Aggie turns farm into tulip destination
Former College of Agriculture and Life Sciences student Jerry Moody ’91 introduces people to agriculture through blooms
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Rows of pink, yellow and red tulips stretch across the East Texas countryside each spring, drawing families, photographers and flower lovers to a small farm outside Mount Pleasant.
Visitors wander through the blooms taking photos, filling baskets with flowers and soaking in the rare sight of thousands of tulips swaying in the Texas breeze.
For Jerry Moody ’91, a graduate of the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, those colorful rows grew from a visit to a tulip farm, some goading from his daughter and a lesson in agricultural economics playing out on the family farm.
“It was the first time I’d ever experienced something like that,” Moody said. “It was truly remarkable. It was colorful. It was beautiful. There were a lot of people out there having fun just enjoying the flowers and each other’s company.”
On the drive home, Moody told his family they could create something similar on their own land.
His middle daughter was quick to challenge him.
“My daughter told me, ‘You always say stuff like that. You never actually do it,’” Moody said with a laugh. “But the next year, on Dec. 23, she was right there with me in the dirt helping plant 23,000 tulip bulbs.”
That little push led to the creation of Moody Blooms, a growing agritourism piece of the operation that now draws thousands of visitors to the Moody family farm each spring.
A budding diversified farm
Before planting tulips, the Moody family farm focused on cattle and poultry production, with Moody serving as a contract grower for Pilgrim’s for nearly three decades.
Moody said diversification became essential for long term success due to the ebb and flow of markets and margins.
“You just have to be willing to branch out,” he said. “Even into things people might not consider traditional agriculture. When people were lined up to enter the farm that first year, I realized we might have something going here.”
Moody and his family plant roughly 40,000 bulbs annually as interest in the flowers and experience continues to grow. Much of the growth has come organically through social media and word of mouth. Visitors travel from across the state to see the tulips with their own eyes.
“Everybody that came out that first year posted pictures and tagged us,” Moody said. “It just exploded.”
The turns before the tulips
For Moody, the venture reflects the kind of innovation and adaptability producers have relied on for generations to meet the changing demands of agriculture.
But unlike many of those producers, Moody did not grow up on a family farm. He is a first-generation college graduate, a first-generation Aggie and a first-generation farmer.
After two years at a junior college, he transferred to Texas A&M University to study agricultural economics, a decision that would shape his future in ways he did not see coming.
A blind first date at a movie theater took care of the rest.
Moody met his wife, Deanna ’91, and through her family, got his start in production agriculture. Her father, a longtime agricultural science teacher, welcomed him into both the family and the farm, introducing him to poultry production and cattle.
Moody says his degree taught him how to make sound financial decisions and weigh risk against reward on the farm, an approach that continues to guide how he evaluates new ideas today.
“My wife says I’m a bit of a dreamer,” Moody said. “And, I suppose, that’s needed if you want to be successful in agriculture these days. You have to be able to think bigger and come up with new ideas to meet the times.”
That mindset not only led to tulips, but also to something Moody did not initially expect.
The fields have become a place where people slow down, connect with one another and spend time outdoors, whether they are celebrating milestones or simply enjoying a spring afternoon. In the process, Moody has found a way to share agriculture with people who may have never stepped foot on a farm.
Visitors come for the flowers but often leave with a better understanding of where their food and fiber come from, something Moody sees as both a responsibility and a privilege.
Tulips and … Christmas trees?
As the tulip farm wraps up its third season, the Moody family is exploring new ways to share agriculture with visitors beyond the few weeks of bloom each spring.
In addition to the tulips, Moody recently planted 500 Virginia pine seedlings. Within a few years, visitors will be able to return to the farm during the holiday season to cut their own Christmas trees.
“I hope the trees attract people to the tulips and the tulips attract people to the trees,” Moody said.
The growing agritourism operation has truly become a family effort. Moody’s daughters and their husbands, all Aggies, pitch in with everything from planting to running the farm, and his son Lucas helps with the cattle operation alongside his own herd. Lucas’s future daughter-in-law, an Aggie herself, is also part of the team. And then there are the five grandchildren who are already getting a firsthand look at life on the farm and may just be future Aggies themselves. As Moody puts it, it really takes all of them.
“They get to see something put in the ground and a flower come out three or four months later,” Moody said. “They absolutely love it.”
For Moody, agriculture has never been just an occupation. The work can be demanding and often requires long hours, but the reward comes from knowing the role farmers and ranchers play in feeding communities and connecting people to the land.
“Agriculture is not really a job,” he said. “It’s a way of life.”
