Meet the McVeys

Ask any couple how they met and you’re likely to get two different stories with a few overlapping facts. That’s certainly true for Bradley and Emily McVey, a young couple in Wilson County, Kansas, who got married last fall.

“I claim she was stalking me on Twitter,” Bradley says, clearly teasing his wife.

Yes, Emily admits she followed him on Twitter—accidentally—but that’s only because they knew people in common who tried to connect them.

When they met in person and started talking about farming, well, Emily sums it up this way: “He fell in love with me, basically.”

The couple laughs as they tell the story, filling in details for one another and playfully bantering back and forth. It’s easy to see how they must have clicked right off the bat.

But their story is as closely tied to their love of farming as their love for each other. From the get-go, Emily was charmed by Bradley’s tweets, which included pictures of baby calves and jokes about soil fertility.

“I thought he was funny,” she says.

Both came from farming families. Bradley grew up helping on his grandparents’ farm. He rode tractors and started running the combine when he was 12. He studied ag engineering and agronomy at K-State and thought he might get into machinery design, but he missed farming.

“I would much rather be on the farm,” he says. “I enjoyed engineering, but farming is what I’ve always done.”

Emily also fondly remembers learning about the equipment and working the fields as a child.

“As a kid growing up on the farm you see your family out there running these big machines,” she says. “They want to pass that down to you and you get to see the whole process.”

Now, Emily hopes to pass that love on to future generations. She works as a teacher and one of her favorite units at school is the one on farming.

“When I ask my students where milk comes from, so many of them say ‘the store.’ That amazed me,” she says. “Even in a farming community, so many children don’t understand what it’s like to be on a farm.”

She wants children to know that milk comes from dairy cows and eggs come from chickens. But there’s more to it than that, she says.

“So many people think that all we do is feed people,” she says.

In reality, numerous materials can be traced back to the farm—candles, lip balm, toothpaste, charcoal, gum, even foam under the turf at football stadiums. (If you’re curious, the items can be linked to Kansas ag as follows: candles, lip balm, and turf foam—soybeans; toothpaste—a small amount of beef; charcoal—corn; gum—wheat.)

Emily also wishes people understood that farmers aren’t stuck in the 1800s.

“I’m just a normal person,” she says, explaining she’s on Facebook, drinks Starbucks coffee, and just happens to farm. “I eat what we grow.”

Another common misperception of farming?

“Animal agriculture isn’t as bad as the media makes it out to be,” Bradley says. “We treat our animals much better than what people see on TV. They get taken care of a lot better than most people realize.”

Bradley and Emily’s passion for farming and ranching is evident and they hope to make others feel as connected to the land as they do.