The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book

by Inc. The Foxfire Fund

  I’ve been around farming all my life, being from a cotton family, both on my mom’s side and my dad’s side for four generations before me. On my mom’s side, her grandfather bought cotton on the cotton block in downtown Rome, Georgia. On my dad’s side, they were cotton growers and buyers in general. Both families were in the cotton business pretty heavy, so when I had the opportunity, I started growing a lot of cotton. The most I have ever grown in one year was nine hundred acres. Farming has gotten more and more risky, especially over the last five to ten years. The cost of production has gone up so much that we try to spread our risk, machinery, and labor out. That’s why I have broken it down into three crops (cotton, corn, and soybeans), and I pretty much stick with that.

  You see, farming has changed a lot since I was a kid. Of course, growing up on a farm in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, you didn’t have the Wal-Mart in town or major highways. Like most people, we lived seven miles out of town, so we usually went to town about once a week—we went to church on Sunday—other than going to school. We caught the school bus and rode to school. Back then, your community had a community general store, a church, and some kind of school in the community. It was almost like one big happy family, with all the sharecroppers working on the farm. It was an experience I will never forget because back then everybody’s work ethic, morals, and values were different than in this day in time. Back then, everybody had a lot in common because they all worked together, lived close, played together, and went to school together. That’s when we’d get off work and we’d get together and go out and play football, basketball, or softball in someone’s backyard. I have a lot of good memories with real good people.

  PLATE 127 The Jordans—Jamie, Kelly, and son, Jesse—standing in high cotton

  Two of those real good people have influenced my life more than anybody, other than my mama and daddy. One was the head ginner and manager on the farm, Junior Dawson, and the other one was a black woman, Jo Wood, who helped raise us as a babysitter at times and helped clean the house as a maid. Neither one of them had more than a fourth-grade education, but they were two of the best people and really as smart as anybody, not by studies or by education but by good common sense and wisdom. Both have been dead for fifteen years, and I wish I had them around today to ask them questions.

  I keep farming year after year, no matter how bad it is, because I love it. But there will come a point when I’ll say I’ve had enough if it doesn’t change. My theory is, when I got in it in ’78, I thought less land because there’s more houses, more roads, more buildings, more shopping centers, less land, more people. We’d get what we deserved one day. Well, my dad said about the same thing when he started, way back in 1946. I don’t know, I always thought the people who toughed farming out would get out of it what they paid, what it was worth one day, but I don’t know if it will ever happen. The reason I say it may not ever happen is America has let several industries go; that is really what America was built on. What I can remember is that America was built on small business and family farms—the main businesses being the automobile industry, steel industries, textile industry, and agriculture, those four. The textile industry is almost extinct in this country. The steel industry is about extinct, and the automobile industry has been lost to a lot of the foreign market; it’s looking like the farming industry might. Even though you think logically, things don’t always work logically. I’d hate to see America depend on foreigners for their food; it’s bad enough that we depend on foreign trade for our energy, our fuel. I’d hate for us to depend on it for food. Even though most of y’all are young and all and don’t think you could survive without fuel to ride around on, you can. But you can’t live without food and water, and I hope that our government realizes that.

  It used to be that the whole South was in the cotton industry; the southern part of the United States was planting cotton—you know, when they used to say cotton was king. We are number two in the world, and China’s number one. It gets tougher to find markets for my cotton. When we were kids, within a thirty-mile radius with all our cotton left to gin, we would load it on a flatbed. One guy would haul all day with one truck, and maybe another guy would haul. Usually, most of it would go to Berrytown, Lindale, or Trion, all within about thirty miles. Before then, it was all brought into town by the farmers, and the buyers bought it on the cotton block. They put it out in a warehouse, and then the buyers sold it. That’s what my great-grandfather (on the Horton side) was, a buyer. In our part of the country now, Trion in Leesburg, Alabama, still buys cotton or Fruit of the Loom in Rabun Gap, Georgia—most of my cotton goes to one of them. The reasons why the cotton mills are closing, I guess, is because they can’t compete worldwide with labor. In a way we can still market pretty decent because we can do it over the Internet. So in that way it’s better, but then you get into distant trucking. Just the difference in going to Rabun Gap and Leesburg amounted to about two dollars a bale, which was two hundred dollars a truckload. Leesburg is just down the river from Centre; it’s really close.

