Virginia Peanut Story Transcription

Virginia Peanut Story Transcription

- [Narrator] Along America's southeastern coast, across the James River from Jamestown and South, past a dismal swamp in North Carolina, a light sandy soil from an ancient shore had formed millions of years old and fertile. With four distinct seasons, this warm coastal soil was ideal for growing a ground nut from South America. Thomas Jefferson's dream of an agrarian America briefly played out as family farms and small communities blossomed all along the peanut belt, this is their story.

- Virginia type peanuts is the best peanut grown.

- The Virginia type peanut is a little larger peanut than is grown anywhere else in the country.

- I personally think Virginia Peanut tastes better than a runner peanut, but I'm very prejudiced.

- It's much larger, has more flavor.

- The China peanuts and the Argentina peanut, either one doesn't have the quality of the peanuts grown in the United States.

- The climate is just not in general suited as well to grow a Virginia type peanut in Georgia or Texas.

- Maybe I'm a little bit partial to that.

- [Narrator] Revered by the Moche, Incas and other ancient civilizations, the peanut was held in low regard by colonial Americans who considered it a lowly food fit only for children and the enslaved.

- It's very clear that the peanut was domesticated in Central South America. The first archeological evidence for it though is in Peru, and that's about seven to 8,000 years ago. And there was lots of images of peanuts that appear in sculptures from Inca and from Peruvian archeological sites. We have peanuts being consumed in Inca stadiums that are piled all over the place, and we have them in tombs of Incas. So obviously people thought important enough that this would be a food for the afterlife. The peanut, in addition to moving west also moved north and very quickly was adopted in northern South America and in the Caribbean.

- The Portuguese established colonies on the Brazilian coast. They were probably the first Europeans to see peanuts in cultivation and they took peanuts back to Africa.

- The peanut became a very important product in Sub-Saharan Africa, mainly because of the oil. The peanut's, almost 40, 48% oil, and there is no oil plant in Sub-Saharan Africa. And because much of West Africa is Muslim, they wouldn't have had lard.

- West Africa, from Senegal to Angola, 3,500 miles. The peanut made a very big culinary and agricultural impact that's shaped African cuisine ever since.

- As the peanut goes from the Caribbean into the Mediterranean, from the Mediterranean, it goes into Turkey, from Turkey, it goes into China, from China, it goes into Southeast Asia. And so you have the beginning of the peanuts introduced into Chinese cuisine and into Southeast Asian cuisine.

- It wasn't really easy to go from South America to North America in those days. It was, you're at the mercy of trade winds. Certain parts of the Atlantic coast were not ship worthy. Everything did not travel up and over, some things traveled over to Africa on a trade wind and came back to North America on another wind.

- [Andrew] And there were English settlers that settled in Barbados. And as Barbados sugar industry destroyed all the local farms, most of local people moved northwards and South Carolina was where they started off. Most likely, the peanut arrived in what is today of the United States through the slave trade.

- [Michael] Peanuts have played a role in Virginia food, agriculture, and its sense of self since the 17th century. That is a long time to be engaged with a crop that sort of like lays low. I call Virginia the Garden of Eden of the South because everybody else comes from there. You look at census records from the 1840s, fifties, and sixties, and the vast majority of people born outside of a state in each southern state you look at are Virginians. They become the settlers who bring these crops. And of course we have to include enslaved people, they're bringing those seeds and those culture as well. So where they go, their food traditions go, and that means that the peanut spreads far and wide.

- Thomas Jefferson talked about peanuts being grown in Virginia in the 1760s. He commented that they were of no value. Slaves and poor whites grew them in their gardens.

- We do have a few references to enslaved people actually hiding or concealing them as a crop from their slave holders. They knew the value, the oil, the fertility, there was an understanding that low growing leguminous crops did something for the soil. And that's where we found the origin of the two biggest southern terms for peanut. So from Mbundu, which is the major language of Angola, you have the word N'guba, which becomes Goober. And from Congo, which is to the north, you find the word Mpinda, which becomes Pindar.

- It is clearly a West African term that is introduced through the slave trade into the American south. My grandfather never called them peanuts, he always called them goobers.

- But yeah, that goober Pea, that goober was essential because it helped preserve a certain element of African culture in the new world.

- [Narrator] F. Roy Johnson, in his 1960s book, The Peanut Story writes, "Commercial peanut crops were reported as early as 1833 in newspapers regularly listing the Wilmington Peanut in the wholesale market prices. Africans too were selling them on the streets. Plots of land poorly suited to the plantation crops, cotton, corn and tobacco were worked by free blacks and poor whites who struggled with the sandy, dry soil. For two and a half centuries, small plots of peanuts had been scattered about Virginia and the Carolinas. But commercial production began in earnest in 1844 when Dr. Matthew Harris imported peanuts to Norfolk and Sussex County. Agrarian towns grew and flourished as the peanut belt began to shift from Wilmington, North Carolina to Virginia.

