These are excerpts from the second interview with Wade:
R: Could you describe the Kents Ridge farm—its acreage and what you raise there?
W: Well, it was about one hundred and twenty-five acres, that’s according to old Meade—it could be anything, they leave a little loophole in it—‘cause it’s more or less. And it’s just pasture now. Back in my father’s time, in my grandfather’s time, they had twelve acres of corn, twelve acres of wheat and, I don’t know, x-number acres of hay. And, of course, they had sheep, cattle, and hogs. Back in the, well, I guess it must have been prior to the ‘30s, they was a-raising a cane patch there, made for molasses for the family use, I guess, maybe sold some, I don’t know. It was so far back they ain’t never did elaborate on it too much other than the fact that they had wheat down there, the big deal was cutting wheat down there, having the grain binder and the horses, you know. And it was a continuous fight trying to keep it from growing up. In the fall of the year they was cutting briars and weeds and brush and all the undesirable plants, flowers, whatever it might be, it’s the only way they had of keeping it clean, other than the mowing machine—they had a horse-drawn mowing machine back in those days. And, of course, I guess about the time World War II was over, everybody started going into public works; therefore, farm labor became hard to come by, you know, so people could make more money at other places. I guess the old farm boys didn’t know there was an outside world until they got…[laughs] until they were in the army and figured out there was another world out there, so that’s the way things went. Of course, my father’s brother-in-law, who would have been my uncle by marriage, was killed over at the other place. He had a premonition, I reckon, that he was gonna get killed, so he told me one of the Ferrell boys had a place during the war they had been able to sell most anything they could grow and when they had got enough money together they bought that place over there. We left the place down on Kents Ridge and come up here because I was school-aged and they wanted me to be able to get to the schoolhouse, and my uncle when he was here he went over to Paint Lick. Of course, that left that place down on Kents Ridge vacant. Eventually they just turned everything out, and it’s just pasture now, and a lot of it has went to woodland. They got over there and they didn’t seem to have any…of course, there was nothing left to do with no help left to take care of the other place, so that one just kind of went. That’s where I been down there today trying to get in one of those state-funded water systems, and we’ve been messing with that for about two years. Got to do some fencing, drive in a few posts today before the ground got wet, if we could. It’s, ah, I don’t know, we got approximately thirty head of cattle running down there during the summer. Of course, we just bring them out here and feed them up here during the winter because it’s un-accessible to the tractor down there in the wintertime.
R: What about the Paint Lick farm?
W: Well, we got cattle over there, got [pauses] I guess [pauses] I don’t know, about twenty acres of hay we rolled in, and, of course, we keep, oh, twenty-some head of young stuff there, I don’t know, five or ten cows there or something or other. Of course, we get them sold off when winter comes on. Of course, we don’t put our second cutting of grass up for the cattle to graze on, try to feed about fifteen head over during for the winter. About all going on over there.
R: Um, have you ever seen the Native American paintings in the caves on Paint Lick?
W: Uh, I’ve been up close to them, but I never did go right up to them. Anyhow, it’s up here on this end of the mountain [points off to the side of him]. That acid rain is, I reckon, about to get the best of it [the paintings]. I never did go right up to them where I could see them, but, you know, I was pretty close.
R: Yeah.
W: But I reckon they, uh, they never did figure out whether it was the first- or second-wave of Indians. Of course, all this information is up there at the fort, you know, up there at the museum. We always called it the fort, because there was an old Indian fort up there, to start with, or in make-believing. Daddy said when he was young that they had a little [mock] battle between the Whites and the Indians [laughs] for entertainment, for the Fourth of July everybody would get up there and, you know, I guess, take something to eat. Yeah, that finally turned into a museum after the Higginbothams, I reckon. They passed on…of course, the road out through there and busted it up. Evidently, I don’t know what it meant to the Indians there, but there was a big burial ground there. They had tents up there, and, of course, you wasn’t old enough to know it, but they dug there for a week. It was, I don’t know, it was like a little town or something that was up there. I reckon people came from everywhere.
R: Wow.
W: Yeah, right up from there where the fort is, up from where the highway is now, I guess. See, they can legally…when the highway is coming through, they can legally dig in a place like that without getting into too much trouble….[muffled]…. I was about fourteen, fifteen years old and, you know, just knowing it had happened, you know, and it really was no interest to me back at that time. Never thought nothing, never really that much about the Indians, other than, you know…. Then, of course, later the family talked about it. We actually crossed paths with them, too, and this area back here it must have been quite infested with Indians on the east and west Town Hollow Branch. Of course, where the place is on east Town Hollow Branch, they said there must have been a campground of Indians. No doubt because there were lots of arrowheads found back there when they worked the fields by hand, found one white flint. Someone said that probably had to have come out of eastern Virginia. And, of course, it was a chestnut forest, basically. And, of course, that was what the squirrels and the turkeys lived off of; therefore, the Indians lived off of that, the food cycle. So, that’s about the extent of that, so far as anything that I would know about it.
