Curtis Furr Farm

0:00:07	Introduction
0:01:56	Becoming a Farmer
0:01:36	Generational Land
02:36	Role in Soil and Water Conservation
03:07	Conservation Initiatives
04:12	Farmer Reluctance
04:44	Farming Practices
06:26	Sustainability Across Crops
08:19	Challenges in Soil and Water Management
12:20	Deer Problems
14:47	Stress in Farming
15:57	Consumer and Government Support
18:59	Public Outreach and Education
19:53	Farmer Support Systems
21:33	Policy and Political Support
22:23	Most Rewarding Work
24:14	Historical Farming Traditions
28:01	Family Traditions and Wisdom
31:45	Childhood Stories on the Farm
36:59	Farming Then and Now
44:24	Future of Farming
50:42	Advice for New Farmers
53:57	Closing Thoughts

[00:00:07]

>>MB: This is Makayla Brooks on October 20, 2024, in Albemarle, North Carolina, speaking with Mr. Curtis Furr, just to start off. Can you tell me about your background and how you became a farmer?

>>CF: Well, I’m the fifth generation farmer here, and I just always have enjoyed being around my daddy and my grandpa and enjoyed farming, and that’s all I ever had a dream to do, was to farm. So, I went to high school and was in all kinds of anything to do with agriculture. I was involved with FFA and was an officer for a few years, and then when I graduated, I went right straight into helping my dad farm and my grandpa. And then Grandpa retired in a couple years after I had graduated high school, so I kind of picked up where he left off helping my dad, and at the time, we were probably farming 800 acres. As time went on, I picked up more land because I got involved, and I just had it in my heart all my life.

[00:01:36]

>> MB: You said it’s been in your family for five generations? Is it the same land?

>>CF: Some of the same land, that’s right, yeah, some of the same land. Most of what I farm, though, is rented from neighbors around; we rent their land and pay them a rent, a price per acre for rent every year. And that saves me having to buying and owning the land, which this day and time you can’t afford to buy it. But right now, I farm by myself, and I’m farming 1300 acres that I’ve got [Unintelligible]. And then my son, he works a public job, but he’s off on Friday and Saturdays, and he helps me farm those two days.

[00:02:36]

>>MB: So you are the supervisor in soil and water conservation?

>> CF: That’s right. I am the president of the soil and water district. I enjoyed being on that board and doing what we can to help other farmers preserve land and water, keeping our water clean, and doing what we can to preserve our country,

[00:03:02]

>>MB: What kinds of responsibilities do you have?

>>CF: Well, I attend different meetings that we have throughout North Carolina to inform us on new programs that’s coming into play, and then try to help get the word out that the farmers can get some help for fixing ditches and stuff like that where they won’t wash away and just try to maintain and keep the soil in its right place. And we try to promote that. And then also, we’re trying to get people to put their land in a voluntary [Ag] district or a conservation easement and that’s where they can sell their development rights, take that money, and buy more land. That’s a new program that’s coming out, and we’re trying to learn it and then encourage other people to get involved with it, too.

[00:04:11]

>>MB: Are people reluctant to be involved?

>>CF: A lot of people don’t understand how it works. We are going to have a meeting a little bit later on and try to encourage people to come and learn more about it. And since land has been used for development, we’d like to save all this farmland that we can, and this is one way that they can do it and still keep land in the family.

[00:04:44]

>> MB: What types of farming practices do you like? What’s your area of focus?

>>CF: Well, to begin with, we do all no-till farming. That’s where we don’t till the soil no more. We don’t go in with bottom plows or chisel plow and work it six, eight inches deep. And we try not to do that so that the land will, you get it to work that deep and come big rain, it’s going to wash on. It’ll wash from the hill down to the holler, and then, you know, you lose that land. It goes down the creek. So we try to no-till farm where we don’t disturb the soil and plant our crops into standing. One other thing I’m doing is cover crops. I’ve got real involved in using cover crops. That’s when, like, right now, when corn is coming off, we’re getting ready to either put a wheat crop on it or a cover crop of some kind of small grain and some kind of lagoon clover or brassicas like turnips or radishes and vetch, and winter peas will like so all that, as well as save the soil that builds the soil up, makes our organic matter come up, since you’re leaving all that on the soil to use as a cover crop.