  I don’t use the old almanac signs, but some of the older guys that used to help me used to talk about it. The size of corn grows about as tall as the ceiling. Sometimes the ear will be down low to the ground and then other times in the middle, and I would say, “Why? Why is that, Hardy?” Hardy Naugher planted in the signs of a shoulder or a chest or knee or whatever. But on our scale—eleven hundred acres of row crop—I don’t have the manpower or the equipment to just blow through there and do it quick. On our scale, I go from when it starts warming up, and I do what I got to do. If I run out of time on corn, then I will start on soybeans and cotton. If I run out of time on cotton, I will go back to soybeans. I try to watch the weather, but the weatherman will run you crazy if you watch him too much. You really have to just go with the flow, and that’s another thing you never know. You got gut feelings on it, so then do it if the weather’s good. Normally, you don’t plant cotton before the first of May, but if the weather’s good in late April and the corn’s finished, come the twenty-fifth of April and it’s hot outside, sixty-degree nights and eighty-degree days, I would say, man, I got to change the planter out and plant cotton. Get it in early to make more, you know, and go to plant a hundred twenty-five acres in one day, and you say this is going to make two and a half, three bales an acre, everything’s perfect. I’ve had the weather change in a week’s time, and it didn’t look like a hundred and twenty-five seeds came up on that hundred twenty-five acres, because if it’s cool and damp, you have to replant it all. Or you can plant it and it come up looking bad and skimpy, and you end up having a good growing season. Then you think, “I really need to replant it over, but I don’t have time.” Then you end up having a good growing season and that crop be one of the best crops. I’ve seen some of the best-looking ones be some of the sorriest-looking ones. So you can’t ever give up. You have to keep working all the way through.

  As far as people helping me, I have one Guatemalan living on the farm helping me full-time. He’s the first full-time helper I think I’ve ever had, other than Kelly. On a farm my size, to really be efficient, I need four people—three including myself. At times I could use more, and I do have a few part-time guys come through, but they may come through when you’re busy, they may come through when you’re not. You just never know ’cause they usually work other jobs. So I have Felipe. He and I do the majority of it, and then Kelly and Jesse do some. So you do what you got to do. That’s one reason why we have gone to bigger equipment. Now I’m on ten-row equipment. I plant with a ten-row planter. I pick five rows at a time, six rows of corn. I’ve found out that a lot of people are going to bigger equipment. A normal day for me has changed a lot, too, over the years.

  I used to not think about giving up on farming and doing something else. I think about it sometimes now because it keeps getting harder and harder to make ends meet. I think this is twenty-eight years I’ve been farming, twenty-nine maybe. To start with, I get up at six thirty, eat
, get my chemicals and seed ready, and go to the farm. I drive fifty miles, work till dark—sometimes after dark—and then drive home. Dark may be at six o’clock this time of year, but in the summer, it’s nine o’clock. Then, in ’86, we bought a used cotton gin to keep up with the pace. So we bought a used cotton gin in Arkansas, went out there, and moved it back to Centre. The same year, we got in the aerial application business, which is also called crop dusting. I bought eight hundred acres when Kelly and I got married. I would get up early enough to be at the airstrip before daylight. I would do this because our first load would need to be out at daylight. While the heat’s not up, the chemicals work better. I would start then, and we would either go to the farm or stay at the airstrip until dark. I’d get home nine or ten o’clock and eat. So it was a long day. Backing up a little bit, the older guy that used to go with me, he said, “Jamie, you’re gonna make an old man out of yourself fast if you try to burn a candle at both ends.” I used to laugh at him. When I was in my twenties, I’d say, “Cicero, you can’t wear me out.” If Cicero was here now, I’d say, “Yeah, you know what you’re talking about, Cicero.” He was about eighty years old. A year or two after I got married, I hurt my back bad. I’d never slowed down enough to realize how tired I was getting until I was laying in the bed and thinking about things I was doing right and doing wrong. I realized how I was wearing myself out. It was a way of God telling me, “You need to slow down.” I still work a lot of long hours, but as time’s gone on, I’ve gotten up later and come in earlier. Instead of working sixteen to eighteen hours a day, I’m down to working ten to twelve hours a day, depending on the year. A lot of times when I’m not in the fields, I’m on the phone or with a lawyer, farm officer, banker, or tax man or whatever. So it’s still work, but used to, we used to work year around, and we even did winter projects. When Jesse was maybe five or six years old, I said no more am I doing winter projects; I’m gonna spend my winter resting and with my family. I pretty much have stuck with that. Now most days we’ll work ten or twelve hours, but I still see some sixteen or eighteen. Like this time of year, when it starts getting later with cotton in the field, you can’t pick any of the crops with dew on them. You have to wait till the dew dries off during morning, and then when the dew comes on early after dark, you have to quit. You can do the cleaning, service, and maintenance work, you know, at other times, but if it’s cloudy or windy, you can pick all night; I mean, you can harvest all night. I guess the longest I’ve ever worked at one time, which is not good, but you do what you got to do—it was me and a Mexican, Santiago. We worked thirty-two hours straight one time, and it went back to the weatherman. He said it was one hundred percent chance of rain. It was getting close to Christmas. I’ve had crops in the field and lost a bunch of money because you can’t get it out when winter rains set in. The weatherman was giving one hundred percent chance of heavy rain by daylight, and it was December twentieth, and so I said I was going to pick as long as I could. I kept saying, “Santiago, you can go in anytime.” He’d say, “No, I’m gonna stay with you, boss.” About every two hours I’d say, “You go in, you go in.” Well, we made it to daylight, and they brought us something to eat. My other helper came in, and well, it didn’t rain. It didn’t rain until dark that day. Even though we were tired, yeah, I felt like I couldn’t make it. The last day, the last ten hours, were tough because I thought, “Rain at daylight, I can go in. It’s gonna rain.” And it didn’t, and you can’t go in when there’s cotton to pick and bills to pay. That’s the longest day but we still get into some fifteen, sixteen-hour days. You know, your priorities change in life. I mean, I still got the bills to pay and I go to pay ’em, but I also realize that if you don’t take care of yourself then nobody else is either. So a lot of times my fourteen, fifteen hours, I don’t do that very often. I go to the house. I just say if that’s not good enough, then it’s just not good enough.

