Portrait of a Farmer

His large hands, which he can no longer feel due to nerve damage caused by an auto accident, gestured as he talked. And whenever he was making a serious point, they were folded and still on the table. A gentle soul, this farmer offered me snippets of memories from his life. And while I am typically quite hesitant to include such in articles, his stories compel me to include them. To understand Jackson Farms II in Lyman, one first must understand Robert Jackson, the man and farmer. Similarly, to understand the present or the future, often one must reconcile the past. Jackson’s story began with his birth.

Robert Jackson entered this world, all three pounds of him, to his mother, alone, in a house on his grandfather’s farm. His tiny body was placed in a shoebox and abandoned. After being found, his grandmother, who was half Cherokee, took his fevered body into the woods and performed some kind of ancient herbal remedy, giving him a fighting chance to live.

“To this day, no one knows what she did,” says Jackson. But something took, something worked, and perhaps his fate as someone continually drawn to and tied to the land was imprinted that day, amongst the flora and fauna of the forest and his grandmother’s skilled and tender hands.

He grew up on his grandfather’s farm on Route 7, not far from where Jackson Farms II is today. “At four years old, I knew what I wanted to do,” he says. He loved plants from an early age. He loved the smell of dirt in the spring when rains bring out the earthiness of clay. He learned all he knows from watching, then participating, with his grandfather in the upkeep of the farm.

“He taught me how to prune, and to this day, if I don’t prune how he taught me, it doesn’t work out right,” Jackson says.

The memories of growing up on his grandfather’s farm still bring a twinkle to his eyes: spying on his granddaddy and his friends as they gathered around the well at night to enjoy fellowship and maybe a sip or two of moonshine; witnessing one of those old men raking in $100 and a gallon of shine for winning a bet that he wouldn’t buck a goat; digging pits in the ground (cold framing); taunting his aunts as they tried to sneak back in the house after staying out too late (young, enterprising Jackson would charge them a dollar to come through the window); sneaking into the forbidden shed where his grandfather’s muscadine and cherry wines fermented in barrels and seeing a possum, who had broken through the cheesecloth barrier, floating face up in the barrel, both drunk and dead; the family meals around the table (his grandparents had 12 children of their own) and having to give up the best pieces of chicken to an uncle; watching and learning from his grandfather how to grow and raise enough to feed that many mouths.

“At the end of the day, that’s what farmers do—we feed the world,” says Jackson. “And farmers aren’t dummies. What other occupation has to be so many different occupations in one? The farmer has to be doctor, lawyer, marketer, developer, business man, salesman, customer service, mechanic, laborer, etc., etc., and skilled in all equally well.”

Jackson pursued his natural interests at Spartanburg Technical College (Spartanburg Community College), earning a degree in horticulture. “I had to learn the Latin names of plants, botany, chemistry, etymology,” says Jackson. And he ended up putting this knowledge to use with his first farm, which specialized in fruit trees—peaches and plums.

But after three consecutive years of damaging freezes, he cashed out and moved to Connecticut to work on two other farms.

“The saddest day of my life, other than my grandfather’s and grandmother’s deaths, was the day I had to give up my red tractor,” he says.

At one Connecticut farm, he helped grow a 20-acre operation into a 1000-plusacre behemoth. “In 2001, I decided that was my last year. I told my boss, ‘you got bigger, but I got smaller,’” he says. Jackson moved back home, got married, found a house, went to truck driving school, and rode the country for a year and a half.

“I got to see some interesting things driving the country,” he says. All the while, however, the earth was summoning him, and in his off time, he started gardening in his backyard.

“One day I called my wife from the road and told her to set up a stand in the front yard with ‘homegrown tomatoes for sale,’” says Jackson. The first day, they made nothing. The second day, they made $10. The third day, they made $50. “That’s when I decided to come on back home,” he says.

Jackson did just that, and he and his son, Robert II, who at the time was in college, rented a produce stand on Highway 29. But soon, renting the stand was not cost effective. The father-son pair found a 35-acre tract near the house, and Jackson Farms II was born.