- The black-eyed pea grows low in the ground, it's weedy, the peanut grows in the ground. So those two crops, which are very much associated with the African-American presence in the South are ironically what help a lot of people in the Confederacy survive the Civil War.

- They were somewhat overlooked by troops that would come through to damage crops, you have corn and wheat are up off the ground, you can easily burn them, stock them, but it's hard to tell this little green bushy plant. We hear about Confederate soldiers using it as coffee, they would grind it up and use it as meal. Peanut was a staple when the food supplies became somewhat scarce.

- [Narrator] Union soldiers returning home after the Civil War introduced peanuts to the industrialized north.

- It is after the American Civil War that the peanut goes from essentially a southern food into a national food.

- The peanut industry was really fueling the town of Smithfield at that point.

- [Narrator] P.D. Gwaltney built the largest peanut concern at that time, fueled by shipping.

- But in 1921, about six o'clock in the morning, a Steamboat came up, it was blowing its whistle and there was a fire in the peanut cleaning factory number one. As it burned, it caught to number two as well as some of the ham warehouses. Unfortunately, peanuts burn very quickly. The towns smelled like burnt peanuts and ham fat with that. But because of the the devastation of that, they decided not to rebuild here in Smithfield because Steamboats were kind of going by the wayside, railroads were much easier to get to, so they moved the concern to Suffolk.

- [Andrew] Beginning in 1896, you have peanut butter that spreads out over America and becomes a very important product.

- Even though yes, we associate peanut butter with George Washington Carver, he did not invent peanut butter.

- George Washington Carver was the father of the peanut industry, he deserves a lot more credit than he's ever gotten.

- [Michael] Dr. Carver was born enslaved in Missouri. He's raised by a white family, he has this relationship with nature where he just picks up on plants, how they grow, cycles, seasons, and that becomes his obsession, his fascination for the rest of his life.

- He wasn't a man of means in terms of dress and fancy clothes and the like. He wasn't a man that number one, if you saw him, you probably wouldn't recognize him, that's what happened to him when he went to Washington to the Ways and Means Committee to talk about peanuts, Tariff Committee. The man went before him, he said, "Have you seen the famous scientist from Tuskegee?" And he was talking to George Washington Carver all the time. And then Carver said, well, "Hope you finds that man."

- In 1896, he ends up at Tuskegee University. In the early 20th century, the problem in the south was the boll weevil and the boll weevil began to destroy the cotton crop. For many African Americans who either had farms with cotton or were themselves tenant farmers, they needed an alternative to cotton. And so one of the things that George Washington Carver encouraged them to do was grow peanuts. If you couldn't sell your peanuts, you could at least eat them during the winter, and it provided at least some sustenance for small farmers to be able to survive and thrive.

- After the Civil War, all the nutrients were gone because of the cotton. In order to replace that nutrients, they had to come up with something that would also be financially viable for the people and that was the peanut. The peanut growers of America asked George Washington Carver to represent them before the 1921 Ways and Means Committee in Congress regarding tariffs about the peanut. The tariffs were such that it was keeping the peanut prices artificially low. Farmers, particularly in the South, in order to make it economically viable for them that these tariffs have to be put in place. He wows over the government and the public there. He's supposed to speak 15 minutes, he speaks over an hour and they're so enthralled with what he has to say. He does make a case for the peanut and its necessity for farmers, particularly in the South, in order to make it economically viable for them that these tariffs have to be put in place.

- Peanut was the salvation because it helped rejuvenate the land, but it was also a means of support in a lot of different ways.

- He had experimented with at least nine formulas of peanut oil, extracted the oil from the peanut.

- We really don't know how many ideas he came up with regarding the peanut. George Washington Carver created over 300 and that's just a supposition.

- Peanut soup, there was medicines you could make for peanuts, there was paint that he developed from peanuts. By deriving his hundreds of different products from the peanut, you had very little waste. If you had the peanut, then you could sell the nut, but then you still had to hull and skin. You could use it for animal feed. After the animal's eaten it, then the animal deposits his stuff and they can use that on the garden. So you come full circle. That's what the sustainability philosophy was all about.

- [Andrew] And so it made it a viable product economically for people here in the south. That was a big deal, what Carver did there was a big deal.

- But that peanut made a difference here in the south.

- Harvest your peanuts, take them into town, and then there, they would be shelled. You had whole towns being developed around processing peanuts. It all became a major economic engine. By developing the peanut industry, you developed a whole new way of living, a way of getting an income, a way of surviving, and that helped keep people on the farm. That's not to say that everything was perfect, but farmers who may have been inclined to leave stayed, some prospered quite well.

- The relationship that family meant to the farm.

- I'm a fourth generation farmer, my sons Brian and Hunter are the fifth generation.

- Well, my grandfather came out of North Carolina, Eastern North Carolina.

- My father, my grandfather, his father.

- My dad came up here in '37, 1937 and bought this farm.

- My father lived on the farm. My grandfather, my great-grandfather, they've all been farmers and they've all had sons. But when my parents had children, they had two girls. I loved to be outside, I love farming, I love the smell of the soil, I love to walk barefooted in the soil with the soil coming between my toes.

