Lyerly, GA |
For most people, life takes them far from where they started — a different town, a different career, a different path. For Garrett Hurley, home has never been very far away at all.
“My house is actually on my childhood farm. The farm I live on has been in our family for five or six generations. I’ve actually moved once, and it was across a cow pasture,” said Hurley, Chair of Georgia Farm Bureau’s Young Farmers and Ranchers Committee. “I’ve been within about 200 yards of the same place my entire life.”
Northwest Georgia may not look like the sprawling row crop country of South Georgia, but to Hurley, the patchwork of fields and tree lines that make up his corner of the state has always been exactly where he wanted to be.
“Riding down some back roads up here in Northwest Georgia, it might look a little different. We may not be wall-to-wall fields — we’ve got plenty of trees packed in and we’ve got little patches, as we like to call them,” Hurley said. “But I can never really remember a time where I wasn’t a farm kid. If I wasn’t out on the farm with my dad, I was in the yard playing with farm toys and tractors. Having my own farm was always the goal — to come back and farm for my career.”
That goal never wavered, even when other opportunities came knocking.
“There was one point in my life that I was going to go to trade school. I ended up talking myself out of that and came straight back to the farm,” Hurley said. “Now that I’m doing it, it’s the greatest blessing ever.”
As Chair of GFB’s Young Farmers and Ranchers Committee, Hurley has a front-row seat to the obstacles facing young producers across the state — and two themes come up over and over again: capital and land access.
“One thing that just keeps coming up is the availability of capital. Things just cost so much — trying to buy equipment to get started, or trying to buy cattle now that prices are at all-time highs,” Hurley said. “But also the availability of land. A lot of times a piece of land comes up for rent and the younger person gets overlooked. The younger generation may not do things the way the older generation did back in the eighties, but a lot of times new ideas aren’t a terrible thing. I would encourage the older generation to give some of the younger guys a chance.”
When Hurley talks about the future, he isn’t just talking about his own farm. He’s thinking about what comes next — and whether the life he’s built can be passed down the same way it was passed to him.
“I hope that in twenty years I can be farming full-time with one or both of my kids. The end goal is to have a sustainable business that my children can come back into,” Hurley said. “I want them to know that if they don’t want to come back, we’ll still have the land and they’ll always have somewhere to call home. But if they do want to come back, I hope I’m in a position to help them — with financial resources as well as years of knowledge — and just present them with the opportunity.”
In the end, Hurley’s story isn’t really about cotton or cattle or even farming. It’s about home — and a dream that never took him far from it.