At 83, Woodrow Austin Still Believes in Tobacco

Source from:  Tribune Staff Writer by NICOLE SLIGER 04/26/2004

Editor's note: This is the eighth in a series of stories about tobacco growing in the Lakeway Area, its impact on the economy, and how farmers will cope with decreased demand. Woodrow Austin first stepped foot in a tobacco patch at age 10. Little did he know that 73 years later, he'd still be finding his way back to that patch every summer. At 83, Woodrow Austin is still going strong and doing the thing that is in his blood-farming. Austin speaks with ease about the trade he has perfected in his lifetime. Farming has changed over the past years, but he says one thing remains the same. It is always 352 days of hard work that he has never shied away from. Austin Bell Farms is a versatile operation. With farms in Hamblen, Grainger, and Jefferson counties, they grow strawberries, hay, corn, and tobacco. It's tobacco that the 83-year-old farmer about wanted to discuss. The story of burley tobacco in East Tennessee is one that Austin has known from the very beginning. "I was 10 years old when I first started helping in tobacco. I've been working in it ever since. My daddy grew tobacco before they even had a warehouse in Hamblen County. "He'd take it to Greenville and sell it. There wasn't an allotment at that time, but you had to have a license with Appalachian Tobacco. I'd go with him to sell it and he'd go ahead and buy it at a quarter a pound. You just flat out paid for it then, but later they went to marketing cards. In the late 1920s Morristown finally got a tobacco warehouse. People started raising more of it around here after that," says Austin. In the late 1940s I went to work for the tobacco companies. I guessed I worked for them 4 or 5 years. We got out of the tobacco business for a while and got into the trucking business. But, we ended up going back to tobacco again. Then in 1978 I went to work operating the Hamblen County Co-Op Tobacco Warehouse. I guess around that time there was around 2 million pounds harvested in Hamblen County. I left that job eventually and went back to farming," says Austin. Tobacco growing has changed over the past years. All the time, farmers are evolving and changing the method to get a stronger product and outcome. Many family farms that survive in East Tennessee are passed down from generation to generation. Austin Bell Farms holds to that tradition. "I worked in it with my daddy and now I work in it with my boy and my nephew. We still raise it, probably always will. Tobacco has paid off for my family." "I reckon I put my three children through UT on it." He talked of the many changes. "Since I was a boy and a young man, a lot has changed. I can remember when I was a boy we'd set the plants by hand and carry water by the buckets to water around them. For a long time we farmed with mules. Most people never farmed with mules or carried water by the buckets. "We went to tractors and then in the early '40s we bought a setter. We'd top by hand and we'd have to go back and take the suckers off. Now, we spray for the suckers. It's changed but it's still hard work. Even though we get a lot more pound per acreage now, fertilizer and such costs so much more. That, and the federal and state taxes on it are unreal. It's changed, (and keeps) changing." He speaks of the one thing that has not changed: Tobacco is as labor intensive now as it was years ago. "We have about 15 acres this year. When we cut it and strip we work some people, but for the most part they (son and nephew) take care of our allotment. That's a lot of work for two men. I help them some, but they work it." Austin feels that the burley tobacco forecast for the East Tennessee crop this year looks dim. "There's so much talk of the tobacco buyout, and trouble with the program, and allotments being so high, you just can't afford it. The grower is suffering these days. We've been cut over half in our allotment in the last four or five years. If they keep cutting it, it's going to keep hurting the farmer." Even with changes in tobacco road and the uncertain future of the crop, Austin still feels confident that the burley crop born in Appalachia will still be here in the years to come. In his 73 years of raising the age old crop, he says he has learned one thing; burley tobacco is way of life. "Well, I reckon it'll still be here. I don't know how much, but it'll still be grown here as long as people are farming." Enditem