Carrie Wornall: The main question that I am asking is how do you feel. farming has changed in Chatham County over the past, I guess since you started

Transcription

1 TAPE 1, SIDE B JIM LETENDRE OCTOBER 22, 1999 Carrie Wornall: The main question that I am asking is how do you feel farming has changed in Chatham County over the past, I guess since you started doing it, in your own experience or through what you've seen through others? Jim LeTendre: Well, when I first moved to Chatham County... let me tell you how I got started farming in Chatham County. I've always been a lucky person and I feel like you make your luck. When we decided to move to Chatham County and try farming, we had already been farming in Apex, I had a goat farm as a matter of fact, and grew some crops for sale. I met the agricultural agent out here, talked to him about how I could make a living farming in Chatham County, and he said that most of the people out here either had poultry houses or a cow/calf operation or they had a pig operation and raised pigs. And this was all before corporate farming. When he talked about raising pigs he wasn't talking about a big pig factory or cows the same way, it was small farm type stuff. Well he left and my dog and I walked around the farm trying to visualize a farming experience. And as we left and was driving down the road, there was this pig running down the road. Well I went up to the neighbors, I went up to all the neighbors and asked if they were missing a pig, and they said no, and the veternarian said that he probably got off a trailer, that he escaped from a trailer that was going to a pig sale and that I oughta go ahead and catch that pig. I

2 Jim LeTendre 2 caught that pig and rolled it up in a rug and took it back to Apex with me, and that was the start of a very successful fetter pig operation and that kinda was the way that I got started farming. And so when I moved here most of the farmers were small and most of them had poultry houses and were raising beef cattle, and those people really started to struggle as corporate farming moved in. It almost eliminated, it did eliminate all the small pig farmers. The chicken companies were so demanding that the producers really became like factory workers, much like the people in the poultry industry. And so the farmers were losing this personal initiative that they had to be farmers. And when I first moved here the old timers come around and they told me "you're really lucky to have this farm. The land is terrible, but the charma is good". And they told me that, well I had bought the land from the last of three maiden sisters and the old timers told me that you could come by and see two sisters in harness and the third sister pushing the plow and then they farmed 25 acres with sister power and that they were really tough women, and there was a lot of sweat and toil that had gone into this farm. So this was really all an encouragement to us to think that we could bust our can and be successful. As we, as I struggled looking for a way to make a living and corporate hog farmers put me out of the pig business, I more or less lucked onto getting into the greenhouse business. I met my partner who already had grown greenhouse tomatoes for a couple of years and I toured a couple greenhouses and we decided that we would give the greenhouse business a try. At the time we were, we were so different than everything else that was going that people really didn't even consider us to be commercial farmers, even though we

3 Jim LeTendre 3 made our entire living off of growing tomatoes. Had we not grown them in the greenhouse, had we grown them in the field, people most certainly would have considered us to be commercial farmers, but because we were doing it in an alternative way, they didn't and at first they thought we were just a couple of kooks or a couple of cranks working out here you know and didn't really understand what we were doing, but we thought we did. So we, we just kinda kept sticking with it and as we, as we became more and more popular, as the tomatoes became more and more popular, and more and more people came to buy the tomatoes. We had the opportunity to interact with a lot of the local farmers and really get into some really heavy duty discussions about what was going on in their agricultural livelihoods. At the time, most of the farmers were not making enough money to stay on the farm totally. They all, most of them had mill jobs where they would work at a local mill and that would give them the insurance and as steady check and they were working on the farm more or less to bring in extra income or to set up a retirement or to pay for the land that they wanted in hopes that some day that they would be able to break the ties to the factory. As the 70s and the 80s wore on, there were actually fewer farmers that were doing it. They were having to give up farming from several years of drought, poor cattle prices, manipulation by the poultry companies, all this, one by one, the farmers were just giving it up. And it was about that time that some of the alternative agriculture people like myself who had been in the business for eight or ten years were starting to become successful, and became role models for new farmers to emulate, established the local farmers markets which were the marketing venue

4 Jim LeTendre 4 that you needed for alternative agricultural operation. Within the last couple of years the number of farmers in Chatham County has actually increased, and I'm sure that that's contrary to probably state and national norms, but the fact is that in Chatham County we have more farmers than we did ten years ago, which we're very proud of. CW: Do you plan on staying in Chatham County or do you plan on leaving any time soon? JL: No, I won't be leaving Chatham County any time soon. I'll be here till I die, I'm sure. I do look forward to retiring and doing a little bit of traveling; but I, Chatham County's my home now and certainly, it's where my children were born and this is our home. And we've kinda been responsible for a lot of our friends moving out here too, just because they've realized what a, by visiting us what a nice place, what a beautiful place it is and the people have been exceptionally fine, the people that we have come in contact with, the local people, exceptionally fine. CW: How do you define sustainable farming? JL: I define sustainable as,firstof all, farming to make a profit so that you can sustain. If you're not here next year no matter how good your ideals are, what your ideals are, it's not sustainable if it only lasts for one year. I think in order to be sustainable you have to be able to maintain the agricultural operation, you have to do it in such a way that you are environmentally friendly and environmentally conscious; that you're morally conscious in that you belong to an

