J.A. Bolton | Farming season is winding down

“Farming season is winding down” was a term my granddaddy used a lot in September and the first of October every year. You see he was a small tobacco farmer from the Sandhills of Richmond County.

Like so many other farmers in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, tobacco was granddaddy’s cash crop. The infamous Boll Weevil and low prices per pound had ravished King Cotton as a cash crop for most farmers during the first part of the twentieth century.

With most farm kids moving away from their jobs on the farm, it only left the older people to keep the small farms going. Even today, the average age of a farmer is 58 and the number of small farms has dropped some 75% since 1950.

Coming up as a kid, I lived next to my grandparents. I knew what getting up at 4:30 a.m. in the morning and taking out a barn full of cured tobacco and replacing it with a barn of green tobacco meant. This would go on ‘bout every week from July through August until my granddaddy died and the tobacco allotment was sold.

To be a good farmer, you got to be a jack of all trades. Why you have to be a mechanic, carpenter, accountant, gambler, planter and it wouldn’t hurt if’en you were a prayer warrior. Many a farmer has toiled in his crops for months only for it to be destroyed by flooding, drought, wind or a hail storm. Before irrigation systems came around, many a farm family prayed for rain or asked the Good Lord to spare their crops from the elements because their livelihood depended on it.

You see, back in the day, farmers would only get paid when their crops were sold, usually in the fall. Won’t no such thing as crop insurance programs, no-sir-re. How good a crop you managed to produce and the price you received for your crops determined the financial status of your family for the next year. Why I’ve been to the tobacco warehouses which were scattered all over the southeast during the forties and fifties. I watched the buyers and auctioneers determine if’en a farmer’s family would have new clothes or shoes the next year. Sometimes even though the farmer received a fair price for his crops; the bills had to be paid, sometimes leaving the family owning ‘bout as much as they made off their crops. This was called the lean years. The so-called good years were about the only thing that kept the farm going.

To have a little change in my pockets, I received the money that the so-called trash tobacco brought in. Won’t much but I got enough to buy my school clothes, shells for hunting and to purchase Christmas gifts.

After the tobacco season was over, it was time to start cutting firewood and stove wood for Ma’s cook stove. As the weather grew colder, we would pull the dry ears of corn out of the corn fields and place it in the corn crib to feed to the mules and hogs. We also kept up the age- old process of picking dry field peas, placing them in a large tobacco sheet (burlap fertilizer sacks sown together), and thrashing them with a tobacco stick. This was done on a windy day so when you threw the peas up in the air, the wind would blow the trash (chaff) from around the peas and you would have clean pea seed to plant the following year.

Another fall chore was digging sweet taters. To keep them from rotting during the winter, they had to be cured. All we would do was scatter them out on boards in our tobacco barn and turn the oil heaters on low for a few days. Before this, people built tater hills which resembled a small haystack. Pine straw or hay and dirt was layered between every layer of potatoes. When folks needed a mess of taters, why they’d just gravel around the bottom of the hill and get what taters they needed. You know, won’t nothing like coming in from school and reaching into the warmer on Ma’s woodstove, pulling out a cooked sweet tater, smothering on a little homemade butter, and you had a snack fit for a king.

Farm life also had other little pleasures, like eating fresh tomato and cucumber sandwich when the tomatoes and cucumbers had come straight out of our garden. Also in the fall, persimmons started to ripen on the trees. Why I knew wherever ‘simmon tree was for a mile around the farm and won’t nothing better than one of Ma’s persimmon puddings fresh out of the oven. Purple Fox grapes would be hanging in trees just out of reach while our many pecan trees would sometimes bare bushels of pecans. It was my job to keep the squirrels and birds from carrying them off until we could pick them up off the ground or shake the pecans off the trees.

You know folks, life won’t always easy on the farm, but I learned many of life’s lessons that won’t and never will be taught in a school. I feel a little sorry for this younger generation, even though most are well-educated, because I feel they have missed out on a great opportunity that farm life has to offer.

Most of our old farm now has grown up in pine trees and pin oaks, but as I walk through the old fields, I can still hear the clicking sound of the tobacco hand- setters as each plant had to be dropped by hand. The tobacco barn and pack shed have all fallen in but as I draw near I can still smell the sweet aroma of the cured tobacco and hear people happily going about their jobs putting in a barn of tobacco. I can also hear the sound of the mule’s harness tightening as the mules pulled the tobacco sleds through the large fields. As a boy, I was allowed to ride one of the mules back to the house at quitting time to feed and water him. Why today I doubt I could even pull myself up on one’s back.

Nowadays as I set back and ponder my life, I wonder, “Oh where have the years gone,” for I know in my heart that “Farming season is winding down.”