![Adam and Michelle with new blueberry plants](http://www.farmvetco.org/"wp-content/uploads//2009/07/New-blueberry-pic14-300x225.jpg "New blueberry pic1")
Adam and Michelle with new blueberry plants
Adam Burke was the first person in his family who didn’t go directly into farming. His life’s path took him away from the family farm that he grew up on in Sumter County, Florida and across the world to the battlefields of Iraq, then back home on a stretcher. Now, after several difficult years of hard work, tenacity and relearning how to walk and talk, Adam and his wife Michele are back on the farm.
Adam was injured twice in Iraq. After recovering from his first injury, he returned to combat. Then, three days before his fifteen-month tour was to end in 2004, he took a mortar hit while serving in Balad, in the middle of the Sunni triangle.
I still have shrapnel riddled throughou![FVCAdamBox2](http://www.farmvetco.org/"wp-content/uploads//2009/07/FVCAdamBox22-300x227.jpg "FVCAdamBox2")
t my head and body,” he says. “I have been undergoing treatment and therapy with the VA System and the progress is slow and tiresome.”
Adam suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and vertigo. He walks with a cane to catch his falls. He has a 100% disability rating. A lesser person might take his disability pay and give up, but Adam not only wants to farm, he wants to help other vets.
Adam and Michele are putting together a very unique blueberry farm. They are planting two-year-old high-bush varieties in thirty-gallon containers. “That way guys can pick in wheelchairs or if they have just one arm,” he says. Their five-acre blueberry farm will serve as a sanctuary for other vets, offering employment, healing and an endless supply of nature’s most delicious antioxidant.
Adam’s commitment to the Farmer Veteran Coalition goes beyond his own farm. While receiving treatment at the VA in California this spring, Adam called farmers in his Florida hometown to see who needed help. When he found farms looking for labor, Adam asked the Florida VA to send over some vets. Two of them got work washing and boiling green peanuts for Michele’s father’s roadside stand.
This is such an inspiring story. Adam and Michele: I pray that your love strengthens you and inspires you to do more. Love itself is healing, and I know it will nourish you into greater health.
(My mother was diagnosed with Type-C hepatitis, but when my sister had a baby girl, and that baby grew up under the same roof as my mother, the hepatitis disappeared. The “baby” is now ten, and the hepatitis is gone. Mama say, “It’s a miracle,” and I say, “Well, DUH.”
Good luck with the blueberries. If I ever get to your neck of the woods (swamp? shore? I lived in multiple parts of Florida and can’t keep it all straight), I will visit y’all.
Adam: I wish the circumstances had not existed that led you to make such an enormous sacrifice. Better things are in store for you and yours.
Dear Adam,
We haven’t talked for a while. Your blueberry bushes look wonderful !
I am so happy for you and Michele ! People helping people is what it’s all about. Blessings. Joy.
Your blueberries look wonderful. I got a good crop off my small three plants Keep up the good work. My husband is 100% from Viet Nam and can relate. Linda
watching FARMaid (far maid)…seen one william nelson with a vet/farm co cap…incredible individual…and google leading to this…seeing that you are a Burke, a vet; sumter flor…county…PTSD, as I am viet era (Potatoes, Tomatoes, Squash (and what a meal)…until you bite into that Dikon radish…all hell breaks loose…especially those that choose to remain unknowledge of this condition…
100%, and back here in NO MANS LAND, finding relatives with the name Burke…as in Burkeville Texas…that migration of traumatized natives from TRAIL of Tears…multi generational…and am most elated finding a younger vet not giving up, trying to make lemonaid….
as I tell so many, my blue heeler chases the cat…the cat chases the rooster…the rooster chases the hens…I steal the hens aigs that get laid…take them to the feed store, exchange for feed…thus the cycle begins again…what a circus…what a circus…freedom, only takes a chair under the oaks to enjoy this…stress free…raize them berries…such healing properties to touch the soil…our mother…
(google)roscoebeauregard.blogspot
paying close attention to LOVING EYES,
(which shows this man and his grandmother)…
and The King and I….a tribute to a shared uncle, (WWII vet, PTSD…now I understand…)…who was photoed in 1949, standing talking to the king of Farm Aid….to share this uncle…priceless…
b.alton cooper
aka//cajunbob po-ET lariate,
where I pasty my proze-ack,
swamp bovine verse infused with
a muscadine lariate twist….