On July 19^th, 2025, our team at Hiwassee Products lost a great friend, mentor, and member of our extended family with the passing of Eddie King, a livestock and vegetable farmer of many decades in Chester, New York. Eddie’s passion for pursuing new, better methods to grow vegetables in a market farm environment led him to pioneer many practices that contributed to greater awareness of soil health and nutrient quality. Eddie was an inspiration and frequent collaborator during the development of Hiwassee Products, and his input, patience, and enthusiasm will be missed. His son Jeff continues his legacy and farming operation in the Hudson Valley. 

This year’s harvest season has been a good one, with more crop successes than crop failures. As a vegetable grower in upstate New York, I’ll take it. This harvest season has also been one of reflection, with the loss of my Dad to ALS this past July.

My Dad was a livestock and vegetable farmer. Hard physical work never scared him, and maintaining a work-life balance simply wasn’t a concept for him. He farmed with a vision for the future, always learning, testing new ideas, trying to make things better. He had a healthy combination of stubbornness and willingness to change.

Although not from a farming family, he was raised in the country around animals and vegetables, and those experiences directed his interest towards agriculture.

After high school, Dad got a two year degree in agriculture from Cobleskill University in upstate New York. He enjoyed the courses in soil science, entomology, and animal husbandry, but he always said that it left him with conventional, chemical-based approach to agriculture. He took this conventional approach to the 15-acre vegetable operation he started managing in the late 70’s. 

My dad had an open mind to new ideas, however, particularly ones that aligned with the natural world, which he loved. He started reading Rodale’s publication “the New Farm” in the 80’s. The ideas presented in those magazines worked on him, and in the 90’s started getting serious about cover crops, reduced tillage, and other components of organic farming. He would pursue any idea that made sense to him, often with complete disregard to public opinion.

For example, Dad became convinced about the benefits of using compost. The obvious thing to do was to find a local supplier, buy some, and spread it on the vegetable acreage. Not Dad. He decided that hay mulch made the best compost, and began a program of cutting over 100 acres of hay and making hundreds of round bales per year for mulch. He rented a bale shredder, borrowed a big tractor from a local dairy farm and chopped the bales into piles to be turned several times over the winter for compost for the following year. Although arguably not the most labor and cost-efficient approach to improving soil health, as a kid who got to spend the summer in a skid loader with a bale spike, I thought it was great.  

These efforts did pay off though. Dad saw progress in the fields he managed. Soil organic matter increased, and plant health and yields improved. The amount of compost we needed decreased every year as well. This taught me the valuable lesson of front-loading the work in order to make long term improvements.

His approach to livestock was similar. As a 21-year-old, my dad had spent almost a year living and working on an Amish dairy farm, so cows were always a passion for him. He got excited about Alan Savory’s holistic grazing methods and applied these concepts to the small dairy and grass-finished beef operations that he helped manage over the years. But the success he had in pasture improvement through good grazing was always overshadowed by his determination to get it even better.

Most of Dad’s learning was pre-internet.  I remember making many trips to farms to learn from organic growers across the Northeast. One of the most impressive trips was to a farm in central Pennsylvania to look at their large vermicompost system and compost extract program for their 90 acres of organic vegetables.

In the late 90’s, he began experimenting with crimped cover crops and a Yetter row cleaner unit to grow no-till vegetables. I remember that his green beans planted into a crimped rye mulch were a great success.  

In his later years, particularly after his diagnosis of ALS two years ago, my dad’s role in farming changed. The frustration of not being able to do what he used to was real, but he found joy in observing the operation I currently manage, pointing out my mistakes, but also enjoying the successes of each season.

Internet learning became a passion as well. He spent hours immersed in regenerative agriculture YouTube videos and podcasts. The list was long, but most notably Joel Salatin, Elaine Ingham, Gabe Brown, and Dr. Christine Jones. I think my Dad loved John Kempf’s podcast the best, and marveled how an Amish man with an 8^th grade education could present concepts of plant physiology and bio-chemistry better than best university professor in the nation.

My Dad took pride in the fact that his son-in-law, a mechanical and electronics engineer, joined Hiwassee Products, a business making equipment for regenerative agriculture. Hayfield fertility had always been a head-scratcher for him, and he used to buy fish-based fertilizers, kelp and other bio-enzymes by the 250-gallon tote. Looking back, he once commented “if only I had had a Hiwassee Extractor for my hayfields in the 90’s!”

Today, with cover crops, reduced tillage, and composting practices getting a lot of positive attention, the work my Dad was doing in the 90’s could be considered ahead of the times. To my shame, I didn’t pay enough attention. Looking back to when I first started managing a vegetable farm, I can see that I started out with too much trust and reliance on farm chemicals, and failed to see the biological component of soil health and plant growth. It is only recently that new science from researchers like Dr. James White have confirmed the hunches that my dad had, and have put me on a truly regenerative, biological track as well. 

Ultimately, my Dads’ journey in agriculture was based on his love of creation and the creator. The changes he made put his farm closer to the original design of creation.  He had a vision that his farm could be a source of education, connection, and healing for a broken and disconnected society. Let’s keep his vision moving forward.