Field Trip

On March 5, 1976, David Hill, a kid from the suburbs in Altamonte Springs, and Lisa Long, a farmer’s daughter, went on a first date to the Central Florida Fair. They became high school sweethearts, dated through college, and Lisa’s father, Zellwood muck farmer Billy Long, asked David to come work with him on the farm.

Hill’s brief stint in minor league baseball playing second base with the Wausau Timbers (then the Seattle Mariners minor league team in Wisconsin) delayed those plans, but not for long. Before the season ended, he and Lisa got married and soon returned to the north shore of Lake Apopka. “Dad put him on a tractor, and the rest is history,” Lisa says with a smile.

Sitting at a picnic table under a covered barn at their farm in Clermont, the Hills share with me the rest of their story over blueberry lemonade, nibbles of chicken salad and bites of fresh strawberries.

Life’s first big curveball, they say, came after the enactment of the Lake Apopka Restoration Act in 1996, when the state started giving farmers the boot so it could clean up the contaminated lake. In 1998, under the threat of eminent domain, Lisa’s family sold the 1,000-acre muck farm where her father had grown sweet corn, radishes and carrots for more than four decades.

After that “gut-wrenching” experience, Lisa was ready to leave agriculture behind, but David still wanted to farm so the couple purchased 120 acres in the sandy hills of Lake County just northwest of Disney and started from scratch.

“It was just a dead orange grove … in the middle of nowhere back then,” David recalls, but he had plans for it. They cleared out the dead orange trees and planted 80 acres of holly, red maple and other landscape trees. The ornamental tree farm went well until the housing collapse of 2008, but with no new houses going up, it “took a beating,” and David decided it was time to get back into a food crop.

In 2012, the Hills harvested their first commercial crop of blueberries, but the fruit came with its own challenges — namely competition from Mexico, where labor is about a tenth of the cost in Florida — so in 2014, at the urging of their son and daughter-in-law, the Hills opened their blueberry fields to the public.

That’s when Lisa came up with her blueberry lemonade recipe, now a favorite among customers. Blueberry donuts, muffins, jam and pancakes followed, as did a variety of new u-pick crops: peaches in 2016, sunflowers and sweet corn in 2018 and strawberries in 2021. Thousands now attend Southern Hill Farm’s annual fall festival, and next month, the farm will hold its first annual sweet corn festival. The farm has a loyal following of locals, me included, who stop by regularly to bask in its golden sea of sunflowers, indulge in a hot donut or pick some fresh fruits and vegetables.

A decade after launching their agritourism venture, the Hills’ success offers a seed of hope for an industry that’s been riddled by hard knocks. As farmers face a laundry list of challenges — pests, unpredictable weather, inflation and more — the consumer appetite for farm life is growing, and the revenue stream from agritourism can make a difference between whether a farm survives or gets sold off to a developer. The Hills’ example also reminds us that leaning into life’s twists and turns can help us navigate its uncertainties. Here are a few other takeaways from my afternoon on the farm.

‘Patience, Young Grasshopper’: In this age of instant gratification, it can be hard to remember that success doesn’t always happen overnight. The first couple of years after the Hills started growing peaches, there would be some fruit left over after the u-pick harvest. Sweet corn was the same way — but today, every ear of corn and every peach is picked. “Everything we’ve done here started off really slow,” says David. “It takes some time for momentum to grow.”

Authenticity Matters: There’s good reason Floridians will drive miles out of their way and get sand in their shoes to pluck lettuce and strawberries by hand — they know what they’re getting. Younger generations, especially, “want to know where their food comes from, they like to kind of get to know the farmer,” David says. Lisa says visitors appreciate their true farming roots. “We were a farm before we were agritourism, and I think that’s the big appeal. We’re a bona fide farm, we’re bona fide farmers.”

It’s Never Too Late: All of us are getting older, and many of us will be working far later in life than we might have imagined. The Hills show that those later chapters can be as compelling as the early ones. They launched their agritourism operation when they were in their 50s and are still growing it. “I’ve always got three projects staring at me. My goal is knock those all out, and then I can sit back and enjoy it,” David says. Lisa’s not so sure about retirement. “How do you go from 85-hour workweeks to being retired? What does that look like?” she wonders. She’s learned not to look too far down the road. “This is just God’s plan, and he gives us the idea and we go for it. Who knows in five years? Five years ago, there was no clue we would have all of this.”

— Amy Keller, Executive Editor akeller@floridatrend.com

Tags: Editor's column