Saddle Creek Farm: Dr. Strickland's Origin Story

Before Custom Livestock Solutions, there was Saddle Creek Farm: a swath of land in Perry, Georgia, characterized by five generations of agriculture, a place where grandchildren are gifted cows for their second birthdays. It was a tradition Jody Strickland, mother of CLS founder Dr. Tyson Strickland, DVM, underwent as a child, and it’s a custom she’s kept going strong.

Dr. Tyson Strickland, DVM, center, stands with his parents on their family farm in Perry, Georgia.

“It’s just a lot of fun for me to watch the grandkids chasing fireflies at night and running around, working on the farm,” Jody says. “It keeps our family close, and it brings me a lot of joy to see the grandkids enjoying the same things I enjoyed growing up.”

Both she and her husband, Edmond, have strong agricultural backgrounds. His is a mixture of cattle, row crops, and pine trees. Jody grew up in Perry, where one of her grandfathers had both a dairy and thoroughbred horses, and another grew hogs and tobacco.

“I would help on the dairy farm and help with the tobacco farm cropping tobacco,” she says, adding that her family also had cows and row crops.

She and Edmond met in college, where they studied agricultural engineering. After a brief stint in Florida, they moved back to Perry in 1988 and started both a hobby farm and a family.

“‘94 was when we bought this farm,” Edmond says. “We didn’t move up here until later, but we had the farm and had cows. We lived about two miles away from it; just came out here every day and checked the cows.”

During Jody’s childhood, the roads around her family’s farms were notated as “Route 1” or “Route 2”. But when city leaders started naming roads, they tossed out “Pitzer Road” as an option for one of the routes that ran by the dairy, intending to name it for Jody’s grandfather.

“He was a very humble man and he said, ‘No, there’s other people that live on this road. Don’t name it after me,’” Jody says.

The powers that be decided “Watergate Road” would work instead. That is, until a certain piece of American history unfolded that made the name “Watergate” a little less desirable. The conversation again turned to renaming the road for its agricultural legacy.

“[My grandfather Pitzer] started the first saddle club in Georgia,” Jody says. “We had a horse arena, so on the weekends, people would come from everywhere that were in the saddle clubs and have Western horse shows. They did a little bit of English, but it was a lot of Western horse shows out on Arena Road.”

Saddlecreek Road — and thus Saddle Creek Farm — joined Arena Road as ways for Perry to pay homage to this part of its ag background. Though the original dairy and equestrian land that lined the roads was largely split up and developed in recent years, Jody, Edmond, and their daughters Morgan and Samantha continue to farm the acreage that remains. Samantha owns Arena Acres, an active flower and row crop farm on the former site of the Pitzer dairy. She followed in her great-grandfather’s footsteps and turned it into a renowned agritourism destination and event venue. Just down the street, Morgan’s family has show lambs, chickens, and some of the Saddle Creek cattle on land that once belonged to Jody’s parents.

“Over the years, we continued to try and expand and do other things with the farm,” Edmond says. “Then as [Jody’s] parents got older and weren’t wanting to do as much on that farm, we expanded into it.”

Tyson says it’s fun to remain involved on his family farm.

“Everybody’s still pretty tied to the properties and the land that we grew up on,” he says. “But as far as being able to come back, still be engaged, involved in the management, Dad and I kind of partner on the cow side of things. We’ve been able to expand and venture into some unique opportunities with embryo transfer and running recipient cattle and things like that.”

Having grown up farming, it came naturally to the Stricklands to raise Tyson and his sisters with exposure to agriculture.

“I don’t know how much of it was necessarily a choice to bring them up in it,” Edmond says. “I’d always grown up and got a little land and some cows, trees; hunt and fish, and so we’d have a little place where we can do all that. That just happened to be how they had to be raised, because that’s what we did.”

Whether it was intentional or not, agriculture stuck hard. All three Strickland children and their spouses are professionally involved in agriculture or forestry. In particular, Samantha is the fourth generation to farm on her family’s land, with her sons poised to be the fifth.

“While we’ve expanded the cattle operations, it’s really nobody’s primary income still. It’s something that utilizes the resources of the land; it’s a great avenue for us to kind of grow the operation as a whole and it feeds into what I do for a living, obviously,” Tyson says. “But for Samantha to come back and run Arena Acres? That’s what pays her bills. That’s her full-time job. It has been very successful.”

And with acreage surrounded by housing developments in one of the fastest-growing counties in Georgia, that success has been both hard-won and hard to come by. For her part, Jody says she’s glad her kids and grandkids want to see farming be successful.

“It really gives me a lot of hope that while this generation is — they’re very tech-savvy and they’re really learning a lot at a higher speed, but yet they love to just come in here and they know they can grab a fishing pole, run down to the pond and go fishing,” Jody says.

The farm, and Perry, look different nowadays from when she and her children grew up there. But now, when Tyson visits with his wife and daughters and watches his siblings, niece, and nephews enjoy Saddle Creek Farm, Arena Acres, and his family’s agricultural legacy, he is reminded this will always be home.

“We’ve all had our things that we love and we enjoy, but we’ve been able to utilize the land and continue to adapt with it and create value,” Tyson says. “It’s fun coming home and getting to see that evolution, but still being part of it, too. I enjoy doing that, getting to come back and still have a little piece of it that I can work and play with.”

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Custom Livestock Solutions is Georgia’s proven source for premiere herd health and management services. Our vets serve large animal herds, show barns and stables in the Peach State and nearby neighbors in South Carolina. Visit us in Comer Monday through Friday from 9 to 5, or call 706-783-8128 to learn more.