How Jenny and Dave Marrs’ Berry Farm Helps People Across the Globe
By Movieguide® Contributor
HGTV’s FIXER TO FABULOUS stars Jenny and Dave Marrs have a fun “u-pick” blueberry field, but for them, the farm carries so much more meaning.
Jenny shared a photo of her family at the farm on Monday and said: “Pulling weeds, pruning and picking berries has been the framework for our kiddo’s summers for the past nine years. They jump in and work right alongside us. It’s a beautiful privilege to be able to work as a family to create delicious food and to cultivate a space for our community to gather and experience a slice of farm life.”
“This small blueberry farm has taught us that we can all DO something bigger than ourselves. The ripple effect of these fields reaches farther than we ever anticipated. It isn’t easy but it is simple: profits from our u-pick farm in NW Arkansas benefit a farm training program for orphaned teens in Marondera, Zimbabwe.”
They hope that the farm will be a permanent fixture in their family that will continue to help people across the world.
“This farm is one of the legacies Dave and I want to pass down to our children. We want them to value hard work and nature and, most of all, generosity. We want them to understand that it’s never ‘us’ and ‘them.'”
“It’s not ‘here’ and ‘there.’ We have shared meals with our Zimbabwean leaders at their table and at ours. We have become dear friends who do life together as best we can across a sea,” Jenny said.
It’s important to the Marrses that their kids see humans across the world as just that — humans.
“We hold them close in prayer and we have hopefully shown our kiddos that even though we live in different countries, with different cultures and foods and languages and looks, we are united in our humanity and our desire to run the race set before us well,” Jenny said.
“With so much division in our world today, we pray these experiences will allow our kids to rise up as world changers and light bearers for their generation.”
“So, yes. These fields may look like just an ordinary blueberry farm. But, there is so much more sewn into this soil: hopes and prayers and hard work and heaps of love. ?,” she finished.
The Marrs are parents of five kids, one of whom they adopted from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The family all visited Zimbabwe together in 2017 and for many years have supported the Help One Now ministry there. Help One Now helps families out of poverty.
Jenny previously said, “Dave and I are fully committed to the work Help One Now is doing around the globe. We have met and learned from all of the brilliant local leaders (leaders leading within their own community – not an outsider coming in mandating what should be done), we have visited communities around the world and we have seen first-hand the impact of programs like the Family Empowerment program. Parents are starting businesses, kids are going to school, entire communities are being transformed.”
Movieguide® previously reported on the Marrs adoption story:
Sylvie was adopted from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2013. However, when the Congolese government shut down, the adoption process was halted and the Marrs family was not able to bring her to the U.S. until 2014…
[Jenny said]: Hope had nearly been lost. Despair had slowly seeped in. We had no way of knowing if our daughter would ever be back in our arms. 602 days of waiting, 602 days of praying and pleading and calling Congressmen and Senators and flying over the sea to beg the US Embassy to help. Emails and letters and phone calls with no traction toward getting her home left us depleted.
Make no mistake – a battle took place to bring our daughter home. The exhale that took place when she was back in my arms on US soil was echoed in heaven. The spiritual battle that I couldn’t see during those long days and nights was finally over.
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