By ELENA MARSH
Staff Writer
One of the top honors a farm can receive in North Carolina is designation as a “Century Farm.” With a history steeped in agriculture, Moore County is home to more than 30 such farms – and another is set to join the list.
The Parker family, owners of Terrace Ridge Farm, can trace their roots on the land at 208 Union Church Road back to 1926. What began as a 50-acre dewberry farm has now grown to 175 acres of production for hay and beef.
“ My great-grandmother had a farm over toward Harnett County near Johnsonville,” said Michael Parker, owner of Terrace Ridge. “The story goes that the government came in and bought her farm to put a new military base they were putting in called Fort Bragg. So they gave her money, and she came over here and bought this place.”
Legacy and History
Archie B. and Katie Johnson Parker built their family home in 1925 from the remains of lumber of the old Vass schoolhouse that had burned down that year. Michael’s father was raised in the home with his two older siblings tending to dewberries until the market crashed in the 1940s.
“ Daddy got his first job auctioning at Cameron at the dewberry market,” said Michael, who is also a practicing auctioneer. “ He went to auction school in ’46 and then started auctioning tobacco.”
When dewberries were no longer profitable, the farm transitioned to tobacco after Michael’s father bought out the interest of his brothers around 1956.
“My dad met my mother at a tobacco auction in Carthage in 1947. He was selling tobacco, and he said this man came up to complain to him about how he wasn’t happy with the prices. Dad said, ‘I was doing a lot of agreeing with him because I really wasn’t paying attention, I was looking at the prettiest girl I ever saw standing behind him.’”
In three months the two were married and, after a long career selling tobacco along the East Coast, Micheal and his parents and siblings went back to Union Church Road.
“ Daddy came home and built the house I grew up in down here next to the plant, and he wound up starting Parker Meat Company. So from dewberries, we went to tobacco, and then started Parker Meat Company down here, home of Parker’s Pure Pork Sausage,” said Michael. “At its height, he employed 22 people in this community which was big at the time.”
The farm eventually transitioned to Michael and his family, who ran it even though he was a practicing lawyer. Eventually, the family switched main crops from tobacco to hay.
“ I hated tobacco. In fact, I tell people that’s why I became a lawyer,” he said. “I worked in tobacco one day and came home and told my daddy, ‘If I can make A’s, can I stay out of the tobacco field?’
“He said, ‘If you can make A’s.’ That was my challenge so I didn’t have to go back into the tobacco field. I loved doing hay.”
Michael and his wife, Carol, took up work on the farm with their two sons, Matthew and Garin. Matthew took to the farm in childhood and as a teenager used his money to start a herd of cattle from four cows.
In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the farm was tested.
“Carol, of course, panicked because there was no food in the stores,” said Michael.
“She calls me and she says, ‘Look, there’s no food in the stores and I’m out of beef. You have to tell Matthew to kill a cow.’ I said, ‘All right, it’s not that easy. You have to get the kill date and all that.’ She said, ‘I don’t care. He’s got to kill a cow because we’re running out of food.”
Michael called his son and Matthew complied, but with a condition. “He said, ‘Look, she doesn’t need a whole cow. She doesn’t even have a place to put a whole cow.’”
The other half of the beef was advertised on Facebook, and two weeks later Matthew had sold the entire herd.
“He pre-sold every one of the cows that he had bought. He said, ‘I gotta quit selling.’ I said ‘You can’t.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘We’ve fed people on this farm for 100 years. Now that we made an investment and they’re wanting it, we’re not going to stop because it’s hard.”
Before long, the beef business had started on the family porch and has remained a part of Terrace Ridge ever since.
Connecting to the Root
The mission at Terrace Ridge goes beyond beef and hay. Education lies at the heart of the farm, from the joy the farmers get from learning to educating the community they are cemented in.
The Parkers are one of many local farms in the area that specialize in agritourism experiences. The USDA defines agritourism as a form of commercial enterprise that links agricultural production or processing with tourism to attract visitors onto a farm, ranch or other agricultural business for the purposes of entertaining or educating the visitors while generating income for the farm, ranch or business owner.
Terrace Ridge offers different farm tours, including a beef tour, hay tour and farm equipment tour.
“ Most people who come here are amazed by it, and they say it’s one of the best experiences,” said Michael.
Terrace Ridge also works with Adult and Teen Challenge to help with skills in work ethic.
“ We use really old tractors. We try to pull them out of the woods, renovate them and put them back to work,” he said. “ My story I tell (the men in recovery) is that these tractors have been left in the woods to die, because nobody cared about them.
“But we care about them, because we pull them out and put them back to work. You need to remember that even though you have problems, they can be fixed, and you can be useful, and people care about you and want to put you back to work, and that’s what we try to do.”
Visitors to the farm don’t just walk away with a new experience: The Parkers feel proud when any person learns something new.
“ We do it to provide a connection to your roots,” said Michael. “Because everybody in this country came from farmers. We have lost that. Every generation becomes wiser but weaker, and they also forget where they come from. We want to remind people of that.”
Ancestral Fields
On the original 50 acres owned by Michael Parker’s great-grandparents, the family grows Bermuda hay for many of horse country’s four-hoofed residents. That 50 acres has spread across hay fields all over the 175-acre farm.
“The soil my ancestors worked has produced what I currently work on today,” said Michael. “I think that is pretty cool.”
The Parkers hope to officially join the distinguished list of Century Farm owners later this year. When looking back at what that means, Michael says, “ It ain’t just feeding people. It’s changing people. To me, that’s what this is about.
“To my son, it’s about the number of acres he’s bred. We work in acres, not hours, but to me, it’s the people that you touch and the people you affect that make a difference.
“ I look back over it, and it is humbling. Every year on Father’s Day, I go to the cemetery, and I see my granddaddy and my daddy. To know that they worked this farm, they bled, they hurt. We respect what the people who came before us did for us to get us to where we are. And to me, I don’t want to disappoint them.”
Contact Elena Marsh at (910) 693-2484 or elena@thepilot.com.
