Visiting Our Past: Project recalls traditions, smells of family farms

With the growing national interest in healthy food, traditional farm values are gaining a renewed appreciation. Area farmers who met with Rebecca Williams, Kaye Myers, Polly Johnson, and Nick Lanier for the 2009 Friends of Mountain History's museum theme exhibit "That's a Long Row to Hoe" vividly recalled another country value: communal hard work.

Children on family farms arose at 4:30 a.m., did jobs, went to school, came home, did more work, and played their hearts out. Grown-ups teamed up with each other to share machinery, bale hay, chop and truck silage, and, on occasion, pull calves.

Brittany Whitmire, owner in 2009 with her husband of Busy Bee Farms and daughter of Cherryfield calf-raiser Jimmy Whitmire, recalls providing help to newcomers when their cows had trouble birthing.

"A guy up the road had a heifer, which he had bred, that was having a calf that was too big, and he called us," she says.

Jimmy had a rotor cuff tear and had to have his daughter do most of the work. "And we delivered the calf," Jimmy says. "It was dead before we got it, but we saved the cow."

Sometimes calving is so difficult, that it requires many hands. Jimmy recalls bringing two neighbors and a hired hand to another emergency. "We needed plenty of help," Jimmy says. "We pulled the cow, and it went into shock. And the cow dies just like that. But during the time of it, it kicked the man."

Brittany refers to helping out as a learning experience. Also, she values the intimacy with life and death her raising has brought her.

David Mackey, a Little River dairyman, intensified the life-and-death feeling when he was a boy, following up early-to-late work in the winter with late-night sleigh rides.

After a snowstorm, Mackey relates, "We'd take a car hood ... and drag it down these trails (to) spread it out and pack it. Then we would take water and spray on it (to) make it slick. Then we would borrow smudge pots from the state department." The incendiary pots would light the sleigh path.

"We used to take stopwatches and figure out how many miles per hour we were going." It was a 2-mile walk home. "That was nothing," Mackey says. "Hold hands. 'Cause all the girls would come, too, you know, so you'd walk her home under the moon."

No account of country values would be complete without a memory of food. One indication of this is Mackey's taste for homegrown chicken. Yet he is aware of the cost factor. Farming corporations have shortened egg-laying time, increased chick production, and increased meat yields.

"They hatch out a million chicks ... in four days," Mackey says of suppliers for big corporate growers. "They hatch 'em out, debeak 'em, vaccinate 'em, put 'em in boxes — 250 to a box — and take 'em to the growers in busloads."

Mackey teaches life skills to children unfamiliar with farming. "We'll crack open a store-bought egg, and it's a light, light yellow," he says. "My eggs are a dark, dark orange, and I explain."

Mackey's chickens, he testifies, "just walk around the farm and think they're in heaven out there."

It's heaven to Mackey, too. After completing a college education, he could not resist returning to the family farm, despite its economic decline.

"I like smelling that country air," Mackey says, "with a tang of silage and a tang of manure, and your animals. ... When I went to college, I said, 'I'll never go back.' And I think I missed that smell the most."

Rob Neufeld wrote the local history feature, "Visiting Our Past," for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published on July 1, 2009.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Project recalls traditions, smells of family farms