Truckin' on the Western Branch

Images by Sheally

I don’t know how people do it. We buy used equipment. Farms are bigger. Now we’re small with 1,100 acres in nursery and grain. We started strawberries and trees in the 1980s.

I married Kathy in 1972, and we have two boys and a girl. My oldest son, Jesse, works in the nursery during planting season.

When I was six years old my father and brothers were sports guys and took me to Churchland baseball, basketball, and football games. I knew everybody that was playing. I played Little League one year and then baseball and basketball for Rabbit Howard—one of the most knowledgeable coaches in basketball. I coached in the rec leagues and was a volunteer assistant coach for the Western Branch varsity and JV with Jim Stanko. Churchland was special, a small, separate agricultural community—not just an overflow from Norfolk. It wasn’t until I was 10 or 12 years old that there were enough people on Tyre Neck Road to get up a ball game. We had a field in the front yard, but eventually they built Green Meadow Point. We had the river and small boats with small motors. We’d fish and gather oysters. R. C. had a little speedboat with a 10 hp motor, and the Speerses did some waterskiing.

This farm is a generational thing—from my grandfather to my father to me. My father, James, dropped out of school at 14 to farm and didn’t stop.

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