- How big is the extended family?

- Very extended.

- When did you fall in love with farming?

- Probably when I was about five years old. Riding around in their arms.

- Was five of us generations have been on some of this property. So I come along when things were done the old way and the hard way. Sometime they'd do it at night, sit there and pick the peanuts off the vine build a fire, and that was the light, that's where the peanuts got harvested.

- [Narrator] The much maligned Goober Pea helped prevent starvation during slavery, the depression, and several wars. By this time, travel and industrialization had created both markets and access to these markets. And it ushered in America's peanut boom in just 17 rural counties along coastal Virginia and North Carolina.

- The 1840s through the end of the 20th century, you have a dominance of Virginia peanuts. As Virginia peanuts become important, you have then other states beginning to produce peanuts. So Texas produce peanuts and Arkansas produces peanuts and Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi. But the Virginia Peanut is the one that will become important for many of the commercial products. One of the reasons on why it will take off very quickly too, is easy access, you have railroads constructed and you have shipping that can easily move from Norfolk and Suffolk into first, Baltimore and then later in New York and later in Boston. And so they could then take peanuts from New York or Boston or Baltimore to Chicago. So you had this huge transportation system that made it possible to transport peanuts relatively inexpensively.

- People come to Virginia with the notion that they're gonna see a peanut field, that becomes part of cultural tourism. Postcards of African American workers in peanut fields, pictures of the shocks of peanuts. People traveling around Richmond and Petersburg looking for these peanut shocks in the fall and won their first taste of fresh roasted peanuts from a real southern peanut field. I mean, all of that feeds into a certain mystique, what it meant to be in the South, between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, this place that was still very agricultural, that was still, quite self-sufficient and that there was sort of an agrarian aesthetic going on. And the peanut fed right into that.

- In fact, Southampton County was the largest producing county in Virginia and right across the border, Northampton County, where Severn is, was the largest producer in the state of North Carolina. So you can see where that area handled a large portion of the Virginia Carolina Peanuts.

- Suffolk was once known as the world's largest peanut market. And it was basically because Planters was here.

- The history of Suffolk parallels the Planters Peanut Company, at least from about 1914.

- It's a rag to riches story. Amedeo Obici is my great uncle. He was born in Oderzo, Italy, he sailed out of Genoa to America, 11 years old alone.

- And the story is they had a little sign on him, said, "I'm Amedeo Obici, I need to go to Scranton, Pennsylvania."

- And he had his peanut cart and this little whistle from the steam would go, choo, choo, and people would come and buy a bag of peanuts. In Wilkes-Barre, he started processing peanuts. Now he had no money, but he got the bank to loan him $35,000 to start this business with really no collateral. He was a dynamic person.

- And he had to truck the peanuts from the Virginia area of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania area. So he decided I'll move my plant down here.

- His partner, Mario Peruzzi, was the operations and finance man. But Mr. Obici was, as I like to refer to him as the P.T. Barnum of peanuts. He was the marketing genius behind doing what Planters did to extend itself as far as being a name brand.

- They thought it sounded elegant, that's why they picked the name Planters. He realized he needed a logo, he needed something. So he had a little contest. And a 12-year-old boy here in Suffolk drew the animated peanut.

- There's no written documentation to verify that, there are no local newspapers that survived, no company documentation. But those that were with the company, and my four foot 11 Italian grandmother insists that such a contest took place.

- On March 23rd, 1917 Planters Peanuts trademarked the Mr. Peanut image. And there's a big, big stories about actually where this image arrived at. But in fact, Mr. Peanut himself almost appeared exactly the same in an illustration of 17 years before, but however that was done, we don't know for sure. But Mr. Peanut then became an important advertising product. And from that point on, from 1917 on, Planters Peanuts began to advertise nationally.

- He changes shape sometimes. Sometimes the monocle's on one eye and then it's on the other, the cane is in the left hand, the cane is in the right hand. It took a while for it to become a fixed image on behalf of the company. I tend to think that they decided that the layout dictated sometimes how he appeared.

- He would be in different positions and you could really see the personality in him, even though he did not talk. He's dapper, he had a monocle, he had a top hat, he had spats, he had gloves. But just the way he tipped his head, the way he tipped his cane, I think that's why people love him.

- They had a whole line of confections. They had, chocolate covered peanuts, chocolate covered almonds, chocolate bars, all kinds of things.

- There are groups that do nothing but collect his little advertising things. Nobody knew what was going to turn in to be the third most recognized advertising symbol in the United States or the world, I don't know what it is.

- Anyway, he's in the top five, but you look at other things, jolly Green Giant. Do you see him anymore? Chiquita Banana, Tony the Tiger I will say has progressed. But how old is Tony the tiger? 50 years old, he's a young pup, Mr. Peanut's a hundred.

- Well little Mr. Peanuts and ashtray, Mr. Peanuts and Coffee Cup, Mr. Peanuts, and then he had bigger things like the statues that were cast roasters in the doors.

