Jacob Waddy, now in his retirement years, could probably get by on just four acres of mixed vegetables. He grows watermelon, cantaloupe, okra, green beans, snap peas, squash, cucumber, peppers and tomatoes to sell at the farmers market in his rural Uniontown, Alabama, and in the neighboring towns of Alberta, Marion and Thomaston.

But this life-long farmer also raises 120 goats on 35 acres of pasture and 45 head of cattle on another 90 acres, and recently planted a two-acre blackberry, apple, pear and peach orchard.

Jacob diversified the operation in part for the added income. He sells goat meat throughout the year to the Mexican and Vietnamese markets. At the end of the summer, when upwards of 5,000 Baptists hail to Uniontown from all over the South for an annual celebration where they dine on goat meat, he sells out the remainder of his spring stock. The animals, rotated to new paddocks every 30 days, also add value by fertilizing his land, doing away with the need for chemical fertilizers.

But above all else, Jacob diversified as part of his strategy to get the youth in his community interested in agriculture.

“I was just looking at so many children walking the streets,” he said, explaining the youth were fed and housed, but seemed to lack direction and purpose. “I wanted to catch them before the streets caught them.” So when he retired from his part-time consulting job in 1998, Jacob expanded the operation, enlisted a dozen children from grade school through high school to help with the work, and renamed his farm Uniontown Youth in Agriculture.

What started as a way to make a little money has become much more than just a job for the young people involved in Jacob’s operation. With their elder’s guidance, a few kids have started their own projects on the land. One is raising 200 turkeys, another, 14 rabbits and a third child is raising 500 chickens in the goat pasture, rotating the pen onto fresh grass every morning.

Others have gotten turned on to growing vegetables and left Jacob’s farm to start their own gardens, where they harvest veggies to sell at the farmers market. The seasoned farmer helps kids survey their yards to find a nice level spot to plow up, and take a soil sample to send to the university to test for fertility and contaminants. He also directs them to youth loans from the U. S. Department of Agriculture to fund the start-up costs of buying seeds or chicks. This way, he explains, the kids learn the ropes of financial management and build a credit rating.

Jacob, too, has been learning new things—such as how laying long strips of black plastic over the soil on the vegetable beds helps keep moisture in the soil, dirt off the produce, and keeps the weeds down without having to apply a chemical herbicide. Concerned about the health risks of using chemicals, Jacob wants to become completely organic in a few years by finding alternatives to chemical insecticides.

He’s also learned that goat meat fetches a more stable and higher price per pound than beef does, and goats require less space, care and maintenance than cows. The smaller ruminants supply what seems to be an unlimited local demand for goat meat. Jacob keeps the cows for the same reason he keeps the poultry and rabbits. He wants to provide his young friends opportunities to learn about raising various types of livestock, and invites them to participate in everything from moving animals to new pasture to planting and harvesting the vegetables.

Jacob himself learned how to farm from his parents, who raised cattle, hogs, cotton, corn and chickens for the local market on the same 175 acres where he still lives. He took over when they retired, and for many years, worked a part-time job on the side for extra income. He thinks he probably could have farmed full-time all along without outside income, especially with assistance from Tuskeegee University , the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and other development organizations, which have helped him diversify. But it would have been a more difficult road, and like his three children who all went to college and moved off the farm, Jacob had interests outside of farming.

For a man whose heart is in the land about as fully as his hormone- and anti-biotic-free animals are raised organically (they are 95 percent organic, Jacob estimates, only because they are not certified organic), the chance to spread the love of farming to another generation is pretty satisfying. He wants others in his community—and not only the youth—to realize that if you’ve got a little land, you can grow your own food.

“You have a family of people sitting on acreage,” he notes of many of his neighbors. And “even if all of them go off to work, they should be able to pick fruits and vegetables directly from their garden.” Home-grown, sun-ripen fruits and vegetables are a world better, he believes, than food shipped from hundreds of miles away grown using who knows what kind of chemicals, and ripened artificially.

If Jacob has his way, the people of Uniontown will turn the wide grassy lots tucked between stands of southern pine, cedar and poplar trees into vegetable plots for every home.

Key resources:

Tuskegee University Extension Program
USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS)
Resources for Community Development (RCD)
Heifer Project International