The Volunteer

Four generations of the family have come home from Knoxville with a Tennessee degree.

Whitt's is in Agricultural Economics, earned on the ag campus at the University of Tennessee and finished in 1991. It is a practical education for a practical business: land, labor, markets, and what is left at the end of the year. Every bit of it has been put to work since, first on the family's century farm and then across the counter at Whitt's Place.

He will also be the first to tell you that the classroom was only part of it. Some of the best instruction he ever got came from farmers who had been at it their whole lives, usually over a cup of coffee down at the co-op.

He was a member of Pi Kappa Phi during his years in Knoxville, and Tennessee runs deep in the family besides. His grandmother Ruth earned a master's in education there in 1970, and his mother Elizabeth earned a bachelor's there in 1969 and later a master's and a doctorate, both in education. Whitt came next in 1991, and his daughter after him: four generations who have sat in the same classrooms and pulled for the same teams. It started, as the family tells it, with his mother and father meeting on that campus.

And he follows all of it. Football in the fall, basketball through the winter, baseball in the spring. If Tennessee is playing, Whitt has a good idea of the score.

There is a habit the ag campus teaches that never left him: you plan past one season. A farmer who only thinks about this year's yield does not stay a farmer very long, and a county that only budgets for this year does not serve its people very well either.

More of Whitt's story in the weeks ahead.