Travis Kress

Nope, it’s not dirt

With a lot of experience behind him and a degree from Auburn in agronomy and soil, Travis Kress knows what he has – the foundation for life.

‘Soil’ and family form the foundations for five generations of Kress farmers

Story and photos by David Moore

Soil is the foundation for all life.

That’s the introductory – and fundamental – remark Travis Kress gives his small class of farmers/ wannabes this semester at Wallace State Community College.

For a visitor who mentions “dirt” during a conversation at his family’s fifth-generation farm just north of Cullman Regional Medical Center, Travis is even more elemental.

“Dirt is soil out of place,” he says, a grin softening his seriousness. “Dirt is what you find in the house. Soil is what you find in the field.”

He confesses to stealing this illustrative definition of dirt from a forestry program he once participated in, but his knowledge of soil runs deeper than a minor, oneoff theft.

Now 33, Travis has farmed since age 10, working alongside his grandfather Robert Kress – killed in a 2002 farming accident – his uncle Kerry Kress and his father Brian.

“They instilled in me the principles of farming and how the business end works,” says Travis.

He, his wife Ashley and their young daughters live elsewhere, on a 120-acre farm his parents, Brian and Pam, own in Fairview.

But the 60-acre farm located behind the hospital is the emotional heart of the extended family operation. Not only does Robert’s wife, Betty still live there, it’s where Travis’s great-great grandfather settled some 150 years ago.

Travis raises about 40 acres of soybeans here, several acres each of vegetables and fruit trees and an acre of strawberries. Meanwhile, in Fairview and on other rented land, Brian raises about 300 acres of soybeans and a 100 acres each of sweet potatoes and wheat.

Father and son tag-team the labor.

“Financially, we have our own independent operations,” Travis says. “But we work together on whatever needs to get done. Whatever it takes.”

Family is as fundamental to Kress farming as the soil itself. Travis and Nanny Betty – she’s too young to be called “grandmother” – are informally digging into the Kress family roots branched out in the Cullman soil.

Conrad Kress migrated from Germany, landing, so to speak, about 1873 with a presidential land grant for

640 acres that once encompassed part of Catoma and part of the property where CRMC now grows. “Seems his wife decided at the last minute to leave her family and come with Conrad,” Travis says. Conrad was impressed with the area, in part because allergy problems that bothered him in Germany vanished in the Cullman air. He wrote of the news to other suffering family back home, offering to sell them part of his land if they migrated, too. Over time, Conrad added onto his original log cabin and divided his land among kin, which included sons George, Henry and John, farmers all. “I’ve been trying to track everything down,” Peaches, like strawberries, bring relatively good returns at the Travis says. “There used to be sharecropper houses market, however they are very labor-intensive with the pruning, on the farms. Today, my spraying and picking. “It takes 16 months of work a year,” cousin John Kress has Travis says. He started the orchard above about 15 years ago, cattle on part of it, and we but got busy with other things. His dad now rent land from other nonhandles the peaches for the most part. farming cousins.” Travis’s grandfather, Robert, was born on his father George’s farm. It was Robert who later married Betty in her pre-nanny days. George died when his grandson Brian was relatively young, and Robert died when his grandson Travis was a young boy. A week later, Travis’s great uncle Albert Kress, who lived next door, died. But the family nucleus remained tight through good times and bad, drought and flood, financial hardships and years of healthy markets. It’s what farmers do.

Brian and Pam Kress bought their 120-acre farm north of Fairview in the 1980s. Travis and his younger sister, Erin, grew up there. She would go on to marry Zak Wilson, Travis’s best friend in high school.

Travis Kress farms in the Catoma area as well as Fairview. What’s more, for the past several years he’s taught continuing ed agriculture classes at Wallace State Community College, left. He says he’s fortunate in that he loves both vocations. “What I do is what I teach,” Travis says. This semester, through a program at Wallace and Athens University, he began working on a master’s degree in education to add to his agronomy degree from Auburn.

Though closer to Fairview High, the kids were schooled in Cullman for the convenience. Brian worked a lot at the old home farm where Betty lives, and Pam was a nurse at nearby CRMC.

Travis says Brian is probably his best friend, but they’ve had some back and forth over the years.

“As a kid, I used to tell my dad I was going to my room,” Travis says. “He’d say, ‘You don’t have a room. You’re just a boarder.’ After I got my house here, I told him I was no longer a boarder. I was a squatter.”

Father and son didn’t always operate in the same time zone, and sometimes still don’t.

“He fussed at me a lot about not getting up early,” Travis laughs. “He wanted to get up at 5 in morning and be done at 5 pm. I tell him I’m a new generation farmer – I wake up at 7 or 8. But, depending on the light or the weather, I’ll be in the field at 10 or 11 at night to have trucks loaded with wheat or soybeans so he can haul it to Guntersville in the morning.”

Tractors and crops and soil aren’t Travis and Brian’s only commonalities. Both have long loved dirt-track racing.

“It was our vice. It was our getaway from farming sunup to sundown,” Travis says.

