Meet Scott Meyer

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Scott Meyer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Scott, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
I get my work ethic from my desire to constantly make our farm more resilient, beautiful and welcoming with each passing day. I always enjoy working with my hands and actively creating and exploring. If I am not working in the fields or in our winery or restaurant I am painting or fishing or simply planning for what is coming next. A blessing or a curse, I am rarely in neutral, and am always actively pursuing some objective, which translates to always showing up and always working hard at whatever it is that comes my way.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
Lindsay and I are in the midst of our 10th year developing our farm based enterprise at Congaree and Penn, and we still feel like we are just getting started. Like anything in life there have been plenty of challenges along the way, and we have continuously been inventing and reinventing our business, building and rebuilding our team and doing our best to create something special in my hometown of Jacksonville, Florida.

I’d say we would be proud of ourselves if we looked back at where we started, but we rarely do. It is much more often that we are looking ahead to what is coming next. Over the past decade we have grown our operations from simply delivering delicious fresh milled rice to chefs in Jacksonville, operating out of a shed behind our house, to buying back and reinvigorating the landscaping and tree nursery business that I grew up in, establishing our hard cider business and most recently opening the farm for full service dining during the summer of 2020.

We are currently planning our next phase of operations on the farm, which will include rental cottages as well as a new farm store and bakery, which will offer guests visiting the farm a wider variety of food & beverage options, which are currently limited to seated fine-dining and a small snack menu available at the farm stand Thursday through Sunday. We hope to be up and running with these new facilities sometime in 2024.

In the short term we are very excited about our first year of olive oil production for retail sales. The 7 acres of trees planted in 2017 are finally coming into production, and an additional 6 acres are being planted this spring. We have also had our first big Mayhaw harvest this spring wherein we had an abundance of fruit from our 35 acre plantings established in 2015-2017. We were able to wholesale to some other jelly makers and specialty foods manufacturers for the first time, and begin establishing the market for our specialty fruit. It is always exciting to see hard work pay off in operations like orchards, as this is something that can take 5-8 years to begin making a crop, and is hard for most people to understand.

Lindsay and I intend to continue pouring ourselves into this land, our team and our products for another decade or more, and I would say that I am most excited to see what that looks like in 2033. As long as we can continue on a path of sustainable growth, I am sure the farm will have matured into a remarkable place that we would be proud of and that visiting guests will enjoy.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Primarily, I think it all comes down to a willingness to learn paired with a willingness to fail. Coming into developing our business I had some skills in plumbing, biology, and generally understood what things would take, but you really only gain knowledge through failure. Through failure I have learned patience, organization and oftentimes a deeper mechanical or biological understanding of what it was that went wrong. Essentially you just have to be open to the fact that things will go wrong and can go wrong at any time, its in that moment where experience and adaptability become more and more valuable.

Here’s a good couple of secrets for anyone reading this:

1.) If equipment isn’t working, try cleaning it thoroughly and then try again, this is the solution to a lot more problems than you can imagine.

2.) You cannot control the weather.

Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
It can be easy to become overwhelmed, particularly when you wear a lot of hats. A good way to overcome this is through avoiding it all together. The best way to do that is to build a great team around you, and always work toward helping them learn through their own failures, while also guiding them with what you have learned through your own. This is a great step in the right direction. It is also critical to keep good people engaged and working with you– the longer the better.

However, at some point you will become overwhelmed, and my advice at that point is to stop doing and start planning. Sit down and write out a list in whatever way works for you of the things that you need to do to feel like you have everything back in order. At that point you must make the hard decisions on where effort is placed, but the only way I have found to overcome being overwhelmed is through organization. Also, figure out what organized means to you, and use the tool that works for you. I like lists on pieces of paper, its not high tech, but it works for me.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Stefanie Keeler

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