[00:06:26]

>>MB: Is that sustainable for all sorts of farming?

>>CF: Oh, yeah, I can do that. I plant corn, soybeans, and cotton. My corn crop consists of probably 600 acres of white corn. And my white corn goes to a company in Columbia, South Carolina, for cornmeal and grits. Therefore, I get a premium for that crop. And I do plant some yellow corn, which is used for feed and well, it’s somewhat grits too, but mostly, the cornmeal grits is made out of white corn, but the yellow corn is mainly gone for corn feed and for cows, chickens, you name it. It’s ground up into cow feed or a feed product. And my soybeans, I grow seed beans for a company called Pioneer Seed Company. And the beans that I grow now will be used next year for the farmers to plant so my [2024] crop will be sent and cleaned and put in bags for farmers to use for seed crop. I’m also in the fire department. We grow cotton as another crop. It takes a lot more equipment, but it’s paid off pretty well for us.  And cotton is another crop it takes a lot more equipment that’s paid off pretty well for us.

[00:08:19]

>>MB: Can you describe the main challenges farmers in this area face regarding soil and water management?

>>CF: Well, the biggest concern right now is water management. And, therefore there’s another way that cover crops is helping it. Filth or what you. What you’ve grown, and then when it comes springtime, you burn it down, and it mats to the ground which holds moisture in the ground. So that’s one way to conserve the moisture, and then I guess the other biggest thing is development. Developers wanting to buy land. We get letters every week from a development company wanting to buy our property to put houses on it. But that’s the two biggest things right now, and also the price of commodities. Commodities right now is as cheap as they were when I got out of high school. They had, I mean, we’ve had better prices, a whole lot better prices, but right now, for some odd reason, they just have plunged to the bottom and like, say, wheat and everything was when I graduated high school, wheat was bringing about the same price it is now, and I’ve been farming since 1976 so something, something bad wrong with that picture. And I don’t know what we can do as farmers to change it, but we just, you know, the farmers is a type person that they’re gonna. Real crop. They’re going to manage the crop and take care of it and harvest it, but then what we get for it is left up to somebody else. And that’s one reason why I got into the white corn, because I can get a little better price and a premium for it, but I’ve got to work for that premium. It’s not like, just cut it, put it in the bin or dry it. Put it in the bin. I have to dry it down a little drier than regular yellow field corn is, and have to, you know, keep the bugs out of it, and then keep the moisture consistent. I’ll store it in my bins and deliver it long in the wintertime. And then the soybeans, they I get a premium out of growing them for them. So that’s another, another way I can make an income that is works out well for me. And then the cotton is just, it’s a dry weather crop. So it’ll take dry weather better than any of the other three crops that I’m growing. The other problem we have is deer. We have herds of deer with 40 and 50 to the herd, and when they get in a field, corn or soybeans, and they mow it off. And then, then we have to rely on crop insurance. And after a time, a certain period of time, I’m sure the crop insurance people’s going to get tired of us turning in claims, because the dairy did it, because that’s that’s not what we are. We’re not insurance farmers, we’re we’re crop farmers, and we’ve tried different things, but we the wildlife, is going to have to step in and help us and the hunters. It’s kind of hard to get the hunters to understand that they need to kill some deer instead of hunting trophy deer. When you have 40 and 50 come in at the time, they can mow a crop down in a couple of nights. And that’s our livelihood.

[00:12:20]

>> MB: Are there preventive measures that you could take?

