It’s hard work.
They are part math expert, part chemistry professor, and the rest, well, you’ve got to love the risk of perhaps losing it all to things that are anything but controllable.
The American farmer. Businessmen who actually get their hands dirty each and every day. They long to breathe the fresh air that Mother Nature provides and not be cooped up in an office, much less a cubicle. I grew up under the shadow of three farmers, J.W. Stowers Sr, J.W. Stowers Jr. and T.M. Herring.
Now the latter didn’t have the operation that the former had but he worked it and fed his wife, two sons and four daughters. He originally came from the hills, Vardaman, where they grow sweet potatoes. I never talked to him about farming.
He was of that era where grandkids were only seen and definitely not heard. I just know he farmed and made a way and provided. Maybe not by much. But he did.
My other grandfather was J.W. Stowers Sr., or as the grandkids proudly called him, “Pop.” His father, a mailman in the hills, gave him $2,000 to start his dream of farming. At least that’s the story I’ve been told. Pop started renting 16th section land around Itta Bena and my daddy was born in a back bedroom there and grew up swimming in Lake Dawson.
Pop gathered up more land and then came up on a deal in Sunflower County and in 1947 bought what we call Macon Plantation – water, woods and farmland.
He moved his family from Itta Bena down Highway 7 and took a right into Sunflower County on Three Mile Lake Road and set up shop at Route 1, Box 57, Inverness, Mississippi. He kept farming the acres in Leflore County and put his boys in school at Inverness High School.
My daddy then started hunting and swimming and farming in and around Macon Lake. He got up early as all farmers do but that gene skipped me and still hasn’t found me.
He was usually in bed by 8 or 8:30 p.m. it seemed, and I enjoyed seeing who Johnny Carson was talking to late at night with my mama.
That green thumb, well it hit my oldest brother, John and my middle brother, Paul. I don’t have a clue if my sister, Beth got any of it but it sure ‘nuff skipped over me (I’m lucky to keep a weed alive). It wasn’t for a lack of trying.
I chopped cotton, sprayed weeds and I don’t think there was a better yard curator in all of South Sunflower County than me.
Each week I mowed our two- or three-acre yard then Pop’s five-acre yard and that side of the road that connected the two that was at least a quarter mile. It was a whole day if not a day-and-a-half of mowing. Probably why my ears ring today.
And I rode around in the truck with my daddy, going to the parts store and everywhere in between. In the summers, I’d get to go to Lions Club every Tuesday and sit between my dad and my grandfather and eat all the fried chicken I could hold. Miss Fannie Bell played the piano and we prayed before we ate. A great way of life, being a farmer.
I didn’t get the gene but I picked up enough grease and dirt and terminology to understand it all more these days when I call a farmer to write a story. I can’t grow cotton, soybeans, corn or rice or even catfish.
But I understand when those who do tell me of their struggles with a lack of labor and rising input costs. And I know how to catch a catfish, all thanks to the men who made a way a long, long time ago.
My dad and two grandfathers. I’m thankful for the Delta farmer in more ways than one can imagine.