- And you know, Mr. Peanut was on Times Square.

- Mr. Obici essentially left the citizens of Suffolk a hundred million dollars to be used for health purposes, that's what it boils down to, which is just incredible. My grandfather started the shelling business in Courtland, Virginia and unfortunately it burned down very promptly after they bought it. Mr. Obici called our family, said, "Don't rebuild in Cortland, Virginia, why don't you come to Suffolk?" That's what the family did, and that's the plant that is right here in Suffolk and it's still a family business and still operating. The sheller is the one that gets that raw peanut in a condition that's been cleaned and sized so that when that manufacturer gets it, he's ready to cook it and put it in his product. And the art of shelling is to knock the hull off but not break the peanut in half. Because Planters was here and because all these shelling plants were here, this area also attracted peanut brokers and other allied manufacturers of peanut butter and peanut products.

- Peanut broker represents the sheller as the seller and sales to the manufacturers and middleman. Suffolk was peanuts and peanuts were Suffolk. The old motto from my high school, Suffolk High School was I'm peanut bred, I'm peanut fed, when I'm gone, I'll be peanut dead.

- There was an explosion in the early 1900s of peanut production, but it is during World War II that the peanut becomes a very important part of American diet in part because virtually, every other part of the American diet is controlled. And so there is no control over peanut production, there's no control over peanut consumption, so you could buy as many peanuts as you would like and peanut farmers greatly increased their sales.

- After World War II, there was a lot of starvation in Europe, the US airlifted tons and tons of peanut butter to Germany.

- What did I miss about farming in my father's Day?

- [Interviewer] Yes.

- I guess the, probably the fellowship of a crew working together in the field. There was always one or two in the crowd that would, that liked to, well they liked to tell little stories, and keep things funny, and there was a lot of laughing and so forth and, and that the days, they were long days and they were hard work, but they were fun days because it was a lot of fellowship going on between individuals.

- Granddaddy Alphin bought the farm just before World War II and he passed it on to my dad and my dad has passed it on to me and I'm hoping to pass it on to someone.

- He knew the type land that was here and he knew what, how good a soil it was on this particular farm, and it was a great farm for growing peanuts, it was just the peanut producing land. And he grew corn and he grew cotton and he grew peanuts and he grew watermelons and he grew sweet potatoes and he had hogs to sell. So he tried to arrange it that he had money coming in through the whole year. And I think I got the love for farming from my dad because he liked farming. He never did anything else but farm. When I first started working peanuts, I was probably about 10, 11 years old and all I did was chop peanuts at the time. We'd get out of school and we'd start chopping peanuts with a hoe up and down each row to get the grass and weeds out of them, and that's what we did all day, every day, the whole summer, just about, by the time you got over one time, it was time to start back again. And right at that time, I didn't very well like peanuts a whole lot.

- No man or woman sitting on the end of a hoe handle all day long in mid-July with the soil burning their feet looking at another cotton picking ragweed or pulling up nut grass, it's no way any human being could love that.

- So I say farming really taught us a whole lot. It taught me a whole lot 'cause there ain't much I can't do.

- It taught work ethics, it taught honesty, it taught integrity, you wouldn't go to anybody's place and mistreat their place, you respected it.

- Most of the work was done by hand. Every row of peanut you had to chop it like you do a garden and work that hill of peanuts and get every bit of the grass, all the grass had to be got out of it.

- Weekly, run a hoe around each hill of peanuts, so you space them the way you could get a weeding hoe round them. You would have chopping crews, lots of times the ladies and workers that worked in the peanut factories in the wintertime would come out and chop his fields, I can remember as a kid seeing 30, 40 people in a peanut field going across it.

- And you could just go down the row real fast and chop in between the peanuts and not hit the peanuts and not have to bend over, pick up grass.

- It wore calluses on the insides of your hand because you did this day in and day out, day in and day out all summer long. But if you turn that hand over, our father taught us that, he said, turn your hand over and once you get accustomed to this, you had the control you could chop up to that close to a peanut, not cut any, not cut it up and just steady moving.

- Daddy would hire people to come in to chop as well, but my sister and I also had to chop. I think I got paid a penny a row or maybe I progressed to a nickel a row, I'm not sure. But once in a while, I can recall chopping a peanut plant off, but I would try to hide it so nobody would see it.

- I think most youth in this area spent the large part of their younger years figuring out how they would get off the farm and if they ever did what they'd do.

- Families, six, eight children were raised on 40 acre farms.

- And they usually had large families with lots of children and the neighbors came in and they'd have peanut popping parties.

- That was your chief money crop.

- They just pulled me out of so many situations, right? And it's a challenge, peanuts are a challenge, and one thing about peanuts, you can go in a corn field and you can get a pretty good idea about what your yield's gonna be. You can go in a cotton field and you can look at it and you can see, get a good idea, but you don't have any idea what that peanut crop's gonna do until you turn them over and bring them out of the ground.