>> CF: With the deer problem? Yes. We tried some different things. There’s a cotton chemical, well its a insecticide that you put in for with the seed, and that plant takes that seed that insecticide up in the plant for a certain period of time that has helped some, but where there’s so many deer, they, the taste of it, what it does, it makes that soybean taste bitter. If there’s such a herd of them, then they just eat cause they’re hungry. And, whether it’s bitter or not, they’re going to eat it. They also have stuff that we can spray over the top, that’s supposed to deter them, but we hadn’t found much luck with that. And that’s a 20 dollars an acre ride every time you go over it. And you need to spray it two or three times. So even if it does work, 40 to 60 an acre takes away from the profit real quick. The biggest thing is getting the hunters to understand that we need help. I can get permits and kill them. In the months of June, July, and August, because they damage our crops. But I hate to kill a deer and just leave it lying or gut shoot it, and it runs to the woods and dies. So it’s better if we can get the hunters to kill them in the wintertime, during hunting season, to help us out instead of us shooting them and killing them, and then the hunters get upset at us for doing that, and that’s a problem too. Farming ain’t just an easy job. It’s got a lot of things we got to look after.

[00:14:47]

>> MB: So, from your perspective, how does the stress of farming impact you personally?

>> CF: Well I guess you’d say we just have to learn to deal with stress, and of course, there are counselors; if it gets to the point you need a counselor, FSA service has a counselor you could go to and talk to. But most everybody just confides in themselves to other farmers; we confide and talk. We got to put so much dependence on the good lord. I’d say that ain’t nobody no closer to God than a farmer; we put a crop out there and depend on that; we’ll get the right amount of rain and the right amount of sunshine. We do our part and I guess the weather does the biggest part.

[00:15:57]

>> MB: Could consumers, corporations or any government businesses do more to help farmers?

>>CF: Yeah, if we just get the word out there, how important it is to understand that the farmers is trying to make a living. And that we’re not out there with this big heavy equipment on the highway just to get in their way when they’re going to work or coming home. And try to, just, I think there’s, they still a lot of people don’t understand where their food comes from. A lot of people think that we, like I just said, that we’re in the way with our big equipment. And what they want is in the back of the grocery store and all they gotta do is just go buy it. But there’s a lot of misconceptions of where food comes from. That’s one reason I try to get involved with things like this. I’m also on the Extension Advisory Committee in Stanley County. We try to have a program every year to have sixth graders to come in and we’ll have someone to talk about every crop, what it means to them, what it means to the farmer, what it means to the county, and what it’s used for. A lot of kids don’t understand what cotton’s all used for. I went and done a presentation one time in Concord at the Cabarrus Arena, and I took pictures and showed them all my equipment.

Before I left, I took five bills and I cut five pieces of paper, same size. When I got started with the class, I reached ten pieces of paper, of the 5 and the five pieces of paper, to the kids. And I told them, water them up, stretch them out. Water them up, stretch them out. By the time I got through talking, those that had the pieces of paper had disintegrated. They had wadded and rubbed them in their hands until they disintegrated. I asked the kids, can anybody tell me why those one dollar bills didn’t do that? One little girl, said, was it because of the cotton? I said, that’s exactly right. There’s a certain percentage of cotton in money. That’s the reason why when you leave it in your pocket and your wife washes it, or my wife washes it in the washing machine it doesn’t go all to pieces. They learned something that day.

I’ve done several of those and I’ve also went and done several cover crop. That’s part of the role that I took on when I was in soil and waters. I can go to other places and talk about what we’re doing in Stanley County, might help somebody in Brunswick County. So I’ve done that several times and good turnout people understand they need to be doing this cover crop thing too. But yeah to answer that question there’s a lot of different ways that the government or other things in the county could help out.

[00:19:49]

>> MB: What’s the support system among farmers like outside of government?

>>CF: The support system?

