Family Continues to Farm Tobacco, Adds New Crops

Source from:  AP State News By CHARLIE HALL 04/18/2005

With each spring comes renewed hope for the Hill family. They're a dwindling breed of family farmers, which means that John, his wife Theresa, and the two children do the work. With tobacco as his money crop and the weather always looming as the wild card, he knows each year of farming could be his last. This will be his 17th year. He'll tend close to 30 acres of tobacco, along with 350 acres of soybeans this year on rented land in the Janeiro Road area southwest of Oriental. He's had as much as 50 acres of tobacco, before government allotment cuts came along. With allotments now a thing of the past, he has contracted with Phillip Morris USA in recent years. The workings of a small farm are filled with good and bad times. He was down to 19 acres of tobacco last year, which he says was the bare minimum he and his family could get by on. This year, he'll get about 10 more acres. Even as he and the family were putting seeds into the greenhouse beds last month, he already knew his price per pound this year would be about 40 cents less. But, on the flip side, with allotments gone, he'll save about $6,000 in payments to the allotment owner. For him, the buyout, or Tobacco Transitional Payment Program, has been a blessing. "That is probably the only thing that saved us, because they were talking this year, if they hadn't passed it, they were going to cut tobacco 30 percent," he says. "In other words, we would have had 10 or 11 acres. In other words, we would have been gone." His hope is that with the buyout and direct company contracts, tobacco will rebound. "My best years were when I had right at 50 acres. At that time, that was sufficient money for a family," he recalls. "It was good for three or four years and then they started cutting the quotas and we started losing 10 and 15 percent a year. We lost half of our crop in four years. You might as well say you lost half of your income in four years." John grew up on a tobacco farm, and except for a few years as a traveling musician, he's only known the labor of the land. His father, Cecil, moved to Pamlico County 42 years ago, the year John was born. It was a different time in many ways - tobacco was a crop that the state boasted about - a crop that was not under social and economic siege. But the small family farm principle applied. "We worked a lot. That was when tobacco wasn't so easy. It was getting up at three o'clock in the morning," he recalls of life for himself, three sisters and a brother. Those were the days of the tobacco barns and tobacco sticks, mostly now crumbling ruins in local fields. "With the stick barns, he had 12 to 14 head he hired, because it took a lot of people pulling it by hand, and then it took just as many looping it," he says. "They used to loop it on the sticks the old-fashioned way." His father had extremely good luck with the weather, he remembers. There were dry spells, but the needed rain always came. Like the other farmers, he had his strict allotment of how many acres to plant and how many pounds to sell. "He sold his pounds all 28 years and that's incredible," John says, adding that his own luck has not been so fortunate. "I've sold my pounds - out of 16 years - not many years," he admits. "There's something constantly happening with the weather. I've had a bad string of luck with the weather." During the first two decades of his life, tobacco farming seemed a hard, but good honest way to make a living. Reflecting upon his childhood, he realizes he never really saw the hard times that he now encounters as a small farmer. "If I had seen that happening with him, I would never have come back and farmed," he admits. "When I grew up we didn't have a lot of money, but the food was always on the table, the light bill was paid and there was always money to go do a little bit with if you wanted to. He was fortunate, really fortunate with the farming." John's tobacco in 2004 averaged $1.91 a pound, with a high of $2. In his father's gravy years back in the 1980s, he made as much as $2.20 a pound. There's an old adage that "you can't keep them down on the farm." John Hill was no different, although life's circumstances eventually led him back to the land. He had a love for music - playing guitar - which for awhile seemed his life's direction. It was also through music that he met Teresa, a Carteret County native. The two met at church, where his church band was visiting. She also played Christian music, on keyboard, and the two hit it off. Over the next couple of years they dated and talked about marriage. "We were talking about buying our little white house," he recalls. Then, a friend from New Bern who played for an Ohio-based band - the Goads - got a shot with a big-time country band. "I tried out and got the job and did it for three years," he says. "It was a big no-name band, the Goads. But they were really a great band." A main venue for the group was Amway conventions, and John recalls performing in front of 30,000 people. The couple married a year into his three-year band gig, and he realized that the traveling life, marriage and family did not mesh. "You jump on a bus and you're gone for two or three weeks at a time," he says. "Most guys that do that end up getting divorced." His friend with the major country group saw his marriage end a few years ago. "He just wasn't home enough," John says. About this time, his own father was winding down his farming career in the late 1980s. "I think I could have taken my music farther than I did, but daddy was quittin' farming, and I knew if he quit and all that land got leased out, then I wouldn't be able to farm." So, John Hill decided he would gamble on tobacco, but not on his family. The number of small farms dwindles each year - longtime farm families sell off everything including their homes and equipment. That reality has not escaped the Hill family's thoughts despite the renewal of hope each spring. "I've thought about quitting. I don't get many good night's sleep anymore, thinking about everything and hoping," John admits. "We got cut from having a comfortable living to just getting by now." His own reality is that he is 42 - which is not old - but not a good age for the head of a household without a college degree to think about career changes. "The reason I have probably continued to (farm) is I figure any job that I go out and get now, I'm just going to be getting by. I don't have a college education. What am I going to do? I'm not going to get a forty, forty-five or fifty-thousand-dollar a year job. That's not going to happen." So, John and Teresa endure, maintaining the guarded optimism that makes the fabric of farm families strong. "So I told her, if we can just get by and pay the bills and hope this tobacco straightens back out and the money comes back into at least where we can get back to making a living. It's worth going through a bad time when you really have nothing else to do. I'm too old to play music. If I was still 25, 28 years old, I'd go back to playing guitar and not think twice about it. But, I'm too old." After hurricanes and droughts and record rains, he's learned not to dwell too long on the negatives. Besides, its spring and he's thankful that the family has again been able prepare the seeds in the greenhouse and wait for them to grow to planting size. In February, John, Teresa, John Michael and Shannon spent two days preparing 900 trays with seeds they hope will produce upwards of 170,000 plants. The plants are now 3 and 4 inches tall, and by mid-month they'll have grown another two inches and should be ready to begin life in the fields. It's a new year for the family, and today, the sun is shining. Endtiem