Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Clay and Kari Fulford, of Fulford Family Farms on Fulford Road, were selected as the 2022 Jefferson County Farm Family of the Year, a recognition bestowed annually by the Jefferson County Farm Bureau on an outstanding farm family.
A fourth generation Jefferson County native, Clay grew up on the farm that today he owns in partnership with his father, Ernest Fulford. Clay and Kari, a Tallahassee resident originally, have been married eight years. The Fulford family mostly grows cotton and peanuts on their 1,200-acre farm, interspersed with growing corn and soybean sometimes.
As Clay tells it, he early developed a passion for farming, going back to his earliest childhood. He began working on the land from as soon as his foot could reach the tractor’s clutch, he says.
“My dad tried everything he could to nudge me in a different direction, an easier way of life,” Clay told Farm Bureau interviewer Doug Mayo in 2021. “But I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.”
Kari’s passion, meanwhile, is horses. Although new to farming, she helps wherever she can, dealing with customers, taking peanuts to Tallahassee once a week during harvest time, and helping pack the cotton packer during cotton season. But what she enjoys doing most is giving horse-riding lessons, leading trail rides around the farm, and taking photographs. She also has a fulltime job outside the farm.
Clay likes to tell the story of his great grandfather, C.A. Fulford, who started the farm in 1945, after returning from the World War. As Clay tells it, his grandfather was a cook in the Navy, who upon his return to Jefferson County after the war bought himself a property to grow peanuts.
As the story goes, the elder Fulford sold his boiled peanuts in Tallahassee near the capitol, and with the proceeds from the sales, he purchased additional land, which today forms the nucleus of the Fulford’s land holdings.
It’s the multigenerational aspect of the operation that gives Clay particular pride in his involvement with the enterprise, following as he is in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great grandfather.
Leadership and recognition are not new to Kari and Clay Fulford, who served as 2018-2020 District 2 representatives on the Florida Farm Bureau State Young Farmers and Ranchers Leadership Group. Of the organization, Clay also served as chairman.
The couple was also one of three finalists selected for the FFB’s 2021 Achievement in Agriculture Award. While they did not win, their very selection as finalists was an honor in itself.
In 2019, Clay won the Florida Outstanding Young Peanut Farmer of the Year Award from The Farm Credit of Northwest Florida and the Florida Peanut Producers Association at the association’s annual meeting.
Being of the younger generation, the Fulfords embrace technology in their farming operation. Clay cites as one example of the farm’s environmental practices, the gridding of soil samples to allow for the more efficient application of fertilizer.
He explains how he and his dad grid soil sample maps, which information they plug into their tractor’s GPS system so that the fertilizer is applied where it is needed across the field and is nowhere over applied.
The Fulfords enjoy offering farm tours and field days on their farm to school age children, to help give the younger generation a better understanding of where their food and fibers originate.
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