Most everybody in our county is supportive of each other. We try not to, step our bounds and rent land out from under each other. A lot of that goes on in other counties. Everybody wants to grow and get so big, they think they’ve got to grow more acres. You know it don’t make no difference who you step on to get to those more acres, I found out that quality is better than quantity. I can farm less acres and do a better job than I can to farm another, like I say, I farm 1, 300 acres and that’s about 13 to 1500 is where I want to be. But if I don’t rent no more, I’m satisfied at 1,300. I don’t want 2,000 or 2,500 because that calls for more people, more equipment, and more wear and tear. I think people need to look at themselves and say, “Maybe I do need to cut back and put Quality into it instead of trying to get quantity out of it.”

[00:21:22]

>>MB: Are there any policies or initiatives that you believe could significantly improve conditions for farmers in this meeting?

>>CF: Yeah, it seemed like the politicians have forgot about the farmers. That’s one thing. I have not heard neither one of the folks running for offices mentioning the farmers. They’re not saying well, we’ll try to help you with a subsidy program, but we have had presidents that have helped, in subsidies for the farmers, but as of right now we’re on our own. To answer that question, yes, there could be some. 

[00:08:39]

>> So you really have gone big in just about nine years?

>> Yeah, I wish I could say that the dollars reflect the square footage still, when we were making such a good profit on a 400-square-foot space. But remember, we were growing vertically, so now the volume is up, but it’s spread out.

[00:22:18]

>> MB: What aspects of your work do you find most rewarding to you?

>>CF: Most what?

>>MB: Rewarding.

>> CF: I like growing corn. Corn seems to be a crop that’s real satisfying to grow, when you put your life savings in it and then see a good return out of it. Something special there and seeing that, you work so hard and you get a return off of it. But then again, there’ve been times that we’ve grow the crop and, better scrape by ’em, make ends meet. But we still, we’re still doing that. Thats just being apart of farming, you make some crops, you lose some crops. This year we’ve managed to get by with some pretty decent crops. There’s where if we don’t make a crime, the government needs to step in and help us a little bit. They do a little bit on the premiums of crop insurance. They pay a certain part of the premium but. crop insurance is just a safety net to catch us if we have a total disaster. It costs a little bit for that. Even with what the government so called says they help on, I guess that’d be the only thing that the government’s helped the farmers with in the last several years, is helping with is crop insurance.

[00:24:07]

>>MB: Is corn a generational crop that you feel like has that always been in your family? 

>>CF: Corn’s always been in the family. They had to grow it to provide for themselves as well as for their animals and, in other words, they used back in the day, I’d say my great-great-great grandpa, they grew corn for the animals and making cornmeal and grits to eat.

Then they grew wheat. Same thing for animals and make flour to make bread. And then they’d grow a little bit of cotton, two or three, no more than five acres. They would grow cotton to have to spend money to buy the kids’ clothes, essentials, sugar, salt. Several years ago, they didn’t have the products we can buy at the grocery store. You can get about anything you can think of. Back then you got sugar and you got salt and probably maybe some small things that you use in the kitchen.

 I don’t know if you know what a stone crock is. There’s one that looks like a bowl. That’s called a stone crock, and Grandpa was telling me that one year, they had a bull that got hurt, and they had to put him down, so they processed him. They killed and processed the meat. 

I said, “Grandpa, what’d you do with the meat?” I said, “You didn’t have a freezer back then?” He said, “No. you know them old big stone crops out in the washed house.” I said, “yeah,” and he had one that was probably 20 gallons or maybe even a 30-gallon big old crop. He said, “we put that meat at the bottom of that crop layer with salt and put more in.” You brought it up to where you wanted to leave it. Or you had the meat you put in and then you filled it up with water, three or four inches higher than where the meat was at. So the salt pulled that fat out of the meat and would bring it to the top of the water. And it served like wax. It would make a waxy, probably an inch and a half of fat, waxy coating.

