City Girl Turns To Ranching To Reconnect With the Land One day in 2005, it hit Onika Huggins that she had no home. She’d travelled extensively throughout North America, the Caribbean, and Europe for Pfizer (the Fortune 500 research-based pharmaceutical company) after joining them in 1997, and had sold her house and car after they moved her to New York in 2001 and on to Ireland in 2002. That day in 2005, she was flying back to the US from Dublin, and on the US entry card she didn’t know what to enter for her address – her US hotel, her parents’ home, the home she sold before moving away, the address where all her worldly possessions were in storage… Shaken by this, she asked her parents to keep an eye out for a place she could buy to return to and that they could look after while she was away. In 2007, they found the perfect one and – with lots of faxes and one trip to the American Embassy – Onika bought it, sight unseen. Like her parents – who travelled from their home in Chicago for 10-years before finding and purchasing their property in 1986 – Onika planned to raise hay and Angus beef while protecting the land and water. And then she realized: she knew nothing about ranching. After all, she grew up in Chicago – not exactly a rural training ground… Fortunately, her parents (especially her father, who was born and raised on a farm in Scott County Mississippi) and the Neshoba County NRCS stepped in to offer lots of encouragement and assistance. On the 60-acre Woodpile Ranch (located on Highway 15 in Union, MS), Onika is growing and selling livestock and related products with her parents – currently including Black Angus cattle, free-range yard eggs and chickens, fish, and hay. With the support and guidance of the Neshoba County NRCS office, Onika is near finishing the third step of a five step plan to create a back to basics, self-sustaining property. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) is enabling her to more quickly turn Woodpile Ranch into a model of what small farmers and ranchers can achieve using conservation practices and traditional small farm practices. Once the plan is fully implemented, Woodpile Ranch will offer: • • • • Breeding stock (cattle, hogs, and goats), which will be sold to local and regional ranchers via private treaty direct sales and auction sales, Produce and eggs, sold to local and regional customers via farmers markets and direct sales, Meat (cattle, hogs, and goats – on the hoof, and poultry), which will be sold to local and regional customers online and face to face, and Cabins, where individuals and groups can see sustainable, traditional, small farm practices first-hand – and eat naturally raised food and homemade canned goods. Through EQIP, Onika was able get Woodpile ready for grazing and haying years sooner than hoped by adding cross fences and a second pond. An EQIP application was developed and approved to address inadequate stock water supply and poor grazing, and to correct pasture sizing to enable rotation grazing. The existing water source was a single pond, insufficient to service the four pastures created by cross-fencing. The conservation plan included the installation of a 310,000 gallon piped pond, 3200 linear feet of fencing, and multiple fertilizer
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