Ninety years of research on the Fairhope farm
The sign along Highway 104 near its junctions with U.S. 98 and County Road 13 — blue, orange and white, the Auburn University colors — marks one of the most quietly important pieces of land in Baldwin County. The Gulf Coast Research and Extension Center, the “substation” that old-timers around Fairhope still call it, has been running agricultural research on its 800 acres since 1930, when it was established as one of the five original outlying units of what is now the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station.
At the center of it all is Jarrod Jones, the Bay Minette native who leads the facility and, until recently, lived on it. Jones arrived straight out of a master’s program at Auburn and stayed — day and night, as he puts it — for a career that has now stretched past two decades. “It’s a very diverse research station, probably the most diverse in the state because of the long growing season,” he says. “The climate here allows for growing just about anything.”
What the station actually does
The mission is deceptively simple: figure out the best ways to grow things in coastal Alabama, and give the answers away. The station’s researchers run trials on varieties, fertility, disease and pest management, and publish what they learn through Auburn Extension’s online platforms for the state’s farmers — commercial growers and backyard ones alike.
The crops list is long. The station’s early decades centered on potatoes — which varieties grew best in coastal Alabama — and the research has since branched through citrus, pecans, corn, cotton, soybeans and peanuts, always with an eye toward what actually produces on Gulf Coast soil. Revenue from harvested crops goes back into the operation. Row crop research remains the core mission.
The cattle program runs in parallel. The station maintains a herd of roughly 110 cows producing around 100 calves a year, and its current trials examine different methods of weaning calves from their mothers. Two bulls round out the herd, along with two donkeys — Pattycake and Jack — stationed as coyote deterrents.
A working farm with a memory
The station was once a small village. From 1947 to 1985 it operated a dairy, and at its peak about 15 families lived on the grounds, running two crews — one milking twice a day, the other handling row crop and pecan research in the fields. Thirteen houses still stand among the oak-shaded buildings near the office, though the workforce has consolidated to a core team: Jones, an associate director, five technicians, a supervisor and an office administrator. The silos and lagoons are what remain of the dairy years.
Jones’s own path to the farm was nearly a detour. He grew up in Bay Minette, studied agronomy, soils and plant pathology at Auburn, and worked for the USDA National Soil Dynamics Lab on campus before coming back to Baldwin County as associate director — a post he held around 15 years before succeeding longtime director Malcomb Pegues, who retired after 40 years. As regional director he now also oversees three other Auburn facilities: in Spring Hill in Mobile, in Brewton, and in Headland, north of Dothan.
Development closes in on the farmland
The world around the station has changed faster than the research has. A multistory apartment complex now looms over the feed corn rows, and the city’s newest Publix occupies ground where Jones personally harvested cotton as a teenager working for the neighboring Cortes farm. The university’s personnel rules, meant to prevent any favoritism toward the Fairhope unit, now require Jones to live off-site; his family is building a home on 28 acres in the Rabun community in north Baldwin County, ending their years of living on the farm with their three children.
The pressure on farmland is precisely why Jones believes the station’s work has never mattered more. “We are losing farmland to development, so we have to make more yield on crops over less land,” he says. “It’s not just a Fairhope or Baldwin County thing — this same thing is happening all over the Southeast.”
Nearly a century in, the farm’s mission is unchanged: grow the trials, measure the results, and hand the findings to anyone who will use them. The apartment buildings can come. The research, like the oaks shading the old farm houses, intends to stay.