County Has New Ag Agent
Meet Trey Gafnea. He is Jasper County’s newest extension agent, eager and ready to serve. In fact with less than a week on the job, he has attended a dairy show in Madison, met with the 4-H Horse Club, and of course made plans to travel to Perry this weekend for all the agricultural fanfare the National Fair brings to Georgia.
Trey is a Peach State native from West Georgia where he was raised on a small registered angus farm near Carrollton. His parents were city slickers from Atlanta who wanted a change of pace for their family. After high school, Trey earned a Bachelor of Science degree in animal science from Berry College in 2009.
Don’t let his youthful looks baffle you, he comes highly experienced in all things agricultural.
Following an intern with 7-L Farms in Mississippi on a registered angus seed stock operation, Trey wasn’t quite ready to settle into a conventional job just yet so he set out on a Southern-Midwest adventure. He took a job as a seed manager for a dairy farm in Live Oak, Fl. From the sunshine state he was headed to the ‘Land of Oz’ to join a combine crew.
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“I liked Kansas so much that after harvesting season was over I chose not to return home but stay there and look for work.”
Didn’t take long before he was the lone overseer of Hilker Ranch, a 6,000 acre calf/cow operation which equipped him with more knowledge than he could have ever imagined. After two years of countless calf deliveries, harsh snow-wretched winters, and an obscene amount of four-wheeler ‘frequent driver’ miles, Trey decided it was time to head back south to be closer to family.
He began working for the University of Georgia extension service in Meriwether County in March 2013. In his first extension assignment he served as extension coordinator and as the only extension agent, a huge task for a county of that size. After a year and half, he took the opportunity to join the Jasper Extension Office as the Agricultural and Natural Resource Agent largely because he wanted to focus his efforts on agricultural programming while meeting the needs of youth and adults in this area.
