About me
Jim is the owner and founder of Secret Garden Bees, a family owned honey farm in Cumberland County NC that is distributed across 20 states and more than 120 stores. Jim served ten years in the Army as a paratrooper and in the Bomb Squad with two tours to Iraq. After leaving the Army he worked 14 years as a Project Manager for Booz Allen Hamilton until his service related injuries mandated a change in career. Jim turned to agriculture as a way to care for himself and his family and used his business experience to build it into a viable, debt free farming operation.
Jim commits a significant amount of time to training other Veterans to succeed in agriculture and his farm has become a place where they can come to work and learn. Jim has an MBA in Project Management and is a PMI certified Project Management Professional. He was the winner of the 2024 NC Small Farmer of the Year, 2023 American Farm Bureau “Peoples Choice” in the Agricultural Innovation Challenge as well as a recipient of a 2023 Outstanding Service Award for Innovative Leadership from the North Carolina Sustainable Business Council.