To market, to market: How one woman built a new story for her family

The Growing Season: How I Built a New Life and Saved an American Farm, by Sarah Frey, (Ballantine, 2020, 251 pp., $27 US)

By Melodie M. Davis

If you love an underdog story, this is it. A farm girl who grew up in the 1970s and 80s without indoor plumbing.

Sarah Frey sometimes went to bed having only cornmeal mush for supper. Her father felt it more important to feed his racehorses than his children.

The Growing Season: How I Built a New Life and Saved an American Farm is intensely sad in places but also laugh-out-loud funny. It’s inspiring and just may help readers push through an unpleasant and difficult task or circumstance.

The first chapters of Frey’s memoir reveal her tough child- hood. Absorbing, compelling, and fascinating — but painful for all who love children, and hate seeing them suffer. Frey says she was hesitant to reveal some details of her backstory.

She remembers being painfully embarrassed at school to use a punch card granting free meals, and always feeling different — and dirtier — than other children. She grew up hunting, fishing, and was, as a seven-year-old, made to fling a huge snapping turtle onto the back of her father’s truck to help put food on the table.

He wasn’t being mean: he felt she could do it. Doing hard things became a trait that has stood her well in her rise from farming to wealth.

A born entrepreneur, Frey loved helping her mother market farm fruits and vegetables to small local grocers. She ended up rescuing her father’s farm from a perennially unpaid mortgage when she was still a teen.

Now just in her mid-40s, she owns and heads Frey Farms, based in southern Illinois. Frey Farms is one of the larger fresh food distributors in the US, servicing Walmart as well as Whole Foods.

She tells several stories of encounters on farms with plain Mennonites. Once, when her cell phone wasn’t getting reception on the farm where she was buying produce, a small Amish boy who couldn’t talk pointed her to the family’s phone box in the woods.

One of her early success stories was landing a huge Walmart Distribution Center account where they would market thousands of watermelons and pumpkins she grew or collected from other farmers.

She had almost sealed the deal when she realized she would need semis — and drivers — to keep that contract. The much smaller farm produce trucks she and her brothers were driving and repairing themselves wouldn’t do the job.

Frey loves the land, which makes this story worth reading for Christians who cherish creation stewardship. In addition to distributing produce, her company is now large enough to innovate ways to reduce food waste and provide healthier eating.

They market watermelon juice bottled from melons past their prime but still perfectly good.

Frey’s father was a known wheeler-dealer who faked his own death in a mysterious car accident. As a child, she was never sure what kind of deals he was making, but she loved her father and knew he loved her, as well as his twenty other children. Yes, a total of 21 children, with different wives.

There is some rough language quoted in the book, but Frey her- self is committed to promoting manners, morals, and high standards for the hundreds of employees — including field hands — whom she treats well. Some of her family are devotedly Christian.

A nephew in the book scolds her for not going to church more often. She certainly holds up Christian values. It’s one of the best memoirs I’ve read. .

Melodie Davis grew up on a farm in northern Indiana and retired from 43 years as a producer/ editor at MennoMedia in 2019. She is a newspaper columnist, author of nine books and blogs at findingharmonyblog.com.