Story by: Megan Leben
When strawberries are in season, Phillips Produce, a U-Pick farm in Wrightsville, is just the place to be with your basket in hand.
The local farm is owned by Wrightsville residents Kevin and Tori Phillips.
“We started growing produce about 14 years ago,” Kevin said. “This is about our seventh season growing strawberries.”
The farm has previously been owned by another family and when the couple who owned it died, it was sold to a timber company. The Phillips bought the farm from the timber company after they got the wood off the property. Then they, cleaned it up and starting farming the fields that were originally there when the farm was first started in the early 1900s.
They originally started “row-cropping” which is what Phillips says people typically think of when they think of farming. It consists of growing crops in rows like corn. Then, the farm had a few bad years where the crop yield was not as great as they wanted, so they decided to start growing produce.
Today, Phillips Produce grows, watermelons, sweet corn, cucumbers, squash, potatoes, and their biggest focus, producing a good strawberry crop.
“We started growing strawberries because we saw there was a need for it in this area,” Kevin said. “Nobody really grew strawberries in this area so we planted some to provide.”
The Phillips prefer to run a U-Pick business as opposed to selling to stores.
“We used to sell some produce to stores,” Kevin said. “There’s not much money there. You gotta be smart about how you do it. We ran into problems with stores not wanting to buy locally but through big distributors instead.”
Both of the Phillips have a full-time job. Tori is a teacher at a local school, but she still helps out on the farm too.
Kevin says there isn’t really a typical day in farming because there’s always something different to be worked on.
“I got up this morning at 5:00 to turn on the irrigation to my corn,” Kevin said. “It’s a lot of management…getting up and kind of looking over the field.”
A few things he does do every day is check the fruit to make sure there aren’t any issues in the fields, likes diseases or things eating the crops. The farm has an electrical fence to keep the deer out, but Kevin said they sometimes still get inside and “feast on a buffet of strawberries.”
The farm isn’t open every day to be picked. The Phillips have to do maintenance and allow time for strawberries to grow and ripen so the fields don’t become over picked.
On the days the farm is closed to pickers, the Phillips are cutting grass, making sure the irrigation system is working properly and repairing it if not, and pulling weeds because they don’t use chemicals to kill weeds and bugs.
There’s a few popular recipes among visitors to the farm – Tori’s cream cheese strawberry pies and the staple of the farm, the strawberry slushee made from freshly picked strawberries and a special recipe. The Phillips see it as the perfect way for visitors to cool off after picking in the fields.
“I go just for the slushees,” Mackenzie Sheppard, resident of Wrightsville, said. “My friends and I have tried to make them in the past, but they just aren’t as good as the ones at Phillips.”
Something that is really important to the Phillips is how and why they farm. They aren’t in it for the money.
Kevin often hears that farmers don’t care about the land, but the Phillips do everything they can to protect their fields and put nutrients back into the ground. They plant a cover crop of wheat and oats when strawberries aren’t growing to make sure that the land isn’t eroding.
“I could talk to you for a week and not ever tell you about everything just because it’s a lot of work out there with it,” Kevin said.
Even more important to the couple is the why behind their farming. It isn’t for money. It isn’t for their own personal love of strawberries. It isn’t for their love of farming.
“It’s a lot of work, I mean we enjoy it but I tell people if it ever becomes a job, I’ll quit because I’ve got one job,” Kevin said. “It gives people a way to connect with the outdoors because so many children today lack a knowledge of farming and what is involved. Everybody has a stereotype of a old man in overalls with a straw hat – now I do wear a straw hat – but it’s so much more than that.”
