettles says she heard about 4-H through school. “The local country agent came around to my fifth grade class and asked if any of us would like to participate,” she says. “I was curious. And I’m so happy I was!” She joined the performing artsfocued group Clovers and Co. and had a 4-H “career” spanning fifth grade through college. The country singer recognizes the impact her 4-H involvement had on her life. “It is not hyperbole for me to say that I would not be doing what I am today, nor have the career I have, if it were not for this organization,” Jennifer says. “It was the first…
