Basically for every house a certain number of acres has to be set aside. This subdivision has 18 one acre lots and the last lot was the 75 acre conservation lot. My dad was able to get 2 acres rezoned residential and the remaining stayed agricultural, which meant by code it could only be used as farmland or left natural, it couldn’t be further subdivided.

So he has this nice house and wants something nice to look at in the back yard so we investigated planting a vineyard but the only way to make money was to build a winery and we didn’t want that headache so we decided on peaches. The area had orchards in the past but kids didn’t want to take them over or developers got to them.

We never had an agricultural background, Hell I didn’t even cut my own grass. We had auto repair shops, built race cars, built houses and then got into the self storage business. Dad had a good business nose and I learned a lot from him. He basically said find a need and fill it and learn as much as possible from as many sources possible.