- It was the cash crop that sustained the family farms in this area and it was a very important crop for the family. It's what bought this farm, it's what raised my father and his siblings. It was five sons raised on this farm and they were all raised on the peanut crop.

- It made the difference between a year of being able to pay your bills and buy for the children shoes and all of the things that made a difference. And if you had a year that peanuts didn't do well, you suffered for the whole next year.

- Our soils in southern part, of an eastern part of Virginia are just ideal for growing peanuts.

- We had a better climate for growing peanuts and we is at the end of the peanut belt.

- We have well drained soils.

- A peanut is a dry weather crop so it thrives on the edge of being dry and droughty soils.

- I'm doing research on drought tolerance on peanut and let me tell you, I struggle getting a yield decrease under induced drought in the field. So it is a tough plant, that's good for a farmer, it may not be so good for me, but it is good for a farmer.

- This farm right here is one of my prime peanut growing farms 'cause the land is real sandy and I have the center pivots to make sure that they don't suffer during the drought.

- Usually around the 1st of May to the 10th of May, we need to start planting peanuts and start getting them in the ground, gotta be warm enough to make that seed, you gotta feel that warmth in the ground and get that seed sprouted and coming up.

- It takes about 45 days from planting until the flowers start to develop on the plants and has a time of abundant flowering at about 10 weeks after planting. The flowers open up early in the morning and then pollination occur, so after they are fertilized, they will just die back.

- The peanut bloom divine, they put out a yellow bloom and that bloom right where that bloom at, a peg will come out and go in the ground and that'd be the peanut on when they get down there where it's dark enough, he'll put a peanut knot on the end and make a peanut. If it turn dry or something that the peg don't get in the ground, he'll dry up. When the first rain come, he'll put another peg out at that same place. He don't miss, if you miss one time, you done missed it for the whole year. But a peanut will keep on trying until the weather frost cut him off.

- And we got to get it planted in a timely manner. Don't by the time they get ripe, you have to worry about frost. If we dig these peanuts and the frost hits them, it'll make them bitter.

- And we also have a long enough growing season, you don't get much further north than where we're at right here in growing peanuts. So our last frost in the spring and our first frost in the fall is just about enough to squeeze a peanut crop in. And sometimes, it's a little close.

- It grows short, not very tall. It produces a lot of vines, is using nitrogen from the atmosphere, only the legumes that can do that. And it has really pretty flowers that are typical legume flowers in a shape of a butterfly, so that makes it a pretty crop.

- Can you imagine going out there and picking up every roll of peanut, every peanut hill?

- [Interviewer] I don't even want a tractor.

- Cultivate them, get the weeds down, and then in August it was kind of a big, then you would get into September, you would get into digging them.

- One hall's farmer would handle about five or six acres of peanuts. He'd work about 25 or 30 acres, but about five or six acres of peanut is all he had.

- When it was time to pick, I loved to be out. I hung around so long, my daddy said, "Well if you're gonna be out here, you need to help." And so for several years I sewed up the bags of peanuts.

- Get out there and pick, oh, during the day and at the end of the day, you would be covered by so much dust you couldn't tell whether you were black, white, green or what because peanut picking is a very, very dusty environment.

- When it came time to harvest crops, none of the children in our family went to school.

- Dug them with a double mule plow, we call them turn plow, but they made a special point they put on it and put a rod out at the end and you'd run under those peanuts and that rod would tear up the peanuts on the outside the edge. And that's way they were dug, one row at a time and then you had to go there with a pitch fork and pick up every peanut separate just about and shake the dirt out of them. You know how the tap roots hold the dirt, it was a slow process and you picked them up and shook the dirt out of them and put them in little piles. And then you came back with a pitch fork and you picked them all up and put them on a pole to dry. We call it shocking peanuts.

- We call them stacks, people around here call them shocks.

- You got to build your shocks. You start and you continue to walk around that shock as you put on layer upon layer upon layer until you build the whole shock up. That way as the water hit, the water would hit, drain to the outside and drain down.

- And they were left to dry naturally until October, no, probably November.

- And the peanuts stayed there until they are good and dry. And if you have three or four rains, then that makes it even longer before you can pick the peanuts and get them ready to market.

- And most every farmer had a few hogs, every farmer had to raise a few hogs and they put them in the field in the fall every year. And that's how they got that sand back then, used, said peanut fed hogs because they'd get those peanuts out and they'd root from one end to the other man. You go out there and that you go out there and it's spring the year and it was just like ditches like that, white them hogs and rooting up the peanuts.

- Pigs eat pretty much anything you give them. There's always a lot of debris left behind. So the pigs would run in, eat up all the leftover peanuts and kind of like Iberico ham that has acorns that finish them, they're doing this in about November, hog slaughtering starts usually in January and the ham started to have kind of a peanuty flavored pack to them. That peanut flavor added something to the Smithfield ham and made it very popular. So the law was, starting in 1920, is that the ham had to be produced in the town limits, but it had to be made from a peanut fed hog from Allawhite County. And it's because of the peanuts that gave it its interesting flavor.

