Family Tobacco Farmers Keep Growing Golden Leaf

Source from:  By APRIL JOHNSTON Aug. 18, 2007  08/20/2007

It's time. After 10 days in a propane-heated barn, the green leaves have cured to a golden yellow, like autumn come early. Craven Register grins as his sons and the two migrant workers they've hired for the summer heave and flip an 800-pound bale of tobacco onto the covered concrete slab with a thud. "We're closer to getting some money back now," he says, pushing back his red ball cap and wiping his brow with a handkerchief. "We've been putting out since the first of the year." That's when Craven and his sons planted their tobacco in greenhouses. They moved the plants outside into the sandy soil April 15 and started cropping on the Fourth of July, a good two weeks behind schedule thanks to a spell of dry weather. Growing tobacco used to be a harder life. The plants had to be cropped by hand, leaves hung high in barn rafters. A few dozen acres was all anyone could really manage. Five years ago, Craven was sure he'd had enough. He'd been growing tobacco since he was 16, when he quit high school to lease four acres from a landowner. He was getting to be 70, and he was tired. The 60 acres the family cropped looked bigger every year. Craven told his sons: Either we mechanize or I'm done. So they spent nearly $1 million for equipment. Two years later, the government handed the family a lucrative surprise that made their decision to mechanize look less like a business gamble and more like prognostication. For nearly 70 years, tobacco farmers lived at the will of the government as the quota system dictated who could grow tobacco and where. It kept farms small and prices high. So when the government decided to do away with the system in 2004, buying out the landowners and growers, some feared it would signal the end of tobacco farming. Prices will plummet, they reasoned. More farmers will plant more acres and bloat the market. In the uncertainty, some farmers used the buyout money to retire. Others sold their land to hungry developers. Those who stuck with it quickly saw those pessimistic predictions fizzle away. "The tobacco system is the best I've ever seen it," Craven says. Before the buyout, Craven paid others up to 50 cents for every pound of tobacco he grew on their acreage or allotment. Today, tobacco brings Craven and sons $1.20 to $1.80 a pound at the Philip Morris USA market, a bit less than they earned under the quota system, but they get to keep all of the money they make. "I don't have to pay for the privilege of selling tobacco anymore," Craven says. And he can grow as many acres of tobacco as he pleases, wherever he pleases. His tobacco operation has swelled from 60 to 110 acres since the buyout. Mechanization can easily handle more acres if he and his sons want to plant them. Craven estimates tobacco bought him half of everything he owns. Hogs bought the other half. Still, farming tobacco is a gamble. It's a finicky crop, susceptible to disease and weather. This season, ground suckers and drought threatened to steal the crop. Price is dependent on quality. An inferior crop still means a low return. Cigarette-maker Philip Morris will send back a bad bale. And, in the Registers' case, that would hurt the entire family. "We've got a lot of mouths to feed," Craven says. "It's not many people who can get up and go to work with their boys every morning." There's something about growing tobacco that reaches in and hooks farmers. Maybe it's the look of a swollen field right before cropping, when the broad leaves stretch on like a green sea. Maybe it's the way those leaves, fresh from the field and ready to barn, smell on a muggy day. Maybe it's the way they feel between fingers. Sometimes, when he's driving the tobacco cropper up a new row, Craven's youngest son, Carlton, will reach out and run his hands over the tops. Or maybe it's the tradition, the notion that, even if it didn't bring in more than pennies, tobacco would still deserve a place on a Sampson County farm. Craven's father grew tobacco on the same land, just south of Clinton, that Craven and his sons plant today. Craven, now 73, was 12 when he joined the family business. Carlton, now 36, was 5 the first time his father took him out on the tractor and rumbled between the rows. Craven's oldest son, C.L., now 45, tried to leave the family business after high school. He was sure working for a mechanic in Clinton was better than farming tobacco. But tobacco called him home. "It gets in your blood," says Carlton. "It's a satisfying feeling when you start something from bare ground and see it sprout and prosper and grow." When he and C.L. joined their father's tobacco operation all those years ago, it took 14 people all day and part of the night to fill a barn. Mechanization changed everything. Today they can start cropping at noon and have a barn full by 3. Their labor costs have dropped by nearly $40,000. And they only need to rely on each other and two migrant workers, Alberto and Hugo, to get it all done. Carlton and Craven's wife, Eloise, crop in the field. Craven and his 83-year-old sister, Sybil, C.L. and his 14-year-old son, Glenn, along with Alberto and Hugo, put it in the barn a few miles away. There's comfort in family business: knowing the person working alongside you will be there tomorrow, no matter the weather or circumstances, taking the same pride in the product. But there's danger in family business, too: building homes all in a mile-long row, like ducklings; eating every meal together. Spats could topple a lesser family; but on Craven's farm, everyone has a say. When he talks about the business, he says "we." He and his sons are partners, equals. And they live by Craven's golden rule: Say what you've got on your mind so everyone knows where you're at. Don't pout about it. "It's about like a marriage," Craven says. "If you quit communicating, it ain't going to be long ..." In Sampson County, the second-largest producer of tobacco in a state known for it, Craven Register is a sort of legend. He's a farmer's farmer, up at dawn, working six days out of a week, taking Sunday off for worship. He owns 500 acres, rents 1,200. When the tobacco's sold and gone, he'll harvest corn and soybeans. He raises hogs and cattle. He wore his teeth out chewing tobacco. He won North Carolina's farmer of the year in 2002. Other tobacco farmers consider his operation the pinnacle. When Glenn tells people in town that his last name is Register, they ask: "Are you Craven Register's grandson?" And Craven knows all that. That's why, when he sees C.L. driving toward him with another trailer full of green leaves, he gets up from his folding chair, adjusts his ball cap and grabs his pitchfork. That's why, as a conveyor belt carries the leaves past his discerning eye he pulls out what doesn't look good and whips it onto the ground. Because Craven knows that reputation has a lot to do with perspiration. And that, until those leaves are sold and processed, his family name is attached. To this day, Philip Morris hasn't rejected one of his tobacco bales, and he wants to keep it that way. "When they carry you to your grave, all you got is your name," Craven says. "I try to make it a good one so nobody can talk about me too bad." And then he winks. Enditem