R: Who else works on your farm?
W: It’s just me. Well, Tim, he’s got some tobacco up there, and I go up there, and he’s supposed to do everything for half the value, and I go up there and help him because he’s by himself now. His boys…I reckon, basically, they finished their education and married off into the vicious world. [laughs] Hay season I just get out there and I’ll mow a while, in the morning, and when the hay is dry, when the hay is…the day before or that or whatever and, you know, whatever the occasion is. I got three tractors here and I’ll get off and just leave it hooked to each basically in the center, and I get off onto the other and I mow a while, get a little hay raked in and rake up a little bit, and then I’ll bale a little bit, and then if it don’t look like it’s gonna rain, then I’ll do it again so I don’t get too far ahead of myself. Now, a lot of the times here in the past, just get it in the bale as fast as I can, and, you know, sometimes it’s even fall till I pick up the roll. This may not be the ideal way to go, but there’s about 80 acres of cropland here to cover to leave it. And, of course, we’ve got a little patch of corn we plant for the hogs to have, you know, to fatten them up all through the year. We just turn them in there, and have them eat till they clean it up, and then hopefully by that time somebody will come along and buy ‘em. [pauses] ‘Course the corn’s on a two-year rotation, then we go back to oats and grass, and, of course, we harvest those one year and then the next year, of course, the grass will be coming in. That way it keeps the hay land or whatever you, ah, whatever you choose to call it coming on. Those old established grass will eventually come on its way out. They don’t completely quit until the productivity goes down. And then we got to try to control the fine rosebushes [smiles slightly, a sarcastic tone in his voice] that old Ladybird Johnson set up and down the highway that caused all the problems. Of course, we had our share of them anyway. And the Canadian thistle and muscat and the curl…Lord knows, what all those varieties. And the burdocks that get to them horses’ mane and tail, gets in the cattle and gets in the sheep’s wool and everything. We try to keep them sprayed down. This pasture here used…sometimes in-between the hay I could get to it. I used to go over there about two or three times and spot-spray it with the boom-sprayer off the tractor, and drive the tractor around kind of like the old commercial on the TV: “Shoot ‘em dead.” That kills the weeds on a lot of them. Keep that under control. And there's just not much else that goes on in the summertime, just, you know, getting in and out of the rain. Of course, when…of course, every now and then the cattle, of course, take one day of the week to go around, sometimes maybe two days, try to see all the cattle once a week, if possible, to make sure one of the cows hasn’t got out or somebody hasn’t hauled them off or something or the other like that. Keep a check on them, all we do. See if a tree hasn’t fallen over a fence, or something, or a man climbing over the dam, keep an eye on the fence so they don’t get away from us. And then the fall comes, the time to try to get them to the market. I didn’t mind doing the rest of it, but, I tell you, getting up in the wee hours of the morning and loading those old cattle and waiting around that old market over there and standing in line till you get up unloaded is kind of a tiresome deal.
* * * * * *
R: Um, before you started farming, did you ever have any other jobs?
W: No, I just…from the time I was big enough to get away from the house, I guess you could say I stayed in their back pocket. Daddy and his two brothers, I was with them most of the time, with the exception of when I was on a pony roaming the hillside, living in a make-believe world, I guess. [smiles] We’d go back there on the back of the place and camp out, build us up a fire and thought we’d be Indians, I reckon, fry some ham and eggs and spend stuff like that through the summer. Had an old dog here, and we’d go out in the night, get skunk all over us. [laughs] That old dog, most of the time, he’s the one that got the skunk on him, and I’d just stay as far back as I could. They called it possum-hunting, but every once in a while you’d run in on a skunk. A boy and a horse and a dog and a gun, I guess that was the deal back in those days. People thought nothing about guns, kids running around here, nine, ten years old with 22 rifles. Nobody ever got hurt. Smacking tin cans, shooting at birds, running all the rabbits, whatever they was. Usually never killed much, just out strolling around, I reckon, running the hills, swimming in the old muddy pond over here with the cows. [laughs] And later on we’d get on the horses, and we’d—all this was farmland through here—and we’d go over across the way here, and we’d go all the way over there on the little river, riding the horses over there and go swimming. Camp out over there a little bit. Get somebody to take us over there and drop us off. And we’d go over there and stay on the river on the weekends.
* * * * * *
R: Do you have any last thoughts for these interviews? [pause] Maybe, like, what would you tell someone who doesn’t know much about farming, or about small-scale farming, about its importance?
