Proud to be a Farmer : Michael Carter

SAVANNAH, Ga. (WTOC) - For the final stop on our southeast Georgia peanut farmer trek. WTOC headed out to Bay Carter Farm in Coffee County to meet with fourth generation farmer Michael Carter.

“Well, I’ve always grown-up farming. When I was little, and started farming on my own when I was in 9th-grade. I went and got me a government loan, started with just a small operation renting equipment from my Father, and went to tending my own. Now, we’re just a bigtime operation,” Michael Carter said.

They tend about fourteen hundred acres of peanut at Bay Carter Farms, and each one of these acres average about two tons of acres around harvest.

“We run six pickers. We run one dump cart. It takes a family; I mean it takes seven or eight head to get everything going. We run two diggers, and we’re right here working on them today with it raining... and so I mean it takes everybody going, it don’t ever stop. It’s seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day really.”

Even though, they don’t sell their peanuts directly outside the farm or at a local farmers market. It doesn’t mean you can’t get Bay Carter Peanuts, and that you haven’t already had them before.

“We actually own part of Premium Peanut here in Douglas. Which is I think the largest shelling plant in United States that’s farmer owned, and we sell to planters... everybody. M&M, just whoever wants to buy them. We ship them all over China and all over the world.”

From the soil of southeast Georgia to the rest of the U.S. and the World. You can see why Georgia Peanut Farmers are so proud.