By Jennifer Dorsett
Field Editor
When COVID-19 disrupted McCulloch County Farm Bureau’s (CFB) normally scheduled Food Connection event to promote agriculture in the community in May, the board of directors rescheduled the event for October.
But when October rolled around with COVID-19 safety precautions still firmly in place, the board came up with a clever solution.
“Like everybody else, we were afraid to host any type of public event with COVID raging,” McCulloch CFB President Bobby Pearce said. “So, we came up with the idea of giving turkeys away at Lowe’s Supermarket.”
After talking the idea over with grocery store management, McCulloch CFB began advertising the event.
“We said we’d give 20 turkeys away—one every 15 minutes, starting at 12 p.m. and going until 5 p.m. the Sunday before Thanksgiving,” Pearce said. “Our only stipulation is that they had to be present to win. If they were there, we gave them a turkey.”
The turkeys were large, coming in at about 16 to 18 lbs. each.
“Probably 85 percent were people who really needed a turkey for Thanksgiving, so we were very happy about that,” Pearce said. “We had people standing there an hour or more saying, ‘I hope they call my name,’ so it was wonderful that we were able to help them.”
Several people stopped by to ask how much raffle tickets were. Pearce noted it was extremely gratifying to be able to tell them it was at no cost, thanks to the joint effort between McCulloch CFB and matching funds from Texas Farm Bureau (TFB).
McCulloch CFB used the TFB Feeding the Need co-op contribution program to help fund the turkey giveaway.
“The county Farm Bureau did this to help people, because it’s been a tough year with COVID and people losing jobs,” he said. “We’re grateful to Texas Farm Bureau for matching those funds, so we were able to help more people.”
While Brady and the surrounding communities have had numerous COVID-19 cases and related impacts throughout the year, Pearce said the need in McCulloch County was even greater this year due to several local sand plants shutting down last fall.
“This county has a special kind of sand they can use in oil fracking. We had five sand plants in our community that closed down, so we had a large number of people even before COVID that had lost jobs,” he said. “There were many, many trucks going out of the county every day headed to West Texas, so we lost a lot of income community-wide when those trucks stopped coming. People couldn’t afford to go out to eat anymore, and local businesses lost money when the traffic slowed down. So, it was a community-wide effect when we lost those plants.”
But being able to give generously lifted the spirits of the McCulloch CFB leaders who organized the event, as well as those of the residents who received turkeys.
“We had two turkeys left at 5 p.m., so we told the manager if there’s somebody in the store who really needs one, we’d just give them one. We found two different families that badly needed some extra help for Thanksgiving dinner, and it was really wonderful to be able to provide for them,” Pearce said.
Earlier in the day, a man who won one of the turkeys said he was single and didn’t need that much meat, so he in turn donated his turkey to a local charity that provides hot meals for people who are in need, paying the giving spirit forward.
That’s the true spirit of Farm Bureau, Pearce said.
“We farm and ranch to feed the world. In this case, we got to help feed our local residents,” he said.