When Grandma wanted a piece of meat, take a knife out there, cut a hole in it, reach down, get what you wanted, and put that right back where it was at so it didn’t melt right back down and seal it off. As long as you kept that salt water, that seal, they kept meat for a year at a time.

 I don’t even know how I got started on that one. But anyway little things like that we took for granted at the grocery store, and little things like that we’ve learned we can do on the farm that I hadn’t forgotten, we may have to go back to some of those ways one day. I hope not, but that’d be one way.

[00:28:01]

>> MB: Have any traditions been passed down to you through each generation?

>>

CF: Yeah. This is going to sound crazy, but my grandmother could use, they called ‘use’ for things. I don’t know why they used the word ‘use,’ say like I got burnt real bad on this arm.

I could go to Grandma and say, “Grandma, I got burnt just terribly bad.” She would take my arm and rub around it, or if it wasn’t too sore, rub over on top of it. She said biblical words. That would work and make it quit hurting. Grandma couldn’t tell a family member.

She could tell a man out of the family, but she couldn’t tell another woman or it wouldn’t work; one of my neighbors close by I was telling him after grandma passed away. I wish I’d learned how to do that. A couple of days later, he called me, and I got this lady’s number. If you want to call her, she’ll tell you how to do it. So that’s what I did. They passed that on to me. Now, I can do that. I hadd been in the fire department. As long as I’d been out of high school. And, after I learned how to do this, boy got burnt one night. I got him out to the side. I asked him, Do you trust me? He said, yeah. He said, “if I can’t trust you, I can’t trust nobody.” I said, “I can make that quit hurting if you trust me.” He said, “yeah.” He and I went out to ourselves and done what I was supposed to do, and by the time we were cleaning up at the fire scene, he came to me and said, “Man, that worked.”

That was something passed on. Grandma and Grandpa passed that down to me. Don’t a day go by that I don’t think about my grandpa and things like that he told me about stories of people in the community here that things that happened to them. I still remember it, but now, kids this day and time, they don’t care about heritage. They don’t care a lot about their heritage. I’m not saying it was to me. That’s something special, but like I said, there’s been a lot of canon, canon green beans and stuff like that. My grandmother and my mother passed down food out of the garden. And of course, my wife, Phyllis she’s from off of a farm and her mother passed that kind of stuff down to her too. Which is enjoyable. We got some green beans. We’re gonna sit and watch tv and strain beans tonight.

[00:31:45]

>> MB: Do you have any stories of growing up on the farm?

>>

CF: Yeah, that was about eight, eight or nine years old, and I’d got off the bus at the road and walked up to grandma and grandpa’s. I stayed with them while my mother worked. And anyway, one of the neighbors over here, she was never got married, and she had come to borrow grandpa’s manure spreader. It was in the spring, because that’s when everybody cleaned the stables out. And when I walked up, grandma said, Miss Isabel’s here. She wants to get nerve spreader. I said, Well, I can help her hook up to it. And she drove a little white Jeep, so we went out there and hooked her up. She said, You know, I forgot how to run this thing. Of course, being a young and enjoying farming as much as I did, I paid attention, and I said, Well, you pull this lever to this point. You pull this lever to this point. And I said, don’t take off driving. And about that time, my grandpa, my daddy, drove up, she was standing there bragging about how smart I was, and I guess, like a kid in the candy store, I was just eating that up, you know, because she was bragging on me. She got in her little Jeep, took off, and hadn’t even gotten to the highway when Grandpa whirled around. And I tell you, where I was standing when he told me, that’s how well, I remember, he almost tapped me on the end of the nose, pointing his finger at me, and said, “Let me tell you something, you got a good name for yourself, but now you got to work. Keep it.”
Well, you know, being eight or nine years old, I thought, what’s he mean by this? Well, it didn’t take me long to figure out our good name goes a long way, and that’s what he was trying to tell me, so I’ve had several incidents where I remember that.Just like that one incident, i where our daughter got sick. Phyllis called me and said, “Can you go drugstore, they’re gonna wait  and give her some medicine.” So I jumped in the truck, took off to Albemarle. Well, going down there, a girl was standing trying to wave somebody downside the road. And I had seen the girl a few times in Albemarle. She wasn’t the most; I don’t know how to say this. She wasn’t the most attractive girl, and she was; you could tell she was mentally challenged, and so I didn’t have time to stop. So I picked up the telephone. I called 911 center, and the boy who answered happened to be one of our firemen at Ridgecrest.