  I know it’s a little scary to think about my long working hours, ’cause I’ve had several friends that their wives leave them. It’s no fun working long hours, because you don’t always get to eat and see each other and wind down at night and all. Then, at the same time in the back of your head, you know that this isn’t year-round. This isn’t like a dairy. After we get over the rush of it, then we just spend a lot of time together. I guess we always got that to look forward to. Kelly has a nursing degree. She worked four years at the hospital; then, when we got married, she started working at a doctor’s office in town and worked there four years. When we got Jesse [their son] in ’90, she quit and didn’t go back.

  Kelly’s really a main part in the operation. She keeps the clothes clean, keeps us fed, takes care of Jesse, takes care of me, picks up chemicals and seed and parts, pays the bills, sends the bills out, and drives a tractor six weeks of the year.

  Well, Jesse really enjoys being around farming; it’s a good experience, a good place to grow up. Even though he enjoys being around it, I don’t think he’s going to be a farmer. It’s a good job, and he has a lot of respect for it. Something that keeps me going is, it’s just a dream of mine. I mean, it’s as good of a farm as there is in the country, I guess in the world. I have a lot of guys come in and say they would like to live here if I ever left, which I never would, of course.

  Jesse, for about the last ten years, has had a sweet-corn patch. The main reason we got into growing corn is, I just didn’t have the manpower and equipment to get a big cotton crop out timely. Our land is bottomland, which usually produces corn good, and so it spreads our risks out in three different crops. If corn prices are good and cotton’s bad, you know, it spreads out into the growing seasons. You may have a good year growing corn [and a] bad year growing cotton. It spreads the risks out; plus, you can start planting a month earlier, and you can start harvesting a month earlier. So really it makes you two to three months more efficient. Plus, rotation is very good for the land. It’s about the one and only thing that we can control that will pay a big dividend. The harvest time for corn is first, and then it depends on the variety of soybeans. Some soybeans are before cotton, some are with cotton, and some are after cotton. I spread the work out over a period of time so that it spreads your work, equipment, labor, and risk.

  The five-row cotton picker I bought was a year old, and I rented it as a new one. To rent it a year is twenty to thirty thousand dollars, and you don’t use it for about two months out of the year. So it was used when I bought it. I think it would have been about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars new. Now that same picker would be two twenty [$220,000]. I know they’re coming out with a cotton picker that builds its own module. You cut out labor and equipment, and it builds half a module. I don’t remember the list price, but I think they sell for four hundred fifty thousand dollars. I really don’t think anyone could pay for any of this equipment, but you can’t do it without it, so you just make your payment on it. I look at paying for it, but a lot of people look at buying it, using it for a few years, and trading it, and so it’s like renting.

  We worked hard when we were young, but we had a lot of work. Now, with the big equipment, if we’re not working, there’s nothing being produced. It’s like that because we don’t have people out there working. In other words, when you had two four-row planters, if one of them broke down, the other one was still going. Now if you break one down, it’s a lot more stressful. It’s sorta sad that I remember more bad experiences than good ones. I’m not a negative person, but I remember when I’ve been hurt, you know, when I hurt my back, when I hurt my leg. There has been a lot of good times, too. I’d say one of the best experiences that we have now is usually, once a year, we’ll have our church, Sunday school class, and close friends out and have a cookout and a cotton ride. Instead of hayrides, we have cotton rides. Sometimes we do it for the youth, sometimes we do it for our class, and sometimes we’ll do it for all age groups.

  Editor’s note: We would like to extend our appreciation to Jim Nixon, who traveled to Alabama to introduce us to the Jord
an family. We’d also like to express our sympathies to Jamie, Kelly, and Jesse, who lost the beloved patriarch of their family, Tom Jordan, in spring 2010. He will be missed by us all.

  With His Own Two Hands