What We Inherit. What We Grow.

Six generations into his family’s farming legacy, Cornelius Caldwell is looking toward what comes next and cultivating new possibilities for the land his family has stewarded for generations.

For Cornelius Caldwell, farming is written into the story of his family.

He is the sixth generation to farm the land behind Caldwell Citrus Groves Management LLC, an operation spanning more than 700 acres in Leesburg, Florida, about 45 minutes outside Orlando.

He began working on the farm at 12 years old and has spent the past 38 years helping carry forward a legacy passed from one generation of Caldwells to the next.

His approach to the work carries echoes of the people who came before him.

“I just don’t play around when it comes to work, like my dad,” Caldwell says. “You’re gonna work, or you don’t work when it comes to me.”

That work ethic has helped sustain a farming legacy stretching through Caldwell’s father, grandfather, great-grandparents, and generations beyond. And sustaining a legacy means continuing to imagine its future.

Growing Through Change

As Florida’s citrus industry faces mounting challenges, Caldwell has been exploring what else might grow on the land his family has tended for generations.

The question is bigger than choosing another crop. It is about keeping the land productive, creating new revenue streams, and positioning the family enterprise for the future. And the significance of that work reaches beyond a single farm.

Across American agriculture, 95% of producers identify as White. Black-operated farms number roughly 32,700 nationwide, stewarding more than 5.3 million acres. Behind those numbers are families, livelihoods, communities, and generations of agricultural knowledge.

When farms like Caldwell’s endure, so does something larger: the connection between land and legacy, between locally rooted producers and the communities they serve, and generations of knowledge that continue to shape our food system.

That is why who gets invested in matters.

For Potlikker, supporting a producer means understanding the entire ecosystem around the enterprise. Land, capital, markets, knowledge, and relationships all matter. When those pieces align with a producer’s vision, new possibilities can emerge.

Potlikker Capital has become one of Caldwell’s partners in that process, helping connect him with financing opportunities, grants, relationships, and potential new revenue streams as the farm explores its next chapter.

“It’s had a really positive impact,” Caldwell says of Potlikker. “They also helped me find alternative crops to replace the citrus. We’re working right now with yaupon, doing a venture with them on that. They help us keep going.”

Investing With the Whole Picture in View

Caldwell first became familiar with Potlikker through relationships within the Black farming community. For roughly four or five years, he has worked directly with Potlikker’s CEO, Mark Watson.

As one of the largest Black farmers in his area, Caldwell says working with someone who understands both finance and the history that has shaped the experience of Black farmers in America brings a deeper dimension to the relationship.

“He really knows his business about financing and banking,” Caldwell says of Watson. “Very compassionate about farming... He does know the details of all the struggles that Black farmers have gone through.”

That understanding is central to how Potlikker approaches Ecosystem Investing.

Every producer brings a different history, unique strengths, personal relationships, and their own vision for what comes next. Listening to that story helps reveal the larger ecosystem surrounding an enterprise, and where capital, knowledge, partnerships, and opportunity can work together to strengthen it.

For Caldwell, that has meant support for the farm he operates today while opening new doors and exploring possibilities for the farm his family will carry forward tomorrow.

The Next Generation

Now another transition is taking shape.

Cornelius’s brother, Ruben, is assuming greater responsibility for the operation. Cornelius remains involved as the family considers what the next chapter of Caldwell Citrus Groves will become.

There is something fitting about that evolution.

For six generations, this land has remained in the hands of a family willing to work it, care for it, and adapt alongside it. Its value lives in the crops it produces and the acres it encompasses, as well as in the knowledge, livelihood, history, and possibility carried from one generation to the next.

Today, preserving that inheritance includes creating room for new crops, opportunities, leadership, and ideas.

And through all that change, Cornelius carries forward a piece of wisdom handed down through his family:

“Work smarter than harder.”

For a family farm that has endured across six generations, those words carry the weight of experience.

Because legacy lives in what we inherit.

Resilience grows through what we choose to cultivate next.