Tobacco Farmers Use old Techniques to Bring New Life From Fields

Source from:  Asheville (NC) Citizen-Times By John Boyle, Senior Writer 11/08/2004

GRAPEVINE - Go ahead. Look as hard as you want. You won't see him. Ghosts are funny that way. But he's there. Twelve years old, full of so much energy that sometimes he just has to take a break from the work and run full-tilt around the barn a few times. Blonde hair, blue eyes and lanky - a lot like his daddy, even down to the glasses. But sweet-natured like his mama, and always willing to talk to anybody who stops by. We can't see him, you and me. But for Buster and Jessie Norton, he's always there - helping them plant, running through the broad leaves of summer tobacco, standing mesmerized in a warehouse full of pungent, ripe leaf as the auctioneer sings his odd song. He's here today as his mother and father begin transplanting another crop of burley tobacco seedlings, just as they've done every year as long as they can remember. Today, even the ghost of a 12-year-old boy knows the work can't wait. It's time to battle the old foe, the old friend - burley tobacco. So Buster, a tall man with a bushy white beard and a talkative nature, hoists a wooden box full of plants and lugs it to the field. Jessie, her long brown hair streaked with gray but her face still full of youth, does the same. Together they move box after box out of a horse trailer to a flatbed truck, then to the field full of rich, dark earth meticulously groomed into rows. Every year in May, the Nortons bring the 8-inch-tall seedlings to these narrow fields, where they plant them, fend off disease, pests and fungus and harvest another year's cash crop. They do this through blue mold, which cut Madison County's crop in half in 1995. Through diseases such as black shank that can decimate a crop in the field, or white mold, which can do the same in the barn. Through a tractor accident that broke the strong back of Buster's father and left the son in charge of the farm at the age of 14. Through the tragedy that claimed the life of their boy, Reagan. Some natives of Madison County have left their highland farms to make a living in the towns and cities, particularly the younger generation who find the work too arduous, the payoff too paltry. The number of farms in Madison has dropped from a high of 3,405 in 1989 to 2,380 this year. The average age of Madison farmers is nearly 60. Big tobacco's profits are shrinking, partly because of enormous payouts they've had to make to reimburse the states for tobacco-related health problems. Demand for domestic tobacco has dropped sharply the last 10 years, resulting in reduced quotas that restrict the amounts farmers can grow - the county's farmers sold 2.2 million pounds of burley in 2001, down from a high of 7.4 million in 1981. Numerous "buyout" proposals have been floated through Congress that could pay farmers a lump sum to get out of the business for good. But on this morning, with the sun burning off the lingering morning mist, the lawyers and the policy-makers - even the specter of a 12-year-old boy - are far, far away. It's planting time in the Grapevine Valley, a community of rolling river bottoms halfway between Mars Hill and Marshall where people live in small, wood frame homes, often with old cars and pickups parked outside in a gravel drive. Petersburg, on N.C. 213, is the nearest "town," but it's really just a BP gas station and a green highway sign. Where the Nortons live and farm is another five miles up Petersburg Road and then to Grapevine Road. Not waving as you pass in your pickup is considered a trifle rude here. The valleys are surrounded by 4,000-foot mountain peaks and inhabited by mountain folk whose ancestors first trudged over these hills shortly after the American Revolution ended. They are people as resilient as the crop that helps sustain them. They are people like Buster's grandfather, Enoch Norton, who started growing tobacco here nearly 100 years ago. So Buster (that's his God-given name) and Jessie load up plants onto their old blue Ford tractor, with the help of Buster's cousin, Analo Phillips, whose mother named him for a character in an old western she took a fancy to. "I been tending this field 20 years," Buster says. "People didn't used to tend these bottoms too much." "The top soil is about six feet deep here in the valleys," Phillips, 54, and a bit of a historian, explains. "Back in the Depression people farmed the hillsides and it washed down to the valleys." He also fancies himself a bit of a comedian - "You know what a farmer is?" he asks. "A man out standing in his field." "It's good soil here," Jessie says. "By the way, we're setting Winston Lights today. That's a little humor to offset the pressure of farming." Ironically, neither Buster nor Jessie has ever smoked or dipped. In a field surrounded by honeysuckle, wild cherry and rhubarb, Buster revs the tractor's engine and positions it at the beginning of the first row. He sets the tractor in motion, about the pace of a walk. Jessie and Analo, sitting in metal seats attached to the rear of the tractor, start feeding the setter, an ingenious and simple machine that sits between them. Its rubber grabbers, called pockets, open briefly, allowing a person to feed the plant in before it closes again, rotates