Brad Blaine is a co-founder of the Blaine Farms' web site. Brad was born in 1974 and grew up on the family farm in West Virginia.Unlike the childhoods of most hunters that come out to the farm today to hunt, there weren't any neighboring kids to hang around with during Brad's childhood. As a result, Brad has been a loner for the majority of his life and found companionship in the outdoors. His father and uncles also grew up on the farm and became diligent hunters themselves, though turkeys and deer weren't around during their younger days. This band of brothers - Rodger,Steve and Randy taught Brad and his cousins to hunt at a very early age. "The earliest hunt I remember going on was one with my father on a doe hunt,"says Brad. "I remember that I was so small that the butt of the gun hit my boots! I couldn't have been over 6 years of age." From that point on, Brad was hooked on hunting and shooting sports. The brothers and their children came to hunt annually and was an event much looked forward to. However, with divorces and other family problems, their ability to carry on with the hunting tradition started to falter, but Brad's interest in the sport of hunting continued to grow. When he was in 7th grade, Brad went out alone and killed his first buck, an 8 point, and from that moment on, he has continued to hunt the wily whitetail as well as expand into other game.
Brad loved the outdoors so much that he decided to make a career of it. To help pay for college, he enlisted in the Army. Brad served with the US Army Special Forces (Green Berets) as a Weapons Specialist for 2 years and spent an additional 6 years in the West Virginia Army National Guard as a Squad Leader in an infantry platoon. He studied at Marshall University in Huntington,West Virginia for a while to get through the bone-head courses and then went to his intended school of West Virginia University in Morgantown,West Virginia. There, he studied biology and emphasized in ecology preparing for a career in restoration ecology. During his college days, Brad worked for the US Naval Academy's Environmental Division as well as the WVU Department of Entomology. After college Brad found a job with the Parkersburg City Government's Development Office as an Ecological Developer where he worked on the Johnson T. Janes Park Project in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Currently he serves as an Environmental Resources Specialist with the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources' Environmental Resources Section in Farmington, West Virginia. Brad has pulled a number of firsts on the farm as a hunter. He has taken deer, turkeys, wild boar and all sorts of small game. He hunts with compound bow, recurve bow, long bow, handgun, muzzle loader, rifle and shotgun. He enjoys the challenge and more importantly enjoys doing his part to properly manage the wildlife resources on the farm. Other hobbies Brad enjoys are reloading, shooting, reading books on science, cultural anthropology and religion, watching documentaries on TV; scuba diving; landscaping; cooking; and teaching others about science and the outdoors. |
