[AT] IH Grain Binder

charlie hill charliehill at embarqmail.com
Wed Oct 3 07:12:43 PDT 2012


David, our farm is at the end of a 3 mile long road.   When I was a kid 
there were more tobacco farmers on that road than there are in the entire 
county now.  Every one of them made their living
from tobacco.  Everyone raised corn and soybeans but it was primarily just 
as rotation crops and for livestock feed.  Some was sold as a cash crop but 
it was never profitable.  If it had not been for needing to rotate out 
tobacco land and do something with excess land (excess because of tobacco 
allotments that were much smaller in acreage than the farm) very little 
grain would have been grown back then.
All of the tobacco farmers left here farm on contract with one of the 
tobacco companies and I don't know of any that tend less than 100 acres of 
tobacco.   To those that don't know how labor intensive tobacco farming is 
100 acres doesn't sound like that much but when I was a child most farm 
families lived on somewhere between 5 and 15 acres.   With large families 
and trading work with other
farmers it was possible to make a living (not a good one but a living).   I 
wanted to farm but I wanted to go to college too and when my dad died when I 
was 16 farming was no longer in the cards for me.

Charlie
-----Original Message----- 
From: David Bruce
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2012 9:10 AM
To: Antique tractor email discussion group
Subject: Re: [AT] IH Grain Binder

Charlie,

I don't think I have ever seen any cotton here but apparently at some
point back in time some was grown.
A few years ago before I retired I frequently worked in the area between
Wadesboro, NC and Cheraw, SC. In that area a lot of acreage was in cotton.

Historically this area was heavy in flue cured tobacco.  Two reasons
that I can determine - a significant purchaser of tobacco in R J
Reynolds in Winston-Salem and secondly relatively small acreage would
provide sufficient income for a farm family for the year.  My grandpa
had an allotment of just over 3 acres.  He also grew some corn, soybeans
and sometimes some grain along with a cow, a mule some hogs and a small
Allis Chalmers tractor (in my like a D-14 but previously a CA).  Later
he added a second tractor - first an Allis B, then a little Ford (never
knew which one) followed by a Ferguson TO-30.

As I reached high school graduation it was clear I did not have the base
from which to leap into mode modern farming so with a scholarship in
hand I took the route of college then working in the textile industry.
My cousin who lives about a quarter mile from here tried to farm on the
side but had the same issues.  Eventually, as a condition to getting a
mortgage for his house, he quit any farming.

Today tobacco is still a big crop (maybe half what it was a decade ago)
and the harvesting has been almost totally mechanized - using used
equipment bought from Charlie's area as farming changed there as well.
We also have numerous vineyards and wineries (there are at least 10
within 20 miles of my house) most started with seed money from the
Golden Leaf Foundation (money from the state's settlement with the major
tobacco companies).

David
NW NC

On 10/3/2012 7:43 AM, charlie hill wrote:
> We only had cotton on the farm that one year and only a few acres of it.
> Daddy had to plant it because there was some sort of allotment we were 
> going
> to loose if
> we didn't actually grow a crop.   I don't think it was a subsidy deal.  It
> was just that the farm had a cotton allotment that had to be grown every 
> so
> often.   Folks here
> didn't grow cotton back then and I understand why.   That little patch we
> had was at best 2 or 3 acres and it took (if I remember right) 8 or 10
> people two days to pick it.
> There is a lot of cotton grown here now, now that there is modern 
> equipment
> to farm it with.   For a few years in the late 80's-early 90's the guy 
> that
> tended our place
> had the whole farm from hedge row to highway planted in cotton.   The farm
> has never been as clean and weed free as it was when planted in cotton.
>
> Charlie
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