Three years into his retirement from a 40-year career in corporate aviation, Greg Hammerstein is enjoying a peaceful life in the rural community of Pembroke, Georgia, and reminisces on growing up in the bustling South Side of Chicago.
“I’d never been out of the city before,” Hammerstein said, recalling the first trip he had taken as a child to Southern Illinois, to visit the country home of his father’s boss.
“I was thrilled with the crows, and he had sheep,” he said. “We went shooting cans with a .22. We just did all these things that a city boy really just never even knows exists.”
From the age of six, it became his dream to get away from the crowds of Chicago, the packed house he shared with his parents and seven siblings, and to own a tract of land where he could enjoy some privacy and have room to ‘spread out.’
“I don’t know where the 150 acres came from, but that's the number that stuck in my head,” said Hammerstein. It wasn’t until many years later that these ambitions were actualized and eventually surpassed.
Greg and Heidi Hammerstein were both working at Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation in 2001. It was a strange time with the infamous terrorist attacks occurring the same year, leading companies like Gulfstream to close their doors to most outsiders.
It was an interesting privilege, as Dewey Newton from AgSouth recalled, being allowed to visit Hammerstein in his office to discuss his plans for financing land through the lending agency.
Hammerstein had seen a billboard for AgSouth while driving to the Huddle House for Saturday morning coffee with his neighbor. On his way home, he pulled over and got the company's number and started talking to Newton, who began walking him through the lending process.
Months of planning and thousands of dollars had gone into custom plans for the house that was to sit on the 142-acre tract of land that Hammerstein was preparing to close on. The morning of the exact day he was set to close on the property, his boss offered him the opportunity to take a new position in Dallas, Texas, where Gulfstream was just starting their newest venture.
His first instinct was to decline the offer and move forward with the plans, as moving to Texas meant abandoning or at least deferring his lifelong dream for another couple of years. But Heidi convinced him to take the job.
They closed on the land but held off on the construction of their home while living in Texas for almost three years. Six months before returning, they began the build, started digging a pond, and replanting pines over 120 acres of the property that had been clear cut.
“The house was about 75% finished when we came back and saw that they had done a really poor job,” Hammerstein lamented, describing the wobbly structure. Ultimately, the builder knocked the house down and the home was rebuilt.
“It’s been a journey ever since,” he said. “And I can’t give enough credit to AgSouth, because since the original 142 acre purchase, we’ve made four subsequent purchases, which has gotten us to the 500 acres we have today.”
He says it's a combination of luck and a good relationship with the Burnsed family, that the land he purchased years later, adjoined his property just so that the house now sits almost exactly in the middle of the 500 acres.
Had the neighboring properties been sold to developers as they feared at one time, Hammerstein says he’d have been looking at other homes outside of his bedroom window.
Fortunately for the Hammersteins, this was not the case. More than 20 years in, and the forest is regrown much to their satisfaction, and next year they plan to harvest some of the wood through thinning. Greg Hammerstein considers himself a ‘smart, lazy farmer’ as the majority of crop cultivation on his property is done under subcontracts with other farmers, who lease his land.
He says the arrangement with the longtime sublease has been great, and he praises the hard work that the farmers put into yielding their crops. And while he doesn’t take on the typical farming role of sowing seeds and harvesting the produce, he has gladly filled his life with the hard work of a rural lifestyle.
“The dogs wake us up most days around 4:30am,” said Hammerstein. “I’m either on the tractor working one of the fields, bush hogging, clearing… I spend a lot of time working on equipment.”
“It seems like for every hour you use a piece of equipment, five hours is spent working on it…The learning experience has been the funnest part,” he said, joking that while it’s hard to say what takes up most of his day sometimes, he certainly stays out of the house.
Their home is surrounded by many oak trees, most of them grown from acorns gathered by Greg in downtown Savannah. The Hammerstein's recalled the land when they bought it, nearly barren, now flourishing through their own efforts.
Lately he has spent his time improving the land by damning an area to create a wetland and digging two ponds. Most of the last year however, he has been helping his brother begin work on the land that he just purchased, just on the other side of Burnsed Road.
He says that the work he fills most of his retired days with stays fun because, “When it’s too hot, too loud, when you get too frustrated,” he can just call it a day.
Heidi Hammerstein’s days are spent a little differently, as she is still pursuing an incredibly successful career as a Senior Systems Engineer for NASA.
She grew up in the rural hills of Silicon Valley and enjoyed a quiet, country lifestyle. She’s been flying airplanes since she was 15 years old and came to the Savannah area to work on Propulsion Performance and Fuel System Flight Tests at Gulfstream.
After meeting and later marrying Greg, Heidi was more than happy to return to the rural lifestyle she had known early on.
“I was in full agreement with him. It was a dream of his to own land and I was all for it,” she said.
She’s continued to pursue her ambitions since they bought the land, earning a Master’s in Molecular Biology while the couple lived in Texas, and eventually earning a slot as an Astronaut Candidate with Project PoSSUM.
Her husband credits her for continuing to work long hours every day, while he works their land. Heidi says of all the potential projects that could be completed on their property, her greatest hope is to build a runway next to the house so she can live her passion for flying, everyday.
The Hammersteins credit AgSouth with creating the possibility for them to build the life that they enjoy so much, through their unique expertise and lending programs.
“The biggest thing with AgSouth was their ability to utilize and leverage the equity I had been building up,” he said, adding that after his original down payment, financing adjacent land has not cost him any additional upfront deposits.
“The flexibility that Ag South demonstrated compared to any other financial institution is far superior,” said Greg. “Every time these adjacent tracts of land became available, I didn’t have the money to buy. But somehow I did… It was because of AgSouth, they always figured out a way to help me.”
If more land neighboring their property were to become available, the Hammersteins would like to continue working with AgSouth to expand their property. As Dewey Newton stated, the properties are worth more to those adjacent landowners than anyone else.
Greg Hammerstein says a friend told him years ago, that once you buy a great piece of land, you’ll never again be without too much to do. And while he has found this statement to be true, he can reflect with satisfaction in his accomplishment of the vision that he had as a child: to live and work on a property like the one he owns today.
“It’s been more than a dream fulfilled,” he said.
Visit the AgSouth website to learn more about how the farm credit lenders can do the same for you.
