“My job was to visit farmers all over the county and show them how to do things on the farm – and get them to open an account at the bank,” said Bowers, who worked his way up to head cashier at the bank before returning to full-time farming at 1,600-acre Gordy Farms on Smokey Road in 1954.īowers became a founding member of the Coweta County Livestock Association, which later became the Coweta County Cattlemen’s Association. He became a part-time teacher to aspiring farmers through the Veterans Farm Training Program to make extra money, and two years later was offered a job as a bank farm agent in Coweta County. He learned “how to do everything on the farm” from his father and studied at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College until his father was killed in an accident and he was summoned home to run the farm. When food was scarce during World War II, Bowers helped his mother sell cream, cottage cheese and butter from the family’s four Jersey and Guernsey cows at a curbside market. You could wean them at around 450 to 500 pounds and sell them as fat calves.” Those cows would give a lot of milk and their calves would grow off fast. “All the farmers had one or two milk cows, and they started breeding them to a Hereford bull or an Angus bull,” Bowers, who became well-known for his champion Charolais cattle, told Kennedy. Bowers spoke about the decline of the cotton industry in the late 1940s, when grass and pine trees began to replace the vast fields of cotton bolls in west Georgia. One major player in the Coweta cattle industry was the late Lisle Bowers, whom Kennedy interviewed in 2019 for the book. “So many people had a big role with the cattle industry in the state, and the longer we waited, the more of them wouldn’t be around to interview,” he said. We had seen some of her work and knew she was capable, but didn’t have a full appreciation for how talented she was.”Ĭallaway said he had seen similar projects chronicling the cattle industry in states like Virginia, California, Kansas, Florida and North Carolina, and there was some urgency to complete the project. “When we started out with this project, we had no idea where it would lead or what it would take to produce this book. “We are fortunate that we connected with her,” he said of Kennedy, a former reporter and freelance writer who has served as editor of Newnan-Coweta Magazine since 2018. ![]() The history project committee oversaw the book project. Kennedy, who grew up on a dairy farm and has penned histories of four electric coops, was a natural choice to record the story, according to John Callaway, co-chairman of the history project committee of the Georgia Cattlemen’s Foundation. Many of them were generational cattle producers, so the history of the cattle industry is their family history.” “I went to every corner of the state and all through the middle,” said Kennedy, who found her interviewees more than willing to share their stories.
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