[AT] IH Grain Binder

[David Bruce]

Charlie,

Very much the same here in those days and today yes most all the tobacco 
is grown under contract  In fact the brothers who lease my aunt's part 
of the old farm are here today to finish the tobacco harvest.  With the 
machinery one person dives the harvester, two people run shuttle back 
and forth to the curing barn location with the trailers of harvested 
leaves and they brought three laborers with them this morning.  No doubt 
the corn, beans and grain were mostly for livestock back in those days. 
  Now the same farmers who lease the tobacco fields also grow corn and 
soybeans - sometimes wheat over the winter - more often than not as a 
cover crop which is not harvested.

They and their cousins farm most of the fields here these days. 
Apparently they do ok but no doubt they have huge investments in 
equipment, tobacco curing barns and grain dryers.  All of them started 
with help from their father's in terms of having land available and over 
the years they have expanded.

Back in the stick curing days maybe 1/3 of the remaining tobacco could 
be prepared for curing by 30 to 40 people total.  Later most of the 
"barn help" went by the way with the advent of first automatic stringing 
machines then to bulk curing - I'm sure the same happened in your area.

David
NW NC

On 10/3/2012 10:12 AM, charlie hill wrote:
> 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