Five Generations Deep: The Story Behind Our Georgia Farm
Five Generations, One Piece of Ground
There's a spot on our land where the fence line dips down toward the creek, and if you stand there long enough, you can almost feel every hand that's worked this dirt before yours.
Mine isn't the first name attached to this place. It's the fifth.
I didn't grow up thinking I'd end up here.. boots on, baby on my hip, elbow deep in a business my great-great-grandparents would probably not recognize but would absolutely understand. Because underneath the Instagram grid and the messages and the spreadsheets, it's still the same thing it's always been: people trying to feed family’s off land they refuse to let go of.
What the Land Actually Asks of You
People ask me sometimes what farming is really like, and I think they expect an answer about early mornings or hard labor.. which, sure, that's a very real part.
But the harder part isn't the physical work. It's the waiting.
You do the thing, you rotate the pasture, you mix the feed, you fix the fence, and then you wait. The land moves on its own timeline. The cattle and hogs grow on their own timeline. It doesn't care about your launch calendar or your quarterly goals. It asks you to trust a process you can't rush and can't fully control.
Some days that's humbling in a beautiful way. Some days it's just humbling.
Building It With Little Hands Around
Most of the real decisions on this farm don't get made at a desk in an office. They get made with a toddler tugging at my leg and a baby on my hip, standing in the middle of a field trying to remember what I walked out there to check on in the first place.
I used to think that made me less capable of building something serious, but I have realized it's the opposite. There is nothing that will teach you what actually matters, and what can wait, faster than trying to build a business while someone small needs you at the exact same moment a hog gets out.
This farm doesn't get built in spite of my kids being around.
It gets built with them woven into it, whether that's tidy or not.
Why We Keep Going
Some nights I stand at that fence line by the creek and I think about Romans 8:18, that whatever we're carrying now isn't worth comparing to what's coming. I think about that a lot out here, honestly. In the middle of a hard season with the animals, or a slow month where the red doesn’t seem to end, or another storage building we haven't finished cleaning out yet, that verse does something practical for me. It reorders the weight of things.
This land has outlasted harder years than you can imagine, and it’ll outlast anything thrown at it.
We're not building Homeplace to look like everyone else. We're building it because five generations back, someone decided this ground was worth staying on, and we take that seriously.
Homeplace Pastures is our direct-to-consumer beef and pork line, raised on our family's Georgia farm. If you want to follow along with the real, unfiltered version of what building this looks like, you'll find us on Instagram at HomeplaceLabel.