Sussex County Farm Bureau honored Barbara Sapp of Milton and the Herbert Wright family of Delmar at the annual banquet last month.
Sapp received the Distinguished Service to Agriculture Award and the Wrights’ children accepted the Farm Family of the Year Award for their parents, who were delayed in returning from a trip abroad.
“Herb Wright truly has farming and Sussex County in his blood,” said Guy Phillips, former Sussex County Farm Bureau president, who made the presentation.
Wright lives in the house he grew up in, on the farm founded by his grandfather in 1933. He has remodeled two more farmhouses on his land, now lived in by his children and grandchildren. He says, “I’ve moved three times in my life and never gotten more than 2 miles from the home I grew up in.”
Wright earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Delaware, where he met his wife Kathy. They have four children: Dawn, Phillip, Jeffrey and Lisa, in addition to their spouses and 12 grandchildren. Jeffrey followed in his dad’s footsteps to earn a plant science master’s degree from the University of Delaware.
Wright partners with Jeffrey in their farming operation, H and J Wright Family Farms. They farm more than 500 acres, growing corn, soybeans, watermelon and butternut squash. Turkeys have been grown on the Wright farm for more than 80 years and the whole family participates in the busy turkey dressing season.
Barbara Sapp grew up on a farm “on the other side of the tracks” in Harrington from her future husband, Richard.
Her parents had grown chickens, and Richard’s parents had dairy cows. When they got married, they made a pact that they would have neither.
They settled in Milton 60 years ago and on 2,000 acres of rented ground, they raised beef cattle and grew limas, peas, wheat, barley, rye, soybeans and corn. In recent years they’ve had the help of their son, Richard Jr., and grandson, Richard III (“Trey”).
Sapp has worked at a bank and at the local hospital and has been a substitute teacher, cafeteria worker, and crop insurance adjuster.
She has served the Farm Bureau as chair of the Sussex County and the state Women’s Committee and as a director of both county and state boards.
Sapp was one of the first two women to receive the Secretary’s Award for Distinguished Service to Delaware Agriculture.
Many members of the Sapp family were on hand for the award, including the Sapps’ first great-grandchild, two-week-old Payten Sapp.
