Callaway Stivers at the Bluegrass Farmers Market
Callaway Stivers has been in business more than half his life. While that’s a fairly common statement to make about entrepreneurs in their 50s or 60s, Callaway is just 15 years old and a sophomore in high school. Yes, he has learned business skills at a young age, and yes, his agribusiness is important (and hip) in today’s world, and he gets to work with family and put his artistic talents to good use, as he is a visual arts major at SCAPA at Bluegrass. But beyond all this, business is allowing Callaway to experience the fullest sense of community.
“Through the vegetables, we’ve made some good friends in the neighborhood,” he said. “Some we’re not even selling to, but I can walk by their house and talk with them for several hours, and have a drink or a piece of pie with them.”
He is connected to the earth by planting and harvesting vegetables and making connections to other people through the results of these labors. Callaway and his brother, Coleman, are equal partners in Stivers Brothers Homegrown Produce and Honey, selling wares at Bluegrass Farmers’ Market on Saturdays and in their Lexington neighborhood during the week. Eight years ago, when Callaway was seven and Coleman Stivers was 10, they worked a small garden plot in their backyard designed by their dad, Jeff Stivers, who is the president of Ross Tarrant Architects. Their mom, Melanie Stivers, is a resource specialist at SCAPA Bluegrass.
“At first it was just for our family to have some vegetables to eat,” Callaway said. “Then we started getting a lot of extra vegetables and started giving them away to our neighbors.”
Soon the neighbors said they would be happy to pay for the produce. The brothers asked their parents if it would be all right to sell vegetables. Melanie Stivers hesitated at first.
“I said, ‘No, that’s not what we’re trying to do,’ but then I thought about it and thought this could be a cool little business for these guys,” she said.
In 2006, the boys took a basket around a couple of times a week to their closest neighbors. The next year they branched out to another street in the neighborhood, pulling a red Radio Flyer wagon. Then they upgraded to a yellow garden cart from Lowe’s and used their grandfather’s farm to grow a lot more vegetables. Charles Byers, a retired professor who taught ag education at UK for 39 years, has a 10-acre farm, High Point Farm, near Calumet.
In addition to growing zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, okra and several types of fruit, the Stivers brothers are also beekeepers. They started with one hive in their backyard and moved it to their grandfather’s farm, adding another five or six hives, so the bees could have access to clover and locust trees, and so they could pollinate the vegetables.
“That was quite a venture to add on top of the vegetable business we already had,” Callaway said.
Yes, the fraternal beekeepers have been stung a few times.
“The bees have turned out to be extremely profitable but difficult,” he said. “But definitely the honey is worth it.”
This summer he attended the three-week Governor’s School for Entrepreneurs program at Georgetown College, where 14 teams of high-school students had some competition thrown in while they were learning about marketing and creating business models. “My team was not in the final five, but I was perfectly OK with that,” Stivers said. “I was there purely for experience.”
One of the entrepreneurial tips he picked up led to a change in the Stivers Brothers door-to-door services. Instead of both brothers going around the neighborhood together, with produce in the back of the car and having people pick out their vegetables on the spot, Callaway decided to ride his bike and take a notebook to each door. He tells people what’s available and then calls in their orders to his brother, who fills them.
“Then we go back in the same order and deliver within half an hour, like ordering pizza,” he said.
“It’s been an unexpected adventure in entrepreneurship,” their mother said. “It’s been the two of them the whole way together.”
Coleman Stivers is now a freshman at UK studying agricultural engineering. He has been involved with 4-H (he showed lambs in his younger days) and studied at Locust Trace AgriScience Farm. He was president of his local FFA chapter, attended the Institute for Future Agricultural Leaders and the Governor’s Scholars Program, and he serves on the Bluegrass Farmers Market board of directors. This summer he had an internship at Big Ass Solutions, formerly Big Ass Fans.
“We’re learning valuable lessons we're going to use the rest of our lives,” Coleman Stivers said. “I don’t think we’ll have a produce business when we grow up, but I’m going to know how to relate to customers.”