forward and pushes the plant into the ground roots first, with a squirt of water and 20-20-20 fertilizer for good measure. This 1.2-acre field will take about 8,000 plants and five hours to set. Jessie and Analo, used to the work, rarely miss the setter's constantly yawning pockets. "This is my second job," Jessie says, not looking away from the box of plants and the setter. "I work at Honeywell, but the work is kind of slow there, so this is my farm job - settin' tobacco." "She just enjoys riding with me," Analo, who sports bushy muttonchops, says with a smile. The Nortons are planting "KT-200," a tobacco variety from Kentucky that's more resistant to black shank, a fungus that leaves the inside of the stalk black and ruined before killing the plant. Black shank has been giving them fits in recent years. Jessie yells to Buster that they've missed a plant. They take a break to recalibrate the amount of water being disbursed with each plant. "See, I keep him straight," Jessie says. "That's my job. He tells me I'm the boss." Buster just smiles. Tobacco's roots run deep "Every now and then you find an Indian arrowhead in these fields," Analo, who like the Nortons also grew up on a farm in Madison County and grows his own crop, says over the tractor's chug-chug-chug. The Cherokee lived in the Southern Appalachian mountains for thousands of years, using the French Broad River basin, including Madison County, as seasonal hunting grounds. In the late 1700s, Scottish and Irish immigrants settled in the mountains, pushing the Cherokee farther west, but adopting from them the practice of growing and smoking tobacco. By 1791, when the U.S. government formally acquired these lands, more than 500 families already lived in what is now Madison County, eking out a living on small farms and homesteads. In 1827, the opening of the north-south Buncombe Turnpike created a commercial market for corn, which shopkeepers sold to passing drovers. Madison's farmers considered this their primary cash crop until the 1870s when mountain farmers discovered the commercial market for tobacco. With the coming of the railroad in the 1880s, tobacco markets became accessible, and mountain tobacco farming boomed. For decades Madison's farmers grew the same bright-leaf, flue-cured tobacco their counterparts in eastern North Carolina cultivated. One of the barns Buster leases for curing his crop still has a flue, or fireplace, to provide the heat source flue-cured tobacco required. But in the 1920s, local farmers latched onto a new variety of tobacco, burley, much prized for chewing tobacco because it could easily absorb flavorings. By 1930, burley was king in Madison County. Growing and selling it became a tradition as ingrained as ballad singing, a way of life handed down generation by generation, ending up in the hands of men like Buster Norton. Buster thinks some of those early settlers were his ancestors, but he's never traced the family genealogy back that far. He does know that in 1923 his grandfather, Enoch, bought the land Buster himself now calls home at the top of Arrington Branch, a steep hillside creek that runs to the back of Grapevine Valley. Buster has since added to the land, amassing 83 acres, but only a half dozen or so are what he calls "tractor land." Buster's father, Brown Norton, also grew tobacco for cash, about three acres total. That sounds like a tiny amount, but with the intense hand-labor required in the days before tractors and chemicals, it was a sizable operation. Brown Norton also ran some cattle and pigs and grew enough vegetables and grains to keep Buster and his younger brother and sister well-fed over the winter. By his side, helping with all the work a farm demands, was his wife, Lola. A good match Typically, men run the farms in Madison, but women often help out or work a second "public job" to help make ends meet. So good fortune smiled on Buster Norton back in February 1976 when a pretty brunette named Jessie Peterson caught his eye when she visited Sunday services at his church, Arrington Branch Baptist. Mountain men don't dilly-dally when it's right, and Buster and Jessie married that July. Now he's 52, a lot grayer and 30 pounds heavier, at 172, than when he married, thanks to Jessie's cooking. She's 47 and still full of the good humor and love that Buster found so attractive. She graduated from Mars Hill College with a degree in childhood education, but she's opted to work at Honeywell. Together they're working 12 acres of land, five of their own and seven they lease from other Madison County residents who still have quotas but don't want to grow a crop. This year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is allowing Buster to grow about 30,000 pounds of tobacco. "The year before last they cut us 44 percent," Jessie says from the setter. When they're done with this batch of plants, they head back to the horse trailer behind Buster's Dodge flatbed truck to get more. "You carry tobacco in the field, and you carry it out," Buster likes to say. Four trays hold 1,000 plants, which cost $36 and will eventually yield about 300 pounds of tobacco for market. But work, not cash, often is the payment of choice in Grapevine. Analo is here today in an old Madison County tradition of "swapping work" - you help me out, I'll help you. "We swap a