Photo by Jay Stone
July 24, 2024
www.gfb.org
Vol. 6 No. 14
YF&R’S HEAR ABOUT PERSERVERENCE, CONSERVATION AND SUCCESSION The Georgia Farm Bureau Young Farmers & Ranchers Summer Leadership Conference, held July 17-20 on Jekyll Island, provided opportunities to network and receive messaging from firstgeneration farm owners Kevin and Lydia Yon, Marine veteran and TV personality Johnny Joey Jones, the Farms Fund, the Georgia Department of Agriculture and succession planning expert Ron Hanson. Conference attendees also pitched in some time to the Harvest for All project, assembling approximately 13,000 meals to be donated to Second Harvest of Coastal Georgia, one of the regional food banks in Feeding Georgia’s network. Yons share about perseverance and faith First-generation farm owners Kevin and Lydia Yon of Ridge Spring, South Carolina, appeared as keynote guests during the Thursday opening session. The Yons, who were named the 2018 Sunbelt Ag Expo Farmers of the Year, shared how their family and farming career have developed over time. Now, they farm a total of 5,000 acres with approximately 1,200 brood cows and 200 commercial cows. The couple met as students at Clemson University, where they both studied animal science in the early 1980s. They landed a tandem internship/job managing a ranch near Columbia. That lasted seven years, but the ranch owner decided he did not want to have cows anymore. From there, the Yons moved to Ridge Spring to manage another family’s farm, with a deal in place that allowed them to start their own operation on 100 acres. The Yons talked about debt, their faith journey and how they’ve handled having their nowgrown children come back to the family farm. The Yons’ expanding farm came with taking on debt. While the couple knows that taking out loans is not the way some people want to operate, taking on debt has allowed them to establish themselves without inheriting family land. “This is a pretty neat thing we get to do, isn't it?” Kevin said of the experience of farming with family. -continued on next page