Playing the odds, blindfolded

On the other side of Cowee Mountain in Whittier, William Shelton is perched atop a tractor, going down the rows of his tomato field with a sprayer in tow. It’s 8 o’clock at night, but Shelton considers the task downtime.

“Every year at this time you hear about how good the market is going to be and everyone is really optimistic,” Shelton said, talking over the low growl of his engine. Shelton shares that optimism this year, hoping, like Johnson, that too much rainfall caused crop failure elsewhere in the South.

A tomato farmer has $5,000 an acre in labor and supplies invested in the crop before picking day.

“When you look out here and see a flooded out tomato field that’s turned yellow, that’s $5,000 that farmer’s lost he doesn’t ever have a hope of getting back,” said Bill Yarborough with the N.C. Department of Agriculture.

Add picking labor and packing costs, and there’s quite a bit a farmer needs to recoup before he can start tallying profits.

“It’s a high-risk crop. You roll the dice. If the market slams the door in your face, with a perishable crop, there’s nothing you can do about it,” Shelton said.

Motorists driving past Shelton’s farm along the Tuckasegee River slow down a bit, watching his tractor work the rows as twilight closes in on the field. It’s a wholesome image of a small mountain farmer, but it’s a complicated and difficult way to make a living. A farmer’s crop might pass through four hands on the way to the grocery store.

John Johnson, who runs Johnson’s Packing Plant, is the first “middle man” in the chain, whether he’s selling boxes out of the packing house in summer or working as a “grower’s agent” in Florida in the winter.

“I represent the farmer. I try to get all the money I can get for them,” Johnson said.

He sells mainly to repackers, who put the tomatoes in wrappers and packages with pretty stickers and pretty names and UPC codes on the bottom. As a grower’s agent, Johnson’s task one week goes like this: find a buyer for 1,000 acres of cucumbers. He could be up against 30 other agents representing 30 other growers, all trying to unload their crop before it spoils, yet not go bankrupt in the process.

It’s Johnson’s job to know who else is selling, for how much and what quality. Johnson hustles like a stockbroker, but his business partners don’t wear suits and the backdrop for most of his deals are fields and loading docks.

“I have no contracts with anybody. It’s all just word of mouth and hand shakes,” Johnson said. He could work all week finding a buyer for those cucumbers, only to find the grower had another agent working for him, too.

“He could quit me tomorrow,” Johnson said.

Shelton is one of a lucky handful of farmers who skips middle men. He’s been selling to a specialty buyer in New York for 16 years.

“It’s hard to be a top-notch grower and a top-notch marketer,” Shelton said. “The big boys are in the business year round. When you’re a grower, you don’t dictate the price.”

Instead, you’re at the bottom of the barrel.

Selling the field

These days, there’s a new market force in the game. Hispanic migrant workers for decades labored solely as field hands. Now those Hispanics are the ones holding the checkbooks. Cash-strapped farmers are giving up claims to their crop and “selling their field” to migrant crews. A deal is struck when the crop is still on the vine, or sometimes before the seed is in the ground. When the crop comes in, the migrant crew picks it, but instead of getting paid for their labor, they sell the crop and keep the earnings.

“If you sell your field, there is a certain amount of security. But you give up your chance to get your home run,” Shelton said.

Shelton knows a man who agreed at the start of the season to sell his peppers to field packers for $10 a box. Two weeks ago, it looked like a bad decision as peppers were bringing about $18 a box. But then in a matter of days, prices dropped to $8 a box. Summer peppers ripened and prices plummeted.

“It can happen overnight,” said Johnson.

Johnson is no fan of field packing operations. They compete with his packing house. Johnson claims farmers have more security working through him. Farmers pay him $3 a box to wash and box the tomatoes. The fee includes his services as a middle man. He sells the tomatoes for as much as he can get, and gives every penny of the earnings back to the farmer. If the market is good, the farmer fares well. If it’s bad, the farmer is still out the $3 a box.

When a farmer goes with field packers, he gets a set sum no matter what the market price. Some field packers will front the farmer money for seeds and supplies at the beginning of the season.

“If they put me out of business and they only have field packers in here buying them, a lot of people are going to get screwed,” Johnson said.

But Butch Dills, a Macon County tomato farmer, said there’s a risk “no matter what you do.” But for the most part, Dills trusts the field packers.

“They usually are pretty good to work with. They were raised in it, a lot of them are,” Dills said. Nearly all of them come back year after year. They don’t cheat the farmers because they want their field again the next year.

“There’s a man wanting to buy my field so I think I’ll do that rather than haul tomatoes 60 miles,” said Dills, who no longer has a local packing house.

The field packing operations use vast networks that help them play the market better than individual farmers. They resell the produce at “terminal markets,” huge clearinghouses for restauranteurs, cruise ships, and other large-scale consumers. They have workers stationed at markets from Atlanta to Miami to Dallas, people who keep field workers apprised of prices and where to haul to that day.

Home-grown ventures

Back at Happy Valley Farm, the Mulls’ greenhouse tomatoes are coming off the vine ready to eat at the rate of a dozen an hour. Janet Mull hopes the public starts showing up to buy them, because she’s getting tired of canning every other night after suckering all day.

Doyle Mull moved along the greenhouse rows behind his wife, readjusting the hooks that hold them up. The vines produce fruit from the top, so as it grows, Doyle lowers the vine, giving it another foot of room at the top, and letting the bottom end coil in a heap around the pot. The vine can grow 30 feet, producing tomatoes for eight months.

The Mulls can produce more than three times as many tomatoes per acre with their trellis set-up. Plus, fewer tomatoes split their skins or rot before they’re picked.

The greenhouse gives farmers more control over the ecosystem. They import their own pollinators — a $100 cardboard box delivered by Fed-Ex containing a few hundred bees were let loose in the greenhouse. When aphids and white flies starting showing up, they imported wasps and lace wings to eat the pests. In a field, the imported predators wouldn’t stay put to do their job nearly as well.

Doyle is religious about shutting the outside vents by dark. If moths get in the greenhouse and lay eggs, there would be no getting rid of the worms without spraying, which would ruin their pesticide-free claim.

But the biggest bonus of the greenhouse is the taste of summer tomatoes year round, as opposed to they typical winter tomatoes found in stores.

“They are picked green and gassed. They are made to travel thousands of miles and not be eaten for weeks after picking. They have thicker skin and a longer shelf life and the trade-off is they don’t taste any good,” said Glenn Stuart, a friend with greenhouse experience who helped the Mulls get started.

Bill Yarborough said ventures like the Mulls are succeeding down east.

“It allows people to supplement their income and stay on the farm,” Yarborough said. “I think we have a real potential for this thing, but it will take the involvement from the public.”

Yarborough has visited farms down east where a line of cars and pick-up trucks file by the door of the greenhouse loading up on fresh local produce.

Loose footing

The only sure thing many farmers have left is their land, and that may be slipping away too as they find it difficult to turn a profit. With property taxes rising and no children willing to take over the farm, older farming couples are selling off their acreage. The one-time profit for their prime mountain real estate should last the old-timers through retirement, but the land that provided sustenance and annual income for generations won’t be tilled again. The land, the strong hold of mountain culture itself, is slipping away forever into outsiders’ hands.

“We’ve got to find a way to support farming,” said Yarborough. “You can’t legislate farmland preservation. You can’t tell a farmer there’s nothing he can do on this piece of land but farm it when farming is losing him money.”

The farmers would prefer not to sell it, to keep on farming it, but a zoning or land-use mandate won’t make that happen, Yarborough said.

“If you want to save farmland, you have to put your money where your mouth is and support your local farms,” Yarborough said.