By Will Atwater
After serving five years in the Marine Corps and another 10 as a Department of Defense contractor, Robert Elliott found the transition away from military life difficult. The jobs he took did not last, he said, and neither did his first attempt at college.
Elliott was at a low point.
“I started going down to a really dark place in my mind,” he said. “A lot of folks that get out of the military in the first year, statistically speaking, wind up having really hard transitional issues.”
Missing the camaraderie and structure of military life, Elliott said he returned to something familiar: farming. He was raised on a family farm in Louisburg, North Carolina, where he helped tend tobacco, corn and cattle, and he drew on that experience and the discipline he developed in the Marine Corps to give agriculture another shot.
Farming restored Elliott’s sense of purpose, he said, and he began to wonder whether it could offer other veterans a route into civilian life. In 2015, he founded The Veteran’s Farm of North Carolina, a nonprofit that provides veterans with agricultural training and support as they pursue farm careers.
A way to ease into civilian life
The Veteran’s Farm of North Carolina trains military veterans in agriculture, with the goal of helping them build careers and find community after service. The nonprofit aims to address two challenges: helping veterans navigate civilian life and preparing a new generation to enter an aging farm workforce.
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