McDonough — Third-generation farmer Jimmy Carter Jr., like his father a generation ago, owns and operates Southern Bell Farm in McDonough with his son Jake.
But the business appears to be very different from when Carter joined his father’s business. The Carter family has kept the family farm alive for his 85 years by consistently adapting and responding to changes in agriculture.
The farm Carter grew up on was a dairy farm, and there were actually two dairy farms. Carter’s grandfather, a former sharecropper, purchased his farmland in 1938, and his son, Carter’s father, purchased an adjacent farmland a few years later, and his father and son ran side by side on separate dairy farms. I ran the venue.
Carter earned a BS in Dairy Science and an MS in Animal Nutrition from the University of Georgia School of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, with two years of military service in between. The farms Carter returned to in 1975 were much the same, but he soon merged the two farms into one. It didn’t take long before further adjustments were required due to changing agricultural conditions.
A dairy buyout program in the 1980s converted the farm to cattle operations. By the early 2000s, the time had come for further market-driven change. This time, it was Jake Carter’s turn to join the family business in 2003, when he graduated with a business degree from UGA.
“His passion was the farm,” Jimmy Carter Jr. said. “He’s such a dreamer, so entrepreneurial. He came up with the idea of agritourism.”
The shift to agritourism (an industry that blends agriculture and tourism to make working farms a unique attraction) meant opening farms to the public. Carter said it was a big change, and he wasn’t at all comfortable with it at first.
“I wanted to put some locks on the gates to keep people out to some extent, but a lot of people came asking me questions about the farm and what we were doing, and they said,” he said. . you know what? If people want to come to the farm, let them in. ”
Today, Southern Bell Farm receives about half a million visitors each year for tours and fresh produce. Selected crops include strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and peaches, while the on-site country market sells pastries and jams made from the farm’s produce. Southern Bell Farm has been named to the Bulldog 100 List of Fastest Growing Businesses Owned or Operated by the UGA Alumni Association three times in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Southern Belle is also a popular excursion spot, with an estimated 40,000 children visiting each year. During the visit, children will learn about agriculture through engaging demonstrations on subjects such as milking cows and the importance of bees in pollination.
Most of the kids who visit here have never seen a farm before, Carter said. In most cases, neither are their parents.
Still, it’s no surprise to Carter that so many people want to visit Southern Bell to learn about the business of growing food. He has led the farm through many adaptations to meet consumer demand. His latest transformation also reflects changing consumer attitudes.
“There’s a saying, ‘Know the farmer, know the food,'” he says. “People generally want safe products and want to know who makes them.
