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Rethinking the Farm
Switching to chickens, produce tests tobacco growers’ resilience
Journal photo by Traci White
Marshall Sink helps Dee Dee Foster select a jalapeno pepper.
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Published: July 12, 2008
MIDWAY - Mike Long's farming future is in four corrugated steel pens in a field on a corner of his quiet farm in northern Davidson County. There, hundreds of white, red and speckled chickens cackle and croon as they scratch for feed.
When they're big enough, Long slaughters them and plucks them in his front yard under shade trees.
He guesses that he has sold about 50 between early June, when he started selling his birds, and early July. It's not enough to make a living. But it's a start.
As interest in local food increases and agriculture expenses rise, some area tobacco farmers are moving their eggs to other baskets, shifting their primary source of income to new crops and livestock.
Long, 56, had been growing tobacco for more than 20 years when a local extension agent planted a seed in his mind about pasture-raised chickens.
Earlier this year, Long thought about farming as he plowed one of his fields, turning over the cost of growing tobacco as he turned over the dirt. The cost of diesel was skyrocketing. Long wanted something he could do himself, without spending money to hire labor. "I just couldn't see where there would be any money in tobacco," he said. "And that's when I decided to take the plunge."
He planted about 32 acres of tobacco last year but harvested only 18 because of the drought. This year, he's down to 3 acres.
And every morning since this spring, he uses hand trucks to move the chicken pens a few feet to a fresh patch of pasture. They have room to scratch the grass and hunt for bugs. Long gives them vegetable feed without antibiotics. Within sight of the pens are three tobacco-curing barns, now used for storage.
"This is something that's going to take a while to come around," Long said. "I'm expecting a slow start."
Long sells whole chickens Tuesdays at the Downtown Farmers Market in Winston-Salem and Saturdays at Lexington's farmers market. At $3 a pound, an average bird will cost more than $13 and about twice the price you'll pay in many grocery stores for conventionally raised chicken. Long thinks that his chicken is worth it.
"I always thought people needed to be a little closer to their source of food physically and emotionally," Long said, standing in his front yard on a recent afternoon. "These chickens are here from the time they're little until the time they're slaughtered. They're not thrown in a truck and hauled all day and sit until they're ready to be killed. I think it's a more humane way to go."
Long is limited to 1,000 chickens a year by state regulations; eventually, he wants to build a small building to kill and clean the birds. According to state poultry regulations, he'll then be able to slaughter up to 20,000 chickens a year.
This summer, he started grinding some of his own oats into feed for his chickens. By the fall, he hopes to have eggs to sell, and perhaps some of his pasture-raised beef, too.
Marshall Sink grew his last crop of tobacco on his farm in Arcadia in 2005. For his family, it was the end of an era. He grew up in tobacco, and so did his father and grandfather. "I tell people Mama had me in a tobacco field," he said.
Now he sets up at five small farmers markets weekly and monthly in parking lots at Forsyth Medical Center and Novant Health Inc. On a recent Friday morning, he and his mother, Nancy, arranged plastic boxes of their cabbage, tomatoes, eggplant, yellow squash, green-leaf lettuce and tiny cream-colored potatoes on tables outside of the employee entrance at the medical center. The Sinks supplement what they grow with produce that they buy, or that isn't in season locally, such as packaged strawberries (likely from California) and cantaloupe from South Carolina.
Sink also grows petunias and other annuals in the same greenhouse he used to start young tobacco plants. He irrigates his vegetables with the same equipment that watered his tobacco fields.
He didn't intend to capitalize on the local-food trend. He was just in the right place at the right time. "That's the reason I got into it. I had to make a living," he said. "This way I could do something and still stay on the farm."
But farmers such as Long and Sink depend on customers who will seek out local food, even if it's more expensive and even as the price of food in general keeps rising. Right now, demand is still bigger than the supply. "How much larger, we don't know," said Blake Brown, an agricultural economist and the director of the Value-Added and Alternative Agriculture Center at N.C. State University. "There's a segment of the population willing to pay for it."
There may be fewer than 3,000 tobacco farmers in North Carolina today, Brown said. In 2002, there were 12,000 tobacco farms in the state, according to the last national agricultural census. Although there aren't similar numbers that point to the number of tobacco farmers working then, Brown says that they have declined, particularly in the Piedmont.
Congress approved a $10 billion buyout of the federal tobacco-quota system in 2004, which eliminated price supports. In recent years, North Carolina has grown slightly more tobacco than in the years before the buyout, but for small farmers, it isn't as profitable under deregulation, Brown said.
Add to that rising fuel and labor costs, and some farmers are looking for new opportunities.
Although many have retired, others have made the transition to growing other crops, moving into landscaping and turf farming, or growing fruit and vegetables.
Farmers making the shift from tobacco have to do things they've probably never done. Very often, they'll have to market themselves and work directly with customers in a way they never had to, Brown said.
Long created a Web site and has brochures for his chickens touting the localness and freshness of chickens from his farm, Cool Branch Farms.
For someone brand new to the farmer's market business, it's not an easy sell. He's finding that most customers at the downtown farmers market aren't prepared to take a raw chicken back to work with them. Restaurants would be a more dependable source, so he's looking for their business, too. Mary Haglund, the owner of Mary's Of Course Cafe on Brookstown Avenue, has started buying about four each week to use for sandwiches and chicken stock.
The restaurant's kitchen staff has turned Long's chickens into lunch, roasting it and serving it with a balsamic vinegar reduction and root vegetables, and making barbecue chicken sandwiches with Swiss cheese and zucchini slaw.
Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.
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