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The Florida Cattle Enhancement Board has provided an opportunity to highlight a difficult subject in farming through a podcast series. We caught up with Marshal Sewell with the Mind Your Melon Foundation to learn more.
Sewell said, “We have got a really cool opportunity to get to work with the Florida Cattle Enhancement Board and the Florida Cattlemen’s Association to continue to do some more storytelling with Florida ranch families. And by storytelling, personally, I am just a firm believer that there is power in our personal stories, our family stories, and even all these business stories that so many of us have put together over years and generations. And I think that they are so rich with meaning and with lessons. But just like I was saying about our own family story, a lot of times, you know, we end up kind of keeping some of these things close to the vest, or maybe in our world nowadays, most of the time people kind of see the highlight reels, or they only see a portion.”
“And so, one of the things that we really wanted to do within this project with the Cattlemen’s is we wanted to find some people who were willing to sit down with us and open up and talk about their families, these multi-generational businesses, their legacies. But not only just talk about how things have come together, the times that they have succeeded, but also the times that they have struggled, or the challenges and hardships they have faced, as well as the ways that their families have had to approach things differently, or their families have had to change, and they have had to evolve over time to try and keep up with the constant evolution that we’re seeing in the marketplace or with our families. And so, to me, I think that really kind of gets at the core of resilience and opening up and talking very candidly about some of these family stories from a slightly different perspective than maybe they’re used to. And so yeah, it’s been a really interesting project to get to know some of these ranch families on a more personal level and share some of those stories as they’re willing. And if anybody is interested in learning more about that, they’re happy to keep up with our Mind Your Mellon podcast, which you can find on any of the streaming platforms. But those episodes are going to be rolling out. And once again, that’s in partnership with Cattleman Enhancement Board and Cattleman’s Association,” said Sewell.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.