And I told him, “That girl trying to flag people down, close to the patrol station. I said, “She’s waving her hands, trying to get people to stop.” He said, “Describe her.” So I did. He said, “Oh, don’t worry about her. So that’s the county prostitute,” If I hadn’t been busy, I would, I mean, in a hurry, I probably would stop and asked her if she needed some help. But when you stop, she jumps in. That’s what I was told. And she won’t get out to until you give her money or whatever. And so there was one of those times that what grandpa told him to flash through my head, you know, you got a good name now work to keep it.

Some of the best advice I got was from my grandpa. And not just that, but other little things he grandpa told me. He said, “If there’s any time in your life that you can’t pay a bill, don’t run from the people.” He said, “You run into them, you tell them, I can’t make that payment right now, or I can’t pay can we work something out?” 

Believe it or not, I’ve had to do that a time or two, and it pays off. Go to that person, tell them that you can’t pay it right now, but you can two weeks or three weeks, and like I said, I’ve been in that situation when we had bad years, and you can’t do no better. And nine times out of ten, they say, “Don’t worry about it.” We know you’re good for it. So there again, there’s that good name that my grandpa taught me to understand, not that my dad, me and my daddy was were close, but that was something about my grandpa was a little special to me, and me and him always got along good, but, yeah, I love my grandparents.

[00:36:59]

>> MB: Would you say farming is easier now or harder now than back then?

>>CF: Years ago, when I started farming, we didn’t have a tractor with a cab or a combine with a cab or air conditioning. The first combine I ran didn’t have a cab, and they put me cutting milo.

Milo is one of the dustiest, itchiest crops. You just have to be around it to understand, but it’d get right around your shirt collar line and eat you alive. But it didn’t matter that day. I was as tickled to death. Now, combines have GPS. We record everything, as far as the yield and moisture. Anything that can be recorded I’ve got an iPad in my combine, and it puts it on that iPad.

You can flip a switch if you’re picking corn. There are switches on the corn head, and you just flip that switch, and it automatically takes off and goes to pick and run in the combine itself. You have to be there to stop it. If you didn’t, it’d run itself in the woods. It knows the perimeter, the boundaries. When the combine goes past the boundary, it cuts the monitors off and it stops recording. That way, it knows you just don’t keep recording. We’re just making 100 bushels here, and then all at once, it goes to zero. Then you come back in, and it picks up and starts recording again.

That’s pretty smart. We didn’t have none of that when I, started farming. Same as tractors, planting, you set the planters up. After you make a preliminary boundary. It’ll follow where it’s supposed to be. And then when you get ready to, go back and forth, you set a point A and a point B, and click it. It sets lines across that field. Then you plant down, and it automatically steers and puts those rows exactly instead of If I’d done it, they’ll be some narrow, some wide, but this autosteer puts everything right where it’s at.

And at the end of the day, it’ll tell you how many acres that you’ve planted. Also, soil sampling, I soil sample by grids, where this is a high potential crop making area. This is not, this is a medium. Those, soil samples tell me that. And then, after a year or so of recording the, yields, the folks that did my soil samples can make me prescriptions. If I’m going across there, it’s a good place, makes good corn, and speeds the population up. But you get over here where it’s not, and it slows down to the point where you don’t want to grow what it’s potentially to grow. In good corn, you’re probably dropping 28 to 30,000. You get into poor places, and it might drop down to 20, 22,000. It’s saving me money by not dropping seed and not wasting seed. The first thing I started was the soil sampling, then the planting, and then the yield, and it all kind of commingles and came together. That’s one thing that my grandpa never seen. And then the Cotton picker is a unique piece of equipment.