- You could tell whether the farm family was gonna have a good year or bad year just by the peanut crop, it was that cash crop. The rest of the crops, they're used to sustain the farm. The corn went to fuel the mules and feed the livestock.

- It'll keep you going from about 4:30 to five o'clock in the morning until after dark.

- It probably kept all of us southern kids out of trouble. We didn't have the time or energy to get in trouble when he turned us loose on Saturday night. You had dirt all over your body, you had dirt all over your head, you had dirt in your ears, you had dirt in your nose and if you spit and you spat dirt, it was dirty, dirty business.

- You brought the shocks to the picker. And that's the way it was right up through the fifties.

- We grew a lot of these Virginia type peanuts, which is a bigger peanut and they like it for the in shell market, they like it for some of your specialty shops, they like to have with these gourmet peanuts. So that's what our peanuts are used for and they have a good taste.

- My grandmother was a school teacher and she also had a father who was a farmer to give friends gifts during the holidays, she would handpick peanuts out of her father's farm, cook them and give them away as presents. My grandfather thought it was a great idea. Nobody was using the super extra large Virginia peanuts, there wasn't really a category for super extra large Virginia peanuts then. But around here, like the special recipe was the water blanching and dipping them in oil. And it's also called blister fried cooking. So she was the first to commercialize that process. It started out in the fifties as giving gifts to friends, H.J. thought this was a great idea and there was a great demand for Dots peanuts so he started taking them to the hardware stores and to the pharmacies. And he thought that his peanuts were twice as good as what was already on the shelf. They were nickel bags of Planters, he was selling dime bags of Hubs. Anytime somebody has a Virginia peanut, we think of the really large kernels that are, that have the blisters on them. And so Dot was really a pioneer in the peanut industry for the cocktail peanuts. And she's the one to really make it a specialty food. And it's really cool 'cause my mother runs the company now, her office was her childhood bedroom.

- There were machines in the works that really revolutionized the industry.

- We've been from human muscle power to animal muscle power to machine power. And now we're looking at the information age. If you look back in the patent office, you're gonna find a lot of those major innovations, those patents are owned by farmers. People that were working on a day-to-day basis. And they say, wait a minute, there's a better way I can do this. If I make this change, if I add this little component, it's going to do something for me.

- I barely remember sitting on the tractor with looking at a stationary pick, I wasn't big enough to do anything, it was cold, I was wrapped up, but like a country boy, I wanted to be outside and be involved. Growing up on a farm, you were interested in getting on a tractor and doing something. When your daddy thought you was quite maybe big enough to see how you get the feel of the tractor.

- My grandfather was Caleb Everett, he was a farmer in the Newsoms area and he invented this peanut planter in 1892.

- Ayers planters had a little cup that came down and you had a hopper and the peanuts were in that hopper and this little thing came up and little cups that had peanuts would come in that little cup and carry it over and drop it. And everybody had an Ayers Planter at the time, just like that was before Cole came out with their planters to plant peanuts with.

- Wakefield, Virginia. Mr. Goodridge invented the Goodridge Peanut Digger that would go along, they could pull it with mule and shake the dirt out of it.

- The golden age of agriculture, roughly 1909 to 1914 was one of farm prosperity equal to that of industrial north. Following this prosperous time, farms failed during the dust bowl and depression, the nation's food supply was threatened and legislators recognized the need to stabilize agriculture. Congress passed agricultural legislation known as Parity based on the golden age time. Then farmers were able to absorb highly unstable weather, diseases and expanding markets without losing their farms.

- All your old time farmers know what Parity is. They know Parity was something that was really good for them.

- When you had a fixed price and you had a good production year, it was good for everybody in the family, it was good for the community, it was good for the stores, for the tractor dealers, for the supermarkets, everybody. Because you had that unheard of thing in the farm economy of making good yields and getting a decent price for it.

- In other words, when the crop failed here on these farms, the whole community felt it.

- The old quota system they had before they had the buy out, it was almost like security for us. I mean, we knew if we planted X number of acres, we could get x number of dollars per ton. I mean, we knew what we were going to get.

- Because the quota system was designed

- When they subsidize us as farmers, the government is also subsidizing you as a consumer.

- It's very easy to stand up on your soapbox and say, we don't want any farm programs, and I as a taxpayer shouldn't be supporting the farmer. But what you gotta remember is if you don't support the farmer, you would be supporting a much higher price in that grocery store. What you buy with that farm program is in most cases the assurance that that food's gonna be on that shelf.

- I've seen it where you had to start out in the spring of the year and borrow every penny that you use for that year's crop. And then you do a lot of praying that year that you'll get to make a crop. Two bad years like that in a row could almost put a man down, I'll tell you because there wasn't anything to fall back on.

- That's the way many people got land. You might be on the board of directors and you hear that so and so's in trouble, they're not gonna be able to make it through this valley, well hey, force them into foreclosure.

