Farm Day may hold new Guinness hayride record
DeFUNIAK SPRINGS — Twenty-five years ago, a local doctor and his wife opened up their farm in DeFuniak Springs to a potluck supper for folks from their Sunday school class at First Baptist Church of Fort Walton Beach.
Bill Buckelew and his wife, Jane, called it Farm Day.
The annual event has grown from those humble beginnings to one that welcomes thousands of people.
“So that the world may know” is the message of the day.
This year, Farm Day was held Nov. 3, and Buckelew and his army of volunteers had an additional challenge: to win a Guinness World Record for the largest hayride.
A popular highlight of Farm Day, the hayride kicks off at twilight and ends after dark just before the fireworks.
This year’s hayride carried 1,042 people.
The line of trucks and trailers, if stretched end to end, would be more than 500 feet long, said Margie James, the church member who organized the attempt to get the record certified.
They are still awaiting word from the Guinness folks on whether their hayride will be a record holder.
“We can’t say we’re there,” Buckelew said. “All we can say is that we had it and tried to certify it, and we’ll see what they say.”
According to an e-mail from Jamie Panas, a marketing assistant for Guinness World Records in New York, the current record for Largest Hayride involves 224 participants at an event in McKinney, Texas, on Feb. 18, 2007.
James said that they couldn’t have even made the attempt without the help of 42 Fort Walton Beach High School ROTC students who made sure that each hayride participant was signed in and received a sticker.
That helped organizers to have an accurate count — at least until they ran out of time and paperwork.
James said that while 1,042 is the number being submitted to Guinness, it was actually a lot higher.
“We had more than that but we didn’t expect that many people so we didn’t prepare stickers and sheets to record that many people,” she said. “And we started running out of time.”
James estimated that between 1,300 and 1,400 people were actually on this year’s ride.