PHILADELPHIA, Tenn. – John Harrison, of Sweetwater Valley Farm, has been named the Tennessee Farmer of the Year by the University of Tennessee (UT) Extension.

“John is a top-end farmer,” said David Bilderback, area farm management specialist for UT. Bilderback, and Loudon County Extension Agent John Goddard, nominated Harrison for the award.

“John is an amazing farm manager,” Bilderback said. “He is a great people person. He does a good job managing people, and people like working for him. He knows when to make the right calls, and that is an art in agriculture.”

Harrison is a third-generation dairyman, the sixth or seventh generation of his family farming in Loudon County. After earning a degree in agricultural business, Harrison farmed with his family for a few years, then rented 350 acres and bought 80 cows to start his own dairy. “We are very diversified,” Harrison said. “We started with a dairy farm. I always wanted to do something with the product, so I started making cheese in 1998 (after taking a cheese-making course and borrowing against the farm to build a $1.5 million cheese factory). I realized right quick that people wanted to come to the farm. We started agritourism after that.”

The 4,490-acre farm includes a dairy farm, cheese factory, a store and a cafe. Besides their cow-calf beef operation, they grow corn, barley, soybeans and hay. 

The farm has more than 2,050 mature dairy cows, 1,500 replacement heifers, 650 beef cows and 450 beef calves. They have three dairy facilities – two with traditional parlors staffed around the clock and a state-of-the-art robotic milking facility where dairy cows are trained to interact with robots that do the milking 24/7.

“Our facility was pretty old, so we knew that if we want to continue to milk cows there, we needed to modernize,” Harrison said. “We liked the idea of this robotic system. We thought it would be very intriguing from a farm and a public tourism standpoint. We went with the Lely System. We are milking about 480 cows in that facility.

“It is a tunnel ventilated barn, which we like,” he said. “You bring a cow into the facility and train her for 10 days, and then she does her own thing. They go to be milked when they want to be milked; they are doing what they want to do. They are not being sorted or directed. The cows are milked three times a day on average.”

The agritourism aspect has evolved. In the beginning, they had an educational space and a walking tour. After installing the robotic system, Harrison’s daughter, Mary Lyndal, wanted to add a store and cafe along with the tours. 

“We have a space in our robotic barn where we do our spiel,” Harrison said. “We do a field trip, show a film, and visitors can hang there as long as they want. Then they come back through the gift shop and cafe.”

The farm is a family endeavor. Celia, the emergency director at Sweetwater Hospital, is the corporation’s secretary and treasurer. Three of their five children work on the farm. Lyndal is the farm’s marketing director and runs the public side of the business. Charles Allen is the head herdsman and crop manager. Amy Elizabeth recently started helping with the business. Another daughter, Sally Anna, is a doctor, and a son, John William, is a software engineer who acts as a “great sounding board” as the farm expands its virtual presence.

One of the reasons for their success is Harrison’s ability to know when to make the right calls, Bilderback said, and that was one of his reasons for nominating him for the award.

“Knowing when to make the right calls is an art in agriculture,” Bilderback said. “Some of it you’ve got to go off your gut, and he’s not afraid to do that. I remember two or three years ago, we had about a five-week drought in a specific area, and his farm was in it. He started chopping silage toward the middle of July. It’s not a good sign when you see people chopping that early. What does John do? He went around and tried to purchase some corn and couldn’t get that worked out.

“So, on Aug. 1 he plants corn for silage,” he said. “It was his highest yielding corn, 14 or 15 tons of silage to the acre, and he planted it Aug. 1. He had an 87-day corn. He harvested it sometime in October.  He hedged his bets, but from a quality standpoint, I think it was some of the best silage produced that year. You have to be willing to take some of those chances. There was a good chance that one would not pay off, but when you’ve got cows to feed, you’ve got to get that feed. I wouldn’t advise anybody ever to do that.”

As the Tennessee Farm of the Year, Harrison will be honored at the UT Institute of Agriculture’s annual Ag Day event Sept. 24. He will also compete in the Swisher/Sunbelt Expo Southeastern Farmer of the Year competition. The winner will be announced in October at the Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie, Ga.

“He is one of the best advocates for ag that we have,” Bilderback said. “He really deserves this; he is a great farmer.”