W: I don’t know…I guess, maybe…farming probably…seems like the farm people live longer. I don’t know where I heard it from, but we had a nurse who used to come here, hang around with us, the doctor thought it was because of the stress, I don’t know what it was, but we…of course, see, we harvest a lot of food off the place and eat it, and we wasn’t eating all this, whatever it is, all this food you get out of the store. Seems like everybody’s stayed reasonably well, you know, until age caught up with them and their body just starts wearing out. Oh, I don’t know, I guess it’ll [small family farms] be a thing of the past unless it’s just something the family left to them, if you ask me. Every now and then somebody will get ahead and be able to get a few acres, but it’s just about got to be a hobby. A few larger farms are probably staying in the family, over here in Wards Cove across the mountain from us, right through this area I don’t think…town just keeps moving in and moving in, most of the younger people they want to sell it and get the money out of it, do whatever they…whatever their interests are. Guess you have to grow up with it, and if you do…somebody said it one time, I heard a bunch of guys was talking, wondering why they kept buying these old tractors and stuff. Said the only thing he could figure out was that they were addicted to it. You grow up with it, and, I mean, I really think that it’s in some people’s genes just to farm, you know. I mean, Daddy said that he reckoned he’d do it even if he didn’t make a penny at it, just to have something to eat, you know. Everybody’s put here, I guess, for a different purpose. Everybody’s designed to do something, and, of course, everybody’s not meant to do the same thing.
R: Do you wish that maybe the economy would be more friendly toward family farms and maybe change to support them more?
W: Oh, yeah, it would be a help, but I have a feeling it’s going to go the other way. They passed some legislation, especially in this [unclear what area he is talking about], I reckon, trying to give people a little rural relief there, trying to save these family farms. The equipment dealer told me, he said, “You just wait till these family farms leave, and the big businesses gets a hold of the land.” He said, “There’s a TV in every room, and every member [of a family] having one car or a vehicle will be a thing of the past.” He said, “The most expensive thing that they’ll be buying is food.” So, I don’t know whether it’ll be your generation or the next generation, but somebody is going to bite the bullet. I don’t know who it’s going to be, but these family farms, people quit producing on these family farms, and they’re producing this cheap food, uh, for the consumer, and the trouble just starts. These big companies, they don’t, they’ll just shut us down and control the food, I mean, and we’ll only produce so much…it’ll be like the gas company. We’ll only produce what we can get a good price for. It’s business, supply and demand. Hard thing about it is that this agriculture, the way it’s been in the past, is that you can’t just throw it in the warehouse till the price goes up on it. It’s all perishable items.
R: What do you think about genetically engineered food?
W: Well….[pauses]
R: It’s supposed to be unhealthy in a lot of ways.
W: Well, you know, time will tell. After twenty years or forty years or fifty years, they will know. Of course, a lot of this food is coming through these stores, I say it is…of course, they tell you every day how long you should cook it. You practically got to cremate it to kill all the bacteria, and it is really bad contaminated. Of course, they’re in the business to make money, and, of course, the more food they can produce, the quicker they can produce it, the more they can turn off, the more money they’re gonna make. A lot of people still…we have several people who come here who will only buy hogs here. Said they…they probably say to themselves, “I know what I’m eating.” They don’t even want ‘em off the stock market up here [in Tazewell] because they’ve been fed everything from soy beans to peanuts to garbage to whatever, uh, chicken manure, uh, distillery grain…and everything, anything an animal could eat and turn into protein. I know a few years ago Glenn was talking about Johnny. He fed his steer on chicken manure, and, of course, the thing he uses is mud fat. Glenn said, “Whatcha gonna do?” And he said, “Slaughter it and eat it.” And he said, “Well, you can’t eat the meat.” He said, “Ah,” and then later on he found he had to throw every bit of it away. Said that it had such a foul taste to it he couldn’t even eat it. Of course, this is where this mad cow disease come from. These dead chickens and dead cows and everything else they ground up and put right back into the feed and fed it back to them. Of course, that’s what they’re saying now; I don’t know what it’s gonna look like. We grow our own beef and grow our own pork, and we used to grow our own chickens. Of course, we don’t eat any…very little unless someone brings it in here, very little poultry. Of course, my mother, when she was able, had been up to this point, canned a lot of green beans, and, of course, we grow our own sugar corn out here in the field, and we harvest it and froze it up. And grow our own tomatoes, make juice out of it, can the tomatoes and the potatoes here that we grew, and, you know, they keep in the winter. And we basically…outside of the junk food we buy, you know, and, of course, we did have some cornmeal ground here once, but we got away from that, so…. The flour in the mill comes from the store, all the other things you can’t get from the farm, such as sugar, other little things. The rest of it, we just eat the farm food. Of course, Jo and Martha, they got to coming over here, and we got to giving them some to come home, and they just got to figuring that their grocery bill wasn’t near as high as it had been, and they learned to like the food, so they help in the garden, and they take whatever they want out of the garden home with them. They talked about eating one day, and one evening—I think they only cooked about one meal since they started working here—said everything that was on the table had come from the farm, and they’ve learned to eat similar to what we eat, if you can compare it. It’s different, but, you know….