Down on the Auburn Farm

By: Jim Hannaford

When Jarrod Jones went to work for Auburn’s Gulf Coast Research and Extension Center, he also found a new home. Starting in 2007, he and his family have lived a uniquely rural life on 800 acres in Fairhope.

As head of the university-run facility, the Bay Minette native oversees a complex operation that includes work on many different kinds of agricultural research. In a nutshell, he and the other farming professionals there figure out the best ways to grow things, and they do it by growing. They want to help farmers be more productive and efficient, so they share their findings freely, mostly through online platforms.

Maybe you know something about Auburn’s Fairhope farm already. If not, you may have seen the familiar blue, orange, and white colors on the sign out front and wondered what goes on there along Highway 104 near its intersections with U.S. 98 and County Road 13.

It’s a lot, and it has been for a long time.

“The station was started in 1930, and it’s one of the five original outlying units,” says Jones, who came to work there a few years out of a master’s program at Auburn and has remained there—day and night—ever since. “It’s a very diverse research station, probably the most diverse in the state because of the long growing season, and the fact that the climate here allows for growing just about anything.”

Jones is a hands-on farmer as well as an administrator. He’s also something of a historian when it comes to local agriculture and how it has evolved over the last century.

‍In its early days, the station’s research focus was on potatoes, or more specifically what varieties were the best to grow in coastal Alabama. In the decades since, they’ve tinkered trial-and-error style with countless varieties of other crops, including citrus and pecans as well as corn, cotton, soybeans, and peanuts. The money they make from what they harvest goes back into the operation.

“We are still doing primarily row crop research,” Jones says, “and the areas that we work in are fertility management, disease management, and pest management. And we still do a lot of variety testing.”

Cattle have long been part of their mission, too. Their current experiments, Jones says, look at the effects of different methods of weaning calves from their mothers. For such studies, they typically maintain a herd of about 110 cows that give birth to around 100 calves a year. Rounding out the livestock census, there are two bulls on the farm and two donkeys (Pattycake and Jack), which help to ward off coyotes.

The farm used to bustle with human activity, too. That’s dwindled dramatically for a few different reasons, including more reliance on machines and high technology. In the central part of the research center, not far from the small office, are 13 different houses among the other structures, some of them shaded by magnificent oaks.

“Back when they had the dairy, which was from 1947 to 1985, there were approximately 15 families that lived on site,” Jones says. “They ran two crews. The dairy crew milked the cows twice a day, and then the farm crew did the row crop research, or the pecan crop research, or whatever was out in the fields.”

Other than two aging grain silos and some surviving lagoons, the dairy operation has mostly faded into memory. The personnel has shrunk to a much tighter circle of employees that, besides Jones, includes an associate director, five technicians, a supervisor, and an office administrator.

Jones grew up in Bay Minette but wasn’t expecting to go to work just 25 miles down the road when he went off to study agronomy, soils, and plant pathology at Auburn. He figured he’d wind up somewhere in Georgia instead because of its many opportunities in his field.

“I didn’t really aspire to be here until I went to graduate school, but I had knowledge of the place,” he says. “As a kid growing up and playing sports (football and baseball), I would come by here on a school bus to go play a ball game in Fairhope. I had been in and around agriculture all my life, then as a teenager, I worked for the Cortes on their (nearby) farm.”

He saw the Auburn operation in a new light when he came here to do research trials while working on his master’s degree. He worked for the USDA National Soil Dynamics Lab on the university campus for 3½ years before returning to Baldwin County to start his new life as associate director. He held that position for around 15 years before taking the reins from longtime director Malcomb Pegues when he retired after 40 years.

With his upward move to regional director, Jones also manages three other facilities in the area. That means more responsibilities as well as a major life change—not only for Jones but also for his wife, Kara, and their three children, Ashlynn, 18, Kelsi, 12, and Jase, 9. He was not aware of the requirements when he first put in for the promotion, but the university’s personnel guidelines require that he live off-site to avoid potentially showing favoritism to the unit in Fairhope.

Once it’s completed, his new family home will be on 28 acres in the Rabun community in north Baldwin County. The other facilities under his authority are located in the Spring Hill section of Mobile, Brewton, and Headland (north of Dothan).

“We’ll miss living here,” he says as he’s giving a tour of what many old-timers still refer to as “the substation.” He notes how quiet it is on the grounds, despite the encroaching commercial and residential growth. We can see a multistory apartment complex looming in the distance over his well-tended rows of feed corn. Just down the road, the city’s newest Publix sits where he personally harvested cotton when he worked for the Cortes.

Despite the changing times, Jones believes the work they do has never been more vital.

“We are losing farmland to development, so we have to make more yield on crops over less land,” he says. “It’s not just a Fairhope or Baldwin County thing—this same thing is happening all over the Southeast.”