- I don't remember what year it was, but we had a spell of rainy weather, just misty, rainy weather that lasted for two weeks. And most everybody had dug the peanuts The ones that had dug them couldn't dig them because the ground got too wet. But they put them right flat back on the ground. And when they went there to pick them, there wasn't any peanuts left on the vines, the stems had all rotted and they'd shed it off.

- If it's wet enough, like if a hurricane comes in and we get 10, 15 inches of rain, we're really in trouble because it could be two weeks before we can even get in the field with the equipment. And by that time, as peanuts become, if they are already ripe when that happens, we can't get back in before a large amount of them will be shedding from the vine. And when they shed from the vine and the soil become detached from the vine, we don't go out and pick 'em up one at a time, they've gotta be attached to the vine for us to save them.

- My grandfather would bag 'em in a hundred pound bags, they would put 'em in a barn, and then you had different buyers that would come by and offer you cash for your peanuts. He's got a perishable product, these buyers know he's gonna have to move them come spring, you can't hold 'em 'cause of insects and mold and this type of thing. My grandfather needs the cash to go pay the mortgage, but he's at the mercy of the buyer that's coming here to this farm. Basically, the federal government says, Hey, you can sell 'em to us for X. So what happened is that did set a price for the peanuts. The buyers knew that they had to offer the farmer that price or the farmer was gonna sell 'em to the federal government. Then the federal government would turn around and use 'em in food programs for the needy. They would use 'em in school programs, or they would sell 'em, they would try to export 'em, they got rid of 'em too. They were in the business to make some money too. So that support system gave him the power to tell that buyer, no thank you, he had another source. It broke the monopoly in my grandfather's eyes. It allowed him to start mechanizing. It allowed him to start making those more, not risky purchases, but to borrow money with some confidence.

- We kind of stood on our own and we protected ourselves. We had a price that we could live with and we felt like it was a decent price and we weren't costing the taxpayer any money and everybody was fairly happy with it. There were some that weren't, of course.

- The world market started growing more peanuts and they started growing them more cheaply than the US growers were growing them. We started getting imports of peanuts from Mexico and Argentina, China and different places. And at one place about, in that area of 2000, 2002, we were concerned about whether or not the industry here was gonna survive very well because of the threat of imports.

- Loosening up our borders created an imbalance of peanuts in the US.

- Manufacturers could buy those foreign peanuts from China or India or Argentina or Nicaragua, Mexico cheaper than they could buy from a United States grower or sheller. And so something had to be done to to stop that or else you were going to destroy your own US peanut industry.

- And I understand this, in other words, to get concessions from them, they want concessions from us. To allow us to sell corn and soybeans to them, they want to sell peanuts to us. Well that happened so all at once and they haven't changed, so you got this archaic peanut program sitting here, so going quota use for domestic consumption, well only half of 'em being used for domestic consumption, the other half the federal government was having to buy. So it was a problem.

- The first was under NAFTA Mexico got so many millions of pounds that they each year could bring into our country. The GATT came right behind the NAFTA, and the two things the GATT did is it gave Argentina a share of our market by assuring Argentina X number of shelled peanuts to import into the US or to export into the US. It allowed Canada to make peanut butter, send it into the US even though Canada produced no peanuts whatsoever. So really what these trade agreements did is it opened our markets up to imports. When your market gets opened up to imports and you've got a supply managed market, sooner or later, the wind comes out of the tires. And that's what happened with our programs leading up to 2002, which is when things started to really unravel.

- The other areas of the country wanted to do away with the quota, the manufacturers wanted to do away with the quota and the peanut shellers, even in the VC area, wanted to do away with the peanut quota.

- It became very easy for the lobbyists, the manufacturers to say, hey, do away with the peanut program. Which in 2001, 2002 they did, and it was called the peanut buyout.

- We had an annual meeting. I remember right before this took place and it was at Wakefield at the 4-H Center and Wakefield's, a place that's got a small airstrip and Senator Warner flew into Wakefield and there were 500 people sitting there looking at him saying, tell us something that's gonna make us believe this is not gonna happen. And he couldn't do it, but he came and he talked to them and he said, look, everything's gonna be fine, we're just gonna have to get through this and you're gonna be okay. Well, we got through it and we're still okay and we're still planting peanuts. But in the meantime, there were some hard feelings at the time, there were some people who really got hurt by it, we lost some farmers.

- You get outside of the farming community, basically we are looking at ignorance. If you abate that program, if you, no truth about it.

- These years are up and down are too extreme for me to be on a level field of paying for this equipment.

- The amount of money that I've poured in the ground in the last four weeks is mind boggling.

- It was all politics.

- At the time the program ended, the government bought those pounds, paid quota holders a certain amount of money. Now that was to the property owner, not to the people necessarily farming the land. It also lowered the government support price from a what we would consider to be a profitable potential if you made a normal crop to the actual support halved, roughly was halved, which on a normal crop, we couldn't make a living up here.

- All at once, the next year after release it, where we were selling peanuts for 30 cent a pound, it plummeted.

