Tim & Kathy Cooper when they first met. Tim is planting his first orchard.

Tim and Kathy Cooper are living proof that a patient family can turn profits working together. At age 12 Tim began picking peaches and saving his money in a summer job at Fairfield Farms, then owned by the late Ralph K. Alexander, the same orchard where he later met Kathy. It was the start of a summer career that he enjoyed all the way through high school.
" I've been picking peaches ever since" says Tim, who planted 1,000 trees to create his first orchard in 1978, while still studying mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University and working as manager for his first employer. He found himself studying agriculture in A&M's library instead of the calculus he should have been pouring over. He left college just short of a degree.

Since starting in 1978, Tim has been a pay-as-you-go operator. That didn't change when he and Kathy married in 1983. They've had no oil and gas income or other outside wealth, and they've never borrowed to invest in or operate the business. Excluding land purchases and leases, their development costs for the 214 acres of producing peach trees, the greenhouses, farm store and related equipment ran into many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So, how did they do it? "We would put the money [back] into the business rather than into something personal, " says Kathy Cooper, who met Tim when he hired her to sell peaches at Fairfield Farms, an orchard he was managing at that time for another farmer.
The Coopers also held other non farm jobs, did and still do most of their own year-round farm work, delayed buying personal luxuries, lived in a garage apartment for five years and then bought a mobile home and located it at one of their three owned orchards. You could reach out a window and almost pick a peach.