lot of work," Buster says. "We still do that in this area. A lot of the jobs you can't do by yourself." When they run out of plants, Buster goes to see his nephew, Eddie Shelton, for more. Shelton operates a greenhouse and an outdoor plant bed with the help of his family, including his brother, Paul Shelton, and their dad, Harlon. Buster's operation is small compared to the Sheltons, who grow 50 acres of tobacco and run 150 head of cattle. The average Madison County farm is 88 acres, but the average acreage of tobacco grown is just 2.5 acres per farm, a testament to the absence of tractor land in these steep mountains. On this sunny May morning, the Sheltons are removing 8- inch plants from beds in an outdoor field they seeded in February. They've got three acres of beds like this, with about 7,000 plants in each 100 feet. "The hard work is starting now," says Harlon Shelton, a burly man whose skin already is deeply tanned. "We've got something to do all the time," says Paul Shelton, a square-shouldered 20-year-old who's studying agriculture in college. "It's simple, but it's complex. Everything has got to be done at the right time, or it doesn't come together." Paul Shelton is what Buster would call "stout" - strong from work, not lifting weights in a gym, a man able to handle the work the tobacco life demands. Unlike many young men in Madison, he wants to stay in agriculture. "Paul and my boy would've been the same age," Buster says. A boy lost Up at Buster's house - three-quarters of a mile off a winding gravel drive off Arrington Branch Road - Buster emerges from his pickup, stretches out his arms and wryly notes, "I don't know why nobody ever comes by to see me." The view is spectacular, the mountains looming huge and green. Inside, the 100-year-old frame house is far from fancy - linoleum floors, a wood stove for heat, a 90-year-old black piano in one corner, not far from a computer. Half of the ceiling sags, but the house, with log beams in the basement, is, as Buster says, strong enough to hold his tractor. On a shelf rests a polished, hand-carved wooden horse, an example of the handcrafts Buster's father took up after his accident. Over the old flower-print sofa in the living room hangs a picture of Reagan in his baseball uniform, bat on his shoulder. He's a boy forever on the cusp of adolescence. A boy forever gone. "My son died at the age of 12," Buster says quietly. "He fell out of a pickup truck. That was eight years ago." Just 12 years old, Reagan Norton could, as his father says, do the work of a man. On June 22, 1994, that's exactly what he was doing, spending most of the day in the tobacco fields, plowing. But as the sun settled behind the mountains of the Grapevine Valley, Buster grew concerned about Reagan getting hurt driving a tractor near dusk. So he sent his son home to get ready for church. Reagan hopped in the back of the pickup, which didn't have a tailgate, for the short ride home. A state law was in the works at the time to outlaw riding in pickup beds, but the practice was so common in the mountains of Western North Carolina that no one thought anything of it. But as the truck rounded a curve near Grapevine Baptist Church, something went terribly wrong. Reagan tumbled out. His head slammed into the blacktop. Buster and Jessie's fun-loving boy who had a word for everybody was brain dead by the time the helicopter flew him to the hospital in Asheville. He was an organ donor for his heart and kidneys. Jessie talks about the incident now without crying, but she's never been the same. She was driving the truck that night. It was a road she'd driven thousands of times before. She wasn't speeding. The accident still makes no sense to her. "It takes you a long time," she says. "You don't ever really get over something like that." They still had two daughters to raise, Kendra, 3 at the time, and Crystal, 14. And the crop. "At first it was real hard to deal with, but we had a big crop out, and a lot of folks came by to help and to just talk with us," Buster recalls. "We can talk about it now, but there's hardly a day goes by that you don't think about it." The funeral at Arrington Branch Baptist Church, where Reagan had gone to services all his life, was overflowing with family and friends, many of whom the Nortons had swapped work with over the years. The cars and pickups took up a half a mile on either side of the road. Reagan's baseball teammates, wearing their uniforms, filled the front pews. Everybody liked Reagan, whether it was a 90-year-old aunt he doted on or his classmates at Madison Middle School. Never a great student - he had problems with reading and paying attention - Reagan was good with his hands and working with equipment. Buster hoped to hand the operation over to him one day when the boy became a man, as tradition holds in Madison County. Despite the loss, Buster and Jessie never succumbed to bitterness, a testament to their strong faith in God, the support of friends and family, and the demands of their lives. You can't dwell on loss with a crop to grow every year, second jobs to work and two daughters to raise. "You learn to live with it - that's part of life," Buster says. The boy is buried in the family cemetery, about a hundred yards from the house, on the farm that one day could have been his. Enditem