

Frey wrote in her memoir, The Growing Season, that "I never remember going to bed without eating anything, but sometimes our meals were just a bowl of mush." The family survived mostly on food raised on the farm or hunted and fished for, sometimes resorting to poaching. The family's home did not have indoor plumbing until Frey was five years old.

The family's original 80-acre farm, which they called the Hill, is five miles from Orchardville and thirty miles from Mount Vernon in southern Illinois. Frey has four older full brothers, thirteen half-siblings from her father's first marriage, and two from her mother's first marriage counting her half siblings she is the youngest of 21. The couple's first child, a girl, was killed as a toddler in a farm accident the couple left Tennessee for Illinois shortly thereafter. Louis, but her parents fled to Tennessee to escape what Frey calls "a perfect storm" of bad decision-making by her father, who staged an accident to make it look as if he'd died. Her father was a steelworker and a farmer and for a time part owner of the Dixie Feed franchise in St. Frey Farms is the largest H-2A visa employer in Illinois as well as the largest grower of pumpkins in the United States.įrey was born July 24, 1976, : 7 to Harold and Elizabeth Frey. She is the CEO and owner of Frey Farms, which she founded at age sixteen. Sarah Frey (born July 24, 1976) is an American farmer and entrepreneur.
