present time

 

Floyd County, Virginia (click the map to learn more)

original name of county seat:
Jacksonville

minerals: nickel, cobalt, iron, arsenic, soapstone

land area: 383 square miles

county officially established:
January 15, 1831

visit www.floydcountyinvew.com

Larry and Sirus

 Day by day:
In the summer time, I get up about half an hour an hour before daylight. I have a cup of tea, go to the outhouse, and as soon as soon as it starts to get late, I go out and take care of the laying hens. They have to be let out and fed. I make sure the water is right and check everything over. From there I go to the broilers, which are pens on the pasture outside, and I tend to that. It takes about a half hour to forty-five minutes. Then I come back in. On the way back, I check the sows to feed them and make sure they're all right. Then I eat breakfast, check the mail and my email, and do paperwork. After that, I go out and make an egg collection, feed the young hogs, and do whatever needs to be done, repairs and the like. I do the broilers and tend the brooder houses. Some time in that first in the morning, depending on what time of day it is now, it could be 8:30, 9:00, it could be 10:00.

I check the broiler houses with the little brooder houses, adjust the temperature inside them, and get onto whatever the program for the day is.  Somewhere around 1:00 or 2:00 I go back in, get a bite to eat, go make a collection of eggs, clean eggs, and go out and move the cattle. By now, you're talking anywhere around 3:00 or 4:00. I come back in, have a cup of tea, go back out, and make the reverse rounds of the rounds of the morning. I feed my beagles, come back in, feed myself dinner, then relax for a little bit. When it's close to dark, we check the broiler pens once again, close the hens up for the night, and go to bed.

Debbie tends to the horses and helps with our sales. She does most of the paperwork. We take eggs and meat to Blacksburg once a week. She does the fliers for that. On Fridays and Saturdays we process chickens.

 
On Debbie Bright:
Debbie is my second wife. When I met Debbie, I was working construction in Pennsylvania. It was a horse barn, and she was the manager for the barn. This was around 1983 or 1984. We started out as friends, but it became romantic. We ended up going to the justice of the peace, got our license, and then she married us. It was just us, the justice of the peace, and our dogs. We didn't want any rigamarole, it wasn't part of our lifestyle. A couple of months later, some friends gave us a party and our families came.

On Politics:
I’ve never been a political activist. When I was in college I always shied away from people that were, mostly because I didn’t really know what I was talking about. Of course I had opinions about it, but I was never interested enough to spend a lot of time researching and thinking about politics. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more convinced that both the Republican party and the Democratic party are nothing but a bunch of phonies who just want to take advantage of the people. When I was younger I was more idealistic about it. I thought that you could elect the president and they would work for the benefit of the people, but now I don’t believe that. Maybe I’ve become cynical.

The biggest political thing that’s ever affected me was the flight that was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland. My brother was on flight 103. That was a political thing. I would say that that’s the way I view these things. It’s one people against another. So obviously that’s had a lot of effect on my life. That may be one of the reasons why I’m a little more cynical about politicians and the lack of doing. I feel like both the Republicans and the Democrats don’t really have a grip on the terrorist situation and how Americans are perceived away from America.
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