The following commentary was published by the Cape Gazette on National Farmer's Day, Tuesday, October 12, 2021. Below is an excerpt and a link to the entire piece.
It was a hot and humid mid-July day, one of the warmest in the summer up to that point. The tractor I was using on my family’s farm had cut out, so I headed back to the farmhouse to get a couple of tools. Oddly, such hurdles don’t get under my skin. There was a job to be done, so there was no need - or time - to be annoyed.
To say that many here in Sussex have a deep appreciation for Delaware’s agricultural community would be a gross understatement. I come from a family of farmers. In fact, our family is direct descendants of the owners of the land where the Town of Georgetown is now located. While not debating legislation in the Senate, I can often be found working on our family farm. Sometimes, it’s even necessary to have to repair broken-down equipment in the middle of the day.
Commercial agriculture has a long history in the First State. Peaches and strawberries were an important crop in the 19th century, and well into the 20th. Selbyville was known as the “Strawberry Capital of the World”, with seven million quarts of strawberries sent to market by 1899. Over the following three decades, strawberries were king. During the heyday of peach growing in the state, Delaware had over 800,000 producing peach trees. Some farms in Sussex County still specialize in those two delicious fruits.