I got to planting and went back to planting cotton on the farm. Of course, they planted it, and then the bow weevil came in the 1950s. Then the bow weave came in and ruined the cotton. Around 1995, cotton began to be a real good price again.

We got back in it, and it worked. So I bought all the equipment and my grandpa. I got pictures of him and grandma picking cotton, and then I got pictures of them with the cotton picker behind them. Early generation and a later generation of a cotton picker

Grandpa, he couldn’t believe it. A combine doesn’t get it all, and a cotton picker doesn’t get it all, but I’ve had several people say if I left that kind of cotton, it’d wear me out with a cotton stalk; that’s just the difference. There’s no way I could hire a cotton pick even if you paid minimum wage. I got to depend on a piece of equipment. Things have come a long way from the time I started farming and I started farming I guess you’d say, my first full year was 1977.

We were a total failure that year. Complete, total failure. But I didn’t let that hold me back. I dug in and was ready to go again in 78. A lot of changes have even been made. From then until now, not, let alone what Grandpa said from the time he started and he quit, he probably seen as much as I did if he was amazed at the cotton pickers and how they worked.

[00:44:18]

>> MB: How do you envision the future of farming?

>>CF: It’s going to be tougher because of the development. I’d say that’s probably going to be our number one thing to face the development, losing the land. As far as growing the crops, technology is wonderful.

The early nineties is when Roundup Ready products started coming out, like Roundup Ready Corn and Roundup Ready Cotton. Roundup Ready means that development has been made where you can spray corn, cotton, soybeans, and a lot of other things with Roundup, and it won’t kill it.

Therefore, we can kill a lot of weeds in those crops with Roundup without killing the crop. Nobody thought that weeds would become immune to it. So now we’ve got Roundup-ready weeds out there. They have developed Dicamba, which is a chemical for broadleafs.

It’s a Dicamba, they call it, in, in Genia. But anyway, it’s, all it is just it, you can spray the crop with Dicamba and it won’t kill it. Then there’s another ones came out that you can spray it with, Enlist, which is a old 2, 4 D’s been around as long as, I’d say it was developed in the 1940s and 1950s,

But now they’ve got it in the plants, too, where you can spray the fields with 2, 4 D, and it won’t kill the crop. Technology like that is changing so much every day. I can tell in the yields of the crops that the yields are getting better instead of worse. If this year we got a decent corn crop, if this had been 1978 or 80, the crop wouldn’t have been half what it is. They have bred these corns and beans and cotton as racehorses. They want to get all that they can get out of it. Now they are breeding plants to be somewhat drought tolerant. I asked this question at a conference we went to, and the Monsanto company had a booth set up there; I asked them, “now, how are y’all getting drought-resistant corn?” They said we’re taking corn varieties from Egypt and dry countries like that. and breeding the genes into the corn we’re growing here in the United States.

Therefore, it makes it somewhat drought resistant. It’s stuff like thats coming down the pipelines that makes me look forward to farming something I always knew coming down the pipelines to increase our yields and equipment is unbelievable. Now they’re coming out with these tractors that you can program.

I could be cutting in one side of the field and get a planter pulled by a tractor that’s not operated by anybody. It’s operating on a laptop in the combine’s cab. But that won’t be used here in Piedmont, North Carolina, maybe down east because the fields are so much bigger. But these, Autonomous tractors or something like that. That’s made for big fields and big places to turn around in because some of the fields we farm is not that big. Five or six paces with a 30 foot planter and we’re done. And that’s another thing, equipment’s got bigger. We can afford the bigger equipment and make it work in these smaller fields here in Stanley County and Piedmont.