- So the government came in and bought the farmers out and paid 'em so much for so many acres and so forth and said that's the end of it. Well how did it change peanuts? The 70,000 acres dropped down to less than 20,000 acres in one year just about. So the farmers, they felt like that's gonna be the end of peanuts. And they got out, most everybody got out of peanuts. We're growing more peanuts in the United States right now than we ever have. But it moved out of Virginia and Carolina were not as important as they were at one time.

- Really turned Virginia upside down in the peanut industry, and a lot of farmers went out of the peanut business.

- It was a severe economic adjustment.

- We were just completely like being dumped out in the ocean, just treading water, trying to find our direction.

- My personal opinion, I'm a farmer so I'm biased. The winners are the manufacturers.

- People who are making the peanut products are the one that are making all the money.

- Probably a good move for the industry itself and for the country 'cause the peanut program was starting to lose money and the shellers losing money now, they're all making money. It's been a positive effect, some people, somebody wins, somebody loses, it's trading money.

- There's been a tremendous consolidation. There used to be over a hundred shellers that were 10 in Suffolk and so forth, and like a lot of industries, that's changed and consolidated. And the same on the manufacturing side, now you have a few huge manufacturers.

- When I came, there were 10 shelling plants in Suffolk and now we are the only one that's left. As a matter of fact, we're the only one left in the state of Virginia.

- The future for peanuts is still very bright. Consumption's still going up on, particularly on peanut butter and the, there's a growing interest in flavored peanuts. Severn Peanut Company from the beginning was founded by three families that were farmer families in the Severn area, the Britt family, the Barnes family and the Watson family. We have a new hatch pepper in-shell peanut, we're doing a dill pickle flavored in-shell peanut now.

- So, everything's getting larger and that helps the efficiency, I guess sometimes, most of the time.

- I think it will simply get larger, few and fewer people will be able to work larger and larger lands with larger and larger equipment. There is a growing niche market for more natural organic farming, no doubt about that. I think there are increasing number of people moving from large urban areas back to the country who are finding this great satisfaction with working the soil that might be an acre or two or three, but they love putting seed in soil and watching it grow. Is something mystical about happening apart from yourself that is miraculous that you don't have anything to do with it. I think people are finding that out somewhat. Now, will there be a grand movement from the city to the country? I doubt that.

- The end result, it changed the social fabric of this area. And I'm sitting in an area that was a loser. What disturbed me the most about the transition was there was no open public debate and consensus. I don't know that we still know what we want our agriculture to look like. I don't think we still know who we want to be producing our food or how it's produced.

- Migrations, wars, borders, boundaries, all those things affect how we eat, how we cook, and also how food travels around the world.

- I would really love to see farming and agriculture return to some of the values that farming meant back in the fifties and the sixties.

- But peanut farming was a good life, wasn't no question about it.

- Would I like to see the family tradition continue? Yes, I would love to see it continue because I love the land and I want the land protected for the next generation, next two generations or three or four.

- It's something I can't really explain, but it's a draw to the earth and, and to seeing things day by day grow and hopefully in the end, you're rewarded with a decent crop and able to sell it for a fair price.

- It is a joy to be able to get up in the morning and to come out and till the land and in the spring of the year to get that fresh smell of fresh turned soil and watch the process slowly unfold.

- And in the fall, I love to see the wildlife to be on a tractor late in the afternoon combining peanuts. And you look and you see deer coming out to feed and squirrels, rabbits, quail, it's just, it's the best life could be.

- I feel a certain responsibility there that something has been passed of me of value and, and I'll only have it a few years. And so there's a responsibility there of doing your part while it's in your hands before you pass it on to someone else.

- And as a farmer, we grow up being a part of this land. For five generations, we raised a crop, a lot of this land we rent, I don't own much of this land, I own some, but a lot of this farm land, especially this farm right here, has been in this family for generations and they, they want to see it farmed. But between development and taxes steady going up, it's harder and harder to hold onto this land. But it's like I said, at some point in time, people gonna have to realize this is more important to save.

- When you work a day, you put in a full day, you go to work when the sun comes up and you don't quit until it gets dark. My mother had hot bread every meal during the week except Sunday night for supper, we had hot biscuits and hot cornbread every meal. She'd get up and make cornbread and biscuits for breakfast every morning. My mother was strictly a kitchen person. No woman should be allowed to get married that didn't know how to cut up a chicken and clean fish.

- Act like you love me, Dan. Act like you didn't marry me for my money.

- [Interviewer] How long have you been married?

- How long? It'd be 60 years come February.

- [Interviewer] Terrific, did you court her on a mule?

- No, I did not.

- No.

- I courted her on a pickup to start with, a farm pickup, a white farm pickup.

- Dirty. I don't have a wish about limiting what they can grow here on this farm. I just want them to keep it in the family if they will, because it is a great place. What they'll get, they'll get it from my children and will be passed on to their children. And I hope they'll just understand that he was a guy that loved the land.