In the corner of a barn on his family’s farm Monday, Michael Magee, the youngest of three brothers, jumped on tractor, whose bright red finish was not telling of its age. Also defying its age, one turn of the key was enough to get the 70-year-old tractor to a healthy rumble, much to the surprise of the 15-year-old farmer-in-training.
Michael Magee takes a good close look at the family’s crop.“I didn’t think it would turn over on the first try,” Magee said.
In the Magee home, a short walk from the barn used as storage space for old tractors and farm equipment, Magee’s grandfather is pictured sitting on the tractor that he bought in the Great Depression era. But that picture only begins to define the history surrounding the Route 54 farm and the family’s tradition.
Since “two years after the Civil War” — a phrase used by family members for decades to describe the magnitude of the farming tradition there — a Magee has raised crops on those 64 acres off Route 54 in Williamsville. In the 1920s — shortly before the aforementioned tractor came into the picture and when a saw mill, not the field, served as the family’s main workplace — the Magees farmed the land to feed the mules that dragged the trees from the woods. It’s a family tradition the family today talks about with pride and some defense.
Displaying a sharp contrast between himself and many other area land owners who have fallen to temptation in the face of astronomical development-backed buy-out offers in recent years, Danny Magee, Michael’s father, said he would never think of selling the heirloom plot.
“Do you have anything your grandfather gave you?” Danny Magee, who, with his two sisters, inherited the farm in 1964, asked Monday. “It’s not something I’m willing to sell.”
But, as is evident when touring the farm and hearing two generations explain the ripeness of a strawberry or fragility of a jalapeno crop, the Magees’ ties to the farm extend beyond just tradition.
“It’s all I’ve ever known,” said Danny Magee, whose family’s livelihood has depended on the health of the crop for six generations. “I didn’t think I’d make out very well in the monastery.”
On Monday, Danny Magee studied the strawberries — which will again be sold at the family’s Route 54 produce stand within the next two weeks — and readied to transplant their 300,000 jalapeno plants from the greenhouse to the field.
Since mid-March, those plants had grown from a seed the size of a pinhead to a plant about a foot long. By July, they will stand roughly 3 feet tall.
And when those jalapenos are ready for harvest, along with what will, hopefully for the Magees, be a strong batch of sweet corn, the Magees will join many other family farmers from the region at the new Bethany Beach Farmer’s Market.
Local farmers and the Delaware Department of Agriculture partnered and worked for months to bring the market to Bethany. Starting July 1 and running for eight Sundays, farmers will gather in the Mercantile Peninsula Bank from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. to deliver their homegrown crops straight to consumers, who will largely be blind to the tradition entrenched the locally-grown produce they will buy this summer.
Magee crops represented at the market this summer could include strawberries, corn, sweet corn, squash, jalapeno peppers and soybeans.
“Delaware has done a good job to promote farmers through the markets,” said Ellen Murray Magee, the daughter of a Cedar Neck-area bait-and-tackle-shop owner who married into the family 29 years ago. “I applaud them for that.”
Ellen Magee also hoped aloud Monday that the market will help educate the not-so-agriculturally-educated on the importance of the industry.
“People don’t like being dependent on foreign oil,” Ellen Magee said. “Wait until they are dependent on foreign food. People don’t realize what it takes to put food on the table. Most people don’t realize what it means to be a farmer.”
That is certainly not the case in the Magee family, where farming roots continue to spread. While Sean, 16, is studying at Sussex Tech to become an electrician, Chris, 21, who was spraying fields Monday, and Michael plan to stay in agriculture, likely on the Century Farm on 54 and the family’s other 290 acres nearby.
Michael, beyond his years when speaking about his family’s history and their work, talked excitedly about continuing that tradition.
“I know I will,” stay in farming, Michael Magee said without hesitation Monday. “It’s a way of life.”