Yep, farming there’s a lot to look forward to. And the biggest thing is the prices of commodities. We’d love to see them come back up. We’ve shown other countries and other worlds how to farm and grow crops, and then it’s come back to bite us in a way because they grow good crops now, too, which I’m thankful for. I don’t want to see anybody go hungry. I don’t want to see anybody broke because they couldn’t make it even.

[00:50:42]

>>MB: What advice would you give to newer farmers entering this field, considering your experiences?

>>CF: First thing I’d do is tell ’em start small and work up. Don’t start farming, saying, I wanna be just like my neighbor. It took me a long time to get where I am today, and they can’t; nobody can jump in and start farming, buying the equipment, and farming 1300 acres. Just can’t do it and never come out. Till you buy that equipment you’d be better off to invest that money and get you a job. Eight to five job helping a farmer if that’s what you wanna do. Farming is not easy to get into.

If I hadn’t been able to follow in my ancestors grandpa and my daddy’s footsteps, I couldn’t farm. Now I’ve got a son that wants to farm so bad. He’s got a job at Charlotte making way over $40 an hour, not counting the benefits and the insurance and the 401 ks and all that.

I can’t compete with that. I can’t pay him $40 an hour and try to give him what he’s getting now. He works a four-day week. He comes home and helps me two days a week and in the afternoons when he gets home. But the, yeah, the biggest thing I tell young farmers is to start small and work your way up. You know there are not many young farmers starting now because they can’t afford it.

They’ve got to follow in somebody’s footsteps; it’s amazing that land in Stanley County, let alone through the Piedmont, has been lost for housing developments. There’s a 100-acre tract two miles from here. It was farmed, then sold at an auction, and now a developer is cutting it up into tracts of land and building houses on it.

We’re trying to get the soil and water, get the landowners to understand that there’s a way to put it in a voluntary ag district or sell the development rights under conservation easement. it’s farming. It’s not an easy job, but it’s a loving job. If you ever get started, you love it. You get in your blood. You can’t get it out.

[00:53:57]

>> MB: Any closing or final thoughts?

>>CF: I just wish everybody could understand what farming is and have the opportunity to come and see a farm and ask the farmer what he’s doing. We are trying to put on events at the Stanley County Ag Civic Center in our new arena now.

Putting on shows and having farm equipment set up there for people to watch. Kids can get on it ask questions. Yeah, I worked on that arena committee for 12 years. I finally got that thing done. I was so proud of that thing. But it took several people, including myself, to keep pushing to get that thing built.

And now that it’s built, everybody’s enjoying it. Going to be a rodeo next weekend if you want to ride a bull. Anytime you see a farmer, tell them thank you. And don’t flip him the bird when he gets in your way on the highway. Farming is not an easy life, but I enjoy talking about it. Anytime anybody wants to come, we’ll sit down and talk farming one afternoon.

And I’ve rode no tellings how many different people in the cotton picker and the combine. I’ll never forget, there’s a lady from Pennsylvania or Ohio coming by the road where I was picking cotton and she wanted to see what that white stuff was; her son turned her around and brought her back to the field, and the boys hollered at me on the radio said there’s a lady here wanting to talk to you so I pulled out to the car where she was and explained what I was doing I said, “Matter of fact, would you like to ride?”

She said, “Can I?” I said, “Yeah. We got her in the cab, and I rode her around four or five rounds. She had the time of her life. People like that just stop by to say hey. And that’s what does my heart good is somebody wanting you to tell them what you’re doing, and then when it’s all said and done, they either hug you or tell you how much they appreciate you. We don’t tell each other thank you. We don’t hug each other’s neck and say I love you and I appreciate what you’re doing. We need to include God in our lives instead of wanting to get bigger, wanting to get ahead and all that. We need to stop and realize where it comes from.

[00:57:24]

>> MB: Okay, cool. Thank you.

>> CF: I hope I answered what you needed. If not, come back, and we’ll do this again.