“Farming is not just a job, it’s a way of life.” – Unknown
For most people, Labor Day is a holiday when you don’t have to work. You have the day off. You can go on a picnic, go fishing, read a book, visit family, have some fun. That might be true for me now, but that wasn’t always the case when I was a kid or even later after marrying.
My father was a farmer. When I was a kid, he had beef cows, grew corn, cut hay, and raised tobacco. Most every farmer raised tobacco as his cash crop back in the 1900’s. The government had a program where they assigned every farm a tobacco allotment. According to the amount of acres you owned, you got the right to grow a set number of acres of tobacco. A small farm might be allotted a partial acreage amount.
Dad had an allotment of several acres. I don’t know how many. Maybe three. Maybe five. All I remember is I thought it was a lot. And then when I was a teenager he partnered with another man and rented other acres on other farms where the farm owner didn’t want to or couldn’t for this or that reason do the work of growing the tobacco. So Dad and his partner would raise the tobacco on the farms that had the allotment, do all the work, take it to market and split the amount of whatever the tobacco brought with the farmowner.
He wasn’t a tenant farmer. My husband’s father was. He lived on the farms in a tenant house and milked cows and raised the crops for half the income. He needed the tobacco crop to bring in that extra cash. For many farmers, the tobacco that generally was sold late in the fall or early winter and helped many farm families have Christmas presents under their Christmas trees. Farmers like my dad also needed the tobacco income to pay the property taxes on their farms as well as salt some away for rainy days on down the road.
Labor Day weekend came at harvest time for tobacco. My sisters and I were right out there in the field helping. I never cut the tobacco – that is, chop it down with a special tobacco knife that looked something like a light hatchet and then spear the stalk on a tobacco stick. I did have to drop those sticks down the rows of tobacco so the cutters would have them in front of them to grab and jab in the ground to spear on five or six stalks. Then I helped hand those sticks of tobacco up to whoever was loading the wagon.
We got to rest on the ride to the barn once the wagon was loaded. Of course, that wasn’t very far from the field. Then I usually either handed the tobacco sticks off the wagon to someone on the ground who handed it up to whoever was on the first rail. Most tobacco barns had several rails. The tobacco was handed up to whoever was in the top rails, then the next rail, and last the man on the bottom rail hung a stick. Then the men (usually men but sometimes a woman would climb up in the barn) would scoot a little back on the rail and start the process over until those rails were filled. Then they would climb over into the next set of rails until the barn was full.
This barn in the picture wasn’t like our barns. Ours had rails coming out toward the wagon. Then there were rails up over the wagon in the middle of the barn too.
My husband raised tobacco too for many years after we married until the government stopped the tobacco allotment and price support programs and small farms gave up on tobacco crops. I don’t have pictures of our tobacco harvesting days. That would have felt like a waste of film and photo developing money. No digital cameras like today where you can take a zillion pictures of everything. But the Library of Congress has pictures of the tobacco growing years here in Kentucky. The top pictures are from their files.
What I remember most about helping my dad in tobacco was that the rows seemed a mile long when I was dropping those sticks between the tall stalks of tobacco. The leaves were gummy. It was hot, dirty work. And every holiday instead of going to the pool or the creek for a day of fun, a farmer and his daughters and sons (my dad didn’t have any of those) were right out there in the field working to make enough money to farm another year.
“The real mystery was how your farm bound you to it, so tightly that you would pay any price (literally, in interest) or make any sacrifice just to take these steps across this familiar undulating ground time and time again.” ― Early Warning
Here’s our old tobacco barn. The trees are pushing in on it now that it isn’t being used.
Did you ever work on a farm?
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Comments 1
I grew up on a dairy farm, with hay and tobacco, .We worked in tobacco for us, our grandpa’s farm and our neighbors crop , Nobody was done til everyone was done.
It was hot hard work, until stripping time, then it was freezing cold work, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.We knew how to work . I think it made me a better person to be raised up knowing how to work hard. There was a lot of teamwork in it too.Our families were close, we worked together and played together.
My kids grew up in our tobacco patch and my dad’s tobacco patch also.
These days none of our family raises tobacco, but I’m glad of my roots.