A North Carolina grower stays competitive by focusing on the latest technology.

By Rosemary O. Gordon
Managing Editor

Sometimes it is simply your calling in life to farm. Just ask Brent Jackson, owner of Jackson Farming Company (JFC) in Autryville, NC. He didn’t come from a farming family but rather took to working the land as a child.

Although his grandfather had farmed, his parents weren’t growers and actually encouraged him to do something else with his life. Instead, Jackson was bitten by the “ag bug” and worked for a few area growers during summer breaks and after school. “I really loved my jobs,” he says. “I worked in the fields harvesting tobacco, and then finally worked my way up to driving tractors and tilling the soil, and the running the cotton picker,” he says.

When he graduated, the plan was for him to attend college and become an attorney. At least this what his parents wanted for he, he says. “I tried [college] for part of the following year and I realized that I was addicted to farming, and I was determined to give it a try.”

So despite obstacles such as having no land, equipment, or money, and little support from friends and family, Jackson put it all on the line. In 1978 he teamed up with one of the growers he had worked with in the past, got married, and he and his wife Debbie decided to give farming a try.

There were times in the late ‘70s and the early ‘80s, however, that Jackson admits that maybe his friends and relatives knew what they were talking about when they told him he’d never make it as a grower. He and Debbie started raising row crops and did not meet with much success.

The Turning Point

Not many people can say watermelons have made a difference in their lives, but Jackson can. In 1981, he planted a field of watermelon, sold some to a broker, and then sold the remainder to small stores in nearby Fayetteville, NC. “This was one of my turning points,” recalls Jackson. “As we were selling watermelons to the store owners, they would ask for other vegetables. So in 1982 we started growing other produce items, mostly cantaloupes, and this proved to be much more profitable and stable then the traditional row crops, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

In addition to watermelon and cantaloupe, JFC grows pumpkins, strawberries, yellow and green squash, slicer cucumbers, and this season they are trying 140 acres of sweet potatoes. While about 900 acres are devoted to vegetables, row crops are still grown on 210 acres.

Jackson also was a broker on a very small scale, until a major hailstorm wiped out an entire crop of watermelon and cantaloupe. This led him to become more involved in the brokering aspect of the business.

“Local growers and some as far away as neighboring states heard of our disaster and started calling and offering us product to sell for them,” he says. “It was then that we were officially in the brokering business.”

Packing Produce

Not resting on his laurels, Jackson says to stay competitive, he needed a facility to pack the produce. “When we built the first packing shed, I was scared to death we couldn’t pay for it and that it was too large,” he recalls. “I called it my ‘Faith’ building, and after we built it, the volume grew.”

Since the first shed was built, Jackson has added on to it three times. The current facility consists of 13,620 square feet of cooler space, which include seven rooms with two holding areas. Once the product enters the coolers, the cold chain is never broker, he says.

According to Jackson, forced-air cooling rooms allow them to cool a trailer load of product to an optimum temperature in six hours.

This in turn helps to extend the shelf life by several days, he continues. “By using forced-air coolers, we are able to maintain better quality of our cantaloupes, and other items that require cooling,” he says. “I had boasted that we could hold 21 loads in our coolers and had hoped to never need to hold that many cantaloupes at one time. With the market glutted this season on Athena cantaloupes, however, we have reluctantly learned that we can actually hold 24 loads.”

State-Of-The-Art Grading

Also to help stay competitive, in 1999 a state-of-the-art cantaloupe grading line was installed that cleans melons with chlorinated water and adds PLU stickers, all in one operation. The farm was the first in North Carolina to have such a line, and other growers and shippers have come from several states to view it and make similar lines, says Jackson.

Dedicated to grading cantaloupes, the line has allowed the farm to increase its daily capacity from four loads to 24 per 12-hour day. The line also allows the farm to size to customer specifications by mechanical means.

“Our pack is much more consistent that when we were doing it manually, making a better impression upon the chain store receivers, and ultimately to the end user, the customer,” says Jackson.

Family Matters

Trying to juggle all the tasks of a grower/packer/shipper is more than a full-time job for Jackson and his wife. So after high school, their son Rodney joined the company. Jackson says he tried to persuade Rodney to go to college, but he had been bitten by the same “ag bug” as his father. Jackson says Rodney is an invaluable asset to the operation, keeping up-to-date on the latest technology in farming practices, chemicals, and plasticulture.

“We joke about Rodney starting to work at age 4, but in reality he was between 4 and 5 years old,” say Jackson. “He would steer the tractor down the rows while we harvested cantaloupes and watermelons in trailers.”

Rodney takes care of pest control issues, and Jackson says one pest that has reared its ugly head in the past two years is rindworm on watermelons. To combat the problem, the farm has been using Asana (esfenvalerate, DuPont Crop Protection) on the crop.

He also says Phytophthora has popped up periodically. In 1999, the disease caused them to lose 60 acres of seedless watermelon. Not an uncommon disease, Jackson says it has impacted more than 30 states across the country.

Weather tends to play a role in when the disease will pop up, he says, especially if it has been wet and then a couple of inches of rain come at one time. To keep the problem to a minimum, Jackson says they focus on drainage and level the fields to keep the water off the plants.

In addition to Rodney, the Jackson’s also have two other sons, Adam and Josh. Adam was tragically killed in a car accident three years ago while in high school. “Adam’s plans prior to his untimely death were to attend North Carolina State University in ag business, come back to work in the office, and take over some of my responsibilities,” says Jackson. “So, needless to say, our loss was not only as parents, but we lost an invaluable associate and heir to our business. It is a loss we will never get over.”

The Jackson’s’ youngest son, Josh, now 16, has taken on various tasks from the field to the warehouse to assisting in the office during the summer. Jackson says he is not sure what his youngest son’s future plans are, but he says he’d like to see him come back to the family farm.

Future plans for farm, he says, are to continue growing. “I have built and attempted to design JFC to last for many generations,” he says. “In such a fast-paced business as ours, our main goal has always been to do the best possible job we can from seed to consumption of our fresh fruits and vegetables.”

---

Raising Basketballs I n the summer of 2002, Motion Theories Inc., a production company based in Los Angeles, CA, contacted Jackson Farming Co. about doing a commercial on their farm to advertise ESPN’s Full Court Basketball Package on DirectTV. According to owner Brent Jackson, the production company found out about his growing operation after checking out the farm’s Web site, www.jfcmelons.com. Motion Theories was looking for a site to film promos that showed basketballs being harvested from the field, explains Jackson. “We were harvesting and grading cantaloupes and watermelons when they first came out,” he says. “They saw our packing line and fields and the idea of growing basketballs became a reality. Motion Theories Inc. offered Jacksons money to use their farm in the commercial. Instead of accepting the $4000 they were to be paid, the Jackson’s donated the money to the Adam Brent Jackson Memorial Scholarship in North Carolina State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “Adam was an excellent athlete and loved most all sports,” says Jackson about his son who was killed in a car accident three years ago. “He would have been very proud to be involved in this unique and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, especially considering it was for ESPN.”