Travis was a sixth grader when Brian and one of his summer helpers built a dirt-track car and started racing. After three years, Travis was revved up to race. His mom stipulated he had to be 16, but she capitulated the summer he was 15 and let him start practicing.

And not only does he still race today, but Travis builds half a dozen cars a year for other racers.

After graduating from Cullman in 2007, Travis attended Wallace State two years then headed off to Auburn University.

“I had met a guy at Wallace (David Topping) and we got to be buddies,” he says. “I introduced him to a girl I knew from high school (Lauren Larue). They got married and I said he owed me one.”

So it was that Travis met Ashley Chandler, a Vinemont graduate also at Auburn. They had their first date in August 2009.

“I was going to take her to Burger King in Auburn. I had a gift card.” Travis laughs. “Everyone was giving me a hard time, so I had to carry her to Buffalo Connection.”

He later worried he might face some blowback from her family after taking her to dirt-track race in Phoenix City, but her grandfather turned out to be a big racing fan and smoothed that potential bump in the road.

Travis graduated in 2011 with a degree in agronomy and soil. Ashley followed suit that December with a degree in elementary education. They married May 19, 2012.

Travis and Brian prepare to rip up last year’s plastic mulch as part of the January preparations for planting this year’s large strawberry patch. There’s a lot of father-son banter between them, but Travis says they are actually good friends and talk at least a half-dozen or so times a day. Behind them is Brian’s mother, Betty’s house.

“We have a 10th anniversary coming up,” he laughs, lobbying for credit for remembering.

Travis owned a mobile home in Auburn, and made a deal with the late Gene Norman, a mobile home transporter from Garden City: he built a body for Gene’s race car in exchange for moving his mobile home to the farm in Fairview.

He and Ashley “squatted” there until 2017 when they built a house on the property.

A first grade teacher at West Point, she initially helped Travis farm their two acres of vegetables then sell them. Though still helping at the Festhalle Farmers Market, she’s taken a hiatus from farming until their two girls get a little older.

Year-old photo, above, shows Ashley and Travis with their daughters, Merritt, now 4, and Makenna Massey, now 9 months. Ashley teaches first grade at West Point Elementary School. Though no one is pushing the youngsters to any career – Brian Kress tried to encourage his son to branch out from agriculture – five generations of farming did influence the girls’ names. Merritt is a variety of corn, Travis grins, and Makenna’s middle name comes from Massey Ferguson, a brand of tractor. This past winter has been a good time for Travis to work on his dirt track racer, below.

Just as Brian never pressured Travis into racing, neither did he pressure him into farming. Actually, it was just the opposite.

“Dad’s deal was go try something else,” Travis says. “He got out of high school and came directly to the farm.”

“Anything you want to be,” Brian told his son. “Try something else. The farm is always here.”

“He was backing me to go and do other things,” Travis laughs. “And dadgum if I didn’t mess around and get a degree in farming.”

When he’d finished high school, Travis had thought on and off about teaching – probably ag. But he came up with a oneword response: “Nah!” And college didn’t change his feelings.

While at Auburn, he missed living on the farm. And every time he came home he enjoyed helping his dad.

“A lot of people hurry to get away from home,” Travis says. “But I knew where I was going after college. I was going to stay in Cullman and live on the farm, either in Catoma or Fairview.”

Still uncertain he actually wanted to be a full-time farmer, he positioned himself with studies at Auburn that could land him a job in Cullman. Extension work was a prime choice, but after graduation there was no local opening.

Engaged and needing a job, Travis helped Brian farm. But financially he needed his own crop, so in 2013 he planted soybeans and – for the first time in two Kress generations – strawberries.

To that, he added part-time work traveling to farms in Alabama and Tennessee conducting soil samples by GPS grids. In 2014, he jumped at the chance to work part-time as a water tech with Cullman County Soil and Water Conservation. He enjoyed the community involvement and working with SWC’s Tim Scott.

When Tim left to become manager for the new Duck River reservoir, Travis moved into his old job as SWC project coordinator.

Farming family soil all this time, Travis also found himself still thinking of teaching – and that door was about to open.

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One decision was to hire a farm manager for the school’s six greenhouses, three nursery houses, three high tunnels (season extensions) and halfacre of fruit and vegetable production. A teaching component was added to the position – and Travis landed the job in February 2018.

For their “extravagant” support, he says he appreciates not just Dr. Karolewics but also former Dean Jimmy Hodges, now president of Calhoun Community College, and his replacement, Dean Wes Rakestraw.

Along with providing a foundation in soil, Travis wants to flatten the learning curve for his continuing ed students and teach them the importance of “pencil whipping” – for analyzing a crop’s potential yield, both from the ground and in the bank.

“It can be a thin line between profit and loss,” says the teacher with five generations of hands-on experience behind him.

“This is the path where I was led,” Travis says of his situation. “It allowed me to get the best of all the worlds. I like the aspect of being able to farm – but also to educate. If you had asked me what my dream job is, I don’t know that I could have come up with something as perfect as this.

“What I do,” he adds, back to fundamentals, “is what I teach.”

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