Advocacy
M: Berry Family Farms aims to prove that farming is both “cool” and essential across generations. How does your family’s legacy of sustaining generational farming and building wealth influence your mission to embody the significance and “coolness” of farming and ranching?
Cedric: Our objective was to kind of let our generation and the generations coming behind us see that if you do it in a smart way, it’s not as much hard work as it used to be — and it’s actually fun.
Looking at when my dad and his siblings were growing up…when they [worked the farm], it was kind of like chores…they had to do it, and everybody wanted to get away from it because it was hard work.
But looking at Georgia — which, for one, is an agricultural state, and that’s [the industry] where a lot of the money is pumped into — with this, I guess you could say, newfound trend or movement [to return to landstewardship], the money is there, the help is there. So, if you look at it from a different perspective, such as, “Okay, everybody wants to be a business owner or entrepreneur, and farming is no different, I’m a business owner filling a need and meeting a demand,” you could turn [farming] into a business and brand it at the same time. It’s kind of more exciting than thinking of it as just a chore.
I’m hoping that one day our kids get a little more involved. My grandfather (Curtis Berry) started with his father, and then, of course, with my dad (Aubrey Berry) and all of his siblings growing up, they kind of had to work things. My grandfather got to where he didn’t [have to] do as much anymore. He always did something, but he didn’t do as much, and my grandmother always said she wanted to see something done [with keeping the farm going]. Then my uncle (Lamar) got back into [daily farm work] around 2008, and then my dad joined in with him a couple of years later, and we always helped. We saw the opportunity, like, “Hey, this is what our family does,” so [my cousin] Tony and I got together and jumped in, too!