5 Jim LeTendre 5 agricultural community and you kinda owe dues to that community and to the consumers. And I also believe that it's, that it has to be, that it should be a type of farming that has a very small ecological imprint; and that you are doing something to the land and to the area that years from now people won't regret that you did. And to me that's the basis of sustainable. There's all different types really, according to the people at NC State, sustainable farming means using the minimum amount of inputs to grow the crops, to rationally decide when to apply agricultural chemicals. If you do use agricultural chemicals, rationally decide when to use them and to use them only in the amounts necessary to do the job, but I think all of this is kind of going back to working with the environment also and the fact that you want to leave as small a footprint as to where you've been an what you've done. CW: Do you think, where do you see farming heading in Chatham County in the future? JL: I see farming in Chatham County growing; I hope rapidly. There's a lot of efforts to be made, a lot of efforts are being made in Chatham County to preserve the agriculture that we have and to protect agriculture in that, when development comes always, when development comes it always takes the best farm landfirst,because that's the land that perks, that's the land that was, that the communities were based centered around with the good farms, where the very productive farms and so unfortunately when development comes thefirstthing that it impacts is agriculture, because they're taking up agricultural land. But between, between the fact that we have the sustainable farming at Central

6 Jim LeTendre 6 Carolina, the Cooperative Extension Service in Chatham County especially but in the state of North Carolina has wholly embraced sustainable and organic agriculture as a viable means to keep people on the farm. And with this kind of support coming out of NC State and this kind of support coming through the Cooperative Extension Service, it really bodes well for Chatham in the development of agricultural enterprises. The focus of the programs at the community college in Pittsboro and Central Carolina are to foster local, reasonable, entreprenuative, agricultural entreprenuial enterprises. And so we're trying to give the students that we have there not only a basis in agriculture, but economic and managerial expertise in order to be successful. I feel like that one of the reasons that agriculture was not successful is that a lot of farmers knew how to farm, but they really didn't know how to market their crops or they didn't know how to do the managerial aspects to maintain the farm; and that's what we're trying to implement at the Community College. So I feel like all in all that agriculture in Chatham County is doing very well and I look forward to a lot of small farmers coming online to supply the local community, especially with fresh foods. I see once a sufficient number of these farmers come online that are supplying fresh foods to the local population, and the local population has been very supportive of the sustainable and organic agriculture movements in Chatham in that they buy from the farmer's markets, they support the programs, they support 'em at the poles, they support the Extension Service that's in support of it, but also this, the success of these farmers, the success of the small family farms, return of the small family farms will mean that other businesses in that will supply

7 Jim LeTendre 7 goods to the farmers, to these farmers that will, there will be marketing coops that become an actuality to handle the products, handle the surplus products. And what we hope most of all is that the successes of the people in thefield,the successes of the small farmers will encourage more small farmers to get in the business. One of the problems that we do have and we didn't address this at all, and I don't know how much tape you have left, one of the things that we, one of the problems that we had is that in Chatham and everywhere, there's this great chasm that exists between sustainable and organic agriculture and conventional agriculture. There was a sense of distrust, the existing commercial farmers and people of long farm backgrounds, old farm backgrounds didn't really consider the people that were getting into the agriculture business to be real farmers, or they didn't trust them, or for some reason, I'm not quite sure, maybe it was because so many of the new farmers are environmentalists, and this sometimes runs against conventional agricultural practices; but there was this, this area of distrust that, that did and does still exist. And so we're working hard to bridge this gap, to make conventional farmers, we're trying to make conventional farmers realize that we aren't a threat, that what we are in a lot of aspects, well, not my operation in particular, because this is pretty avant-garde and it's alternative agriculture, but a lot of the organic agriculture is farming like their father did, as opposed to you know being opposed to what they're doing; it's almost a regression, it's a regression away from the chemicals and some parts of "modern" agriculture that these people didn't embrace, that they felt like was the demise of conventional agriculture. And so there is this feeling that exists and that is something that we

8 Jim LeTendre 8 actually try and address, and so one of our big, one of our big points of concern is to A) merge with conventional agriculture, but B) and even more importantly to teach the conventional farmers sustainable agricultural techniques, so that they don't go out of business; so that maybe by using these sustainable agricultural techniques and the identification of new crops and alternative crops that we can keep some of these people on the farm that were having to give up their farms, and keep some of the farms that were farming and working at the factories, maybe give them the opportunity to make a living totally off the land which will count them as farmers. They will, they will have all the benefits, they will be able to give all of the benefits to the communities and to their children, passing the farms down, and maybe the livelihood down to their children, because it is a profitable situation as supposed to just barely struggling along. So that's, that is a point of concern and that is a point of emphasis that we are trying to deal with the conventional farmers, and trying to slowly but surely re-educating them and bringing them around to some of the feelings of sustainable agriculture, along with the education. Unfortunately, most of these people are so busy trying to stay alive that they don't have the time or the opportunity to take in a lot of these programs, or they feel like they're too far along in their farming careers, or their children have chosen not to farm. And it's really sad if their children have chosen not to farm, because sometimes, it's because of economics. They don't see their parents as being successful farmers, even though they have farms and they aren't losing their farms, they don't consider it a viable livelihood; and so they don't choose to stay on the farm and maintain the farm. They're off looking for a better

9 Jim LeTendre 9 job, whereas if the farms were successful and viable, maybe the second generations and the third generations then would continue farming. CW: Do you think your children will? JL: No, although that I think my children gained valuable lessons from agriculture and both of my children as they, as they look toward areas of education, both of them have included an agriculture component. My son and daughter bothrightnow are talking about being microbiologists, but they're both also talking about doing something involved with agriculture. And I told my son, you know you're talking about microbiology, you're talking about GMO corn and this kind of stuff. And he says, well dad, there's got to be people that test it for the reasonable people, there's got to be people that did the tests to see the foodstuffs already good, or if they do contain genetics that you don't have to be all on the same side of the geneticists or the companies that are trying to do that. Both sides have to have scientists on it, so I really feel like they're using a lot. That they've, my son's talked about being an ethnologist... (Tape ran out). END OF INTERVIEW