MOULTRIE, Ga. — Every year the 10 Southeast state Farm Bureaus each select its Farmer of the Year. A team of judges visit each of these winners at their farm for interviews and inspection tours, to select a Southeastern Farmer of the Year.
This overall winner will be announced at the Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie, in October. This entire process has been developed and put in place by Swisher Sweets, manufacturer and distributor of a variety of tobacco products. This is the 25th anniversary of the competition and over the years the Jacksonville, Fla.-based Swisher has donated almost $1 million in prizes.
A fairly wide variety of farming operations are represented by this year’s state winners. A brief description of the 10 feature diversity in beef ranching, staple crops such as corn, cotton and soybeans and even holiday decorator items.
Ray Allan Mackey of Elizabethtown, Ky., is a 28-year veteran diversified farmer raising corn, soybeans, burley tobacco, hogs and beef cattle. With more than 4,500 acres he grows specialty corn while using minimal irrigation and tillage to reduce erosion, and to minimize fuel and labor costs.
His burley tobacco is under contract to Philip Morris USA. Mackey manages tobacco production costs by providing his own greenhouse-raised transplants and finishes in his own curing barns.
He grew up on a farm and raised Angus cattle for 4-H and FFA competition. Also as a youth, he raised strawberries, popcorn and tobacco. The Mackeys are active in church, school, Farm Bureau and various corn growers associations from the local to national levels.
Kentucky has not had an overall winner since it became one of the competing states in 2000.
Maryville’s John Keller has farmed nearly 800 acres in the shadow of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains for 50 years. He has raised corn, soybeans, wheat, rye, hay and sells straw from the wheat and rye.
He owns 80 head of beef cattle and provides 20 head per year to custom freezer consumers. Straw sales are 20,000 bales, plus mini-bales for fall decorative use. Keller also sells bundled cornstalks as decoratives.
The Kellers promote American farm family values through school tours – with as many as 1,400 kids in a single day. They practice an "all in the family" approach to their operations with minimal outside assistance. They are active in church, schools, Farm Bureau and livestock, soybean and corn associations at local, state and national levels.
Tennessee has been one of the competing states since the inception of the Farmer of the Year competition in 1990. Two Tennessee farmers have previously taken the top honors, in 1994 and again in 2006.
Other states’ Farmers of the Year for 2014 are Andy Gill of McGehee, Ark., Danny Murphy from Canton, Miss., C. Dennis Carlton of Tampa, Fla., Frank Howey Jr. of Monroe, N.C., Philip Grimes of Tifton, Ga., Phillip Hunter of Talladega County, Ala., Robert T. "Tom" Nixon II of Rapidan, Va., and Walter Dantzler from Santee, S.C. While most of these winners raise program crops such as corn, soybeans and cotton, there is a tree nursery represented too.
Each of these winners has already been awarded $2,500 cash and all trip expenses to attend the Sunbelt Expo, by Swisher Sweets. Massey Ferguson will provide a tractor for one year. Southern States awards $500 cash and a gun safe, Dow AgroSciences provides an option of $1,000 of Phytogen cotton seed or a $500 donation to a designated charity and Ivey’s Outdoor and Farm Supply provides a Columbia vest.
The panel of judges will visit each farm the week of Aug 4-8. Each visit will include an hour interviewing the farmer and his family, followed by a two-hour tour of their operation.
The judges are John Woodruff, a retired University of Georgia extension agent who has been involved with Sunbelt’s Darrell Williams Research Farm since its inception; and John Kirksey, the Southeastern Farmer of the Year of 2008, after being the Arkansas winner. The third judge is Clark Garland, longtime extension agriculture economist from the University of Tennessee.
The overall winner will take home, in addition to state awards, $15,000, an additional year of Massey Ferguson tractor use and Ivey’s will provide a Columbia jacket. The Southeastern Farmer of the Year is to be announced at a luncheon on Oct. 14 before hundreds of invited guests.
