So these people were not simply losing a job, they were losing their lives, losing all that they had known, and all that their parents worked for and so forth. You can imagine how painful it is for people to have to admit that this is all going to have to be sold, or worse, the bank is going to get it all. That's what people were telling us when they called this hotline. Occasionally, we would get the call from a woman, usually, who would say, "My husband is talking about killing himself," that sort of thing, or, "He is talking about shooting somebody." Occasionally we would get those. We weren't really equipped to be mental health workers. We were community organizers who were answering the phone. Our solution was systemic rather than individual anyway. We wanted, rather than to say, "Tell me your feelings," and use that approach, we wanted to say, "Can we get other people in the community to talk about losing farms; can we have a meeting at your community center, can we have a meeting at the restaurant and have a bunch of farmers come together and talk together about what the problems are, and then let's see if there's something we can all do together to work on these problems. We built a pretty good organization, we got a number of different farm groups in North and South Carolina, that's what I did for a number of years. I worked from Robeson County to Bladen County to Duplin County. These are very rural counties who were recently hit by the flood down east. And I really enjoyed that work a lot.

But all the time, from the time I'd been in Kentucky, to North Carolina, after college, I had this strong pull to farm myself. As I said to the group back in the class, it was a very ironic time to go into farming, when all of these other people were going out of business. They were very big farmers who had expanded their operations. Usually young farmers who were in debt. The older farmers were not so indebted.

But you don't like big farm, right?

No, I didn't. I said, well, these people are going out of business, is there is a way for me to make a living, the opposite of that is getting small and getting into agriculture. The difficulty was convincing a lender to give me money to buy a farm on a small scale with the farm plan of raising fruits and vegetables. The farm plan I worked out pretty well, using lots of different books. Remember I told you about that agricultural library? I continued to use that library, because the library had moved from Anson County to Chatham County. That library is no longer in Chatham County unfortunately, but that's another story. So I worked with these books and resources that I had and came up with a very good farm plan. Probably much better than anything they'd ever seen, just to be honest about it. Because most farmers don't go through the kinds of experiences I had been through with a college degree in the humanities, and so my writing skills and all that were good. So I came up with this farm plan that was very specific in terms of how many acres of each thing I was going to plant, I gave justifications for it, I even did a marketing analysis showing that various restaurants would buy from me. I interviewed people who had done this and wrote down what they said. They said they thought a farm like this could work. I had quotes in there. It was a professional business plan. It was like a paper. So I gave that to a couple of banks—No, I don't think I gave that to banks. I had talked to bankers who said, "No, we don't make any farm loans any more." So I tried to convince them. But Farmers Home Administration was a federal agency, and still is a federal agency, that was established to help limited-resource and beginning farmers. That was their historical mandate from Congress to serve those two populations, particularly minority farmers. So when we started this hotline, and different methods of helping people in these communities who were calling, one of the things we had to learn was regulations about lenders. And the main one we were really getting lots of information about was called Farmers Home Administration. It was a federal agency, and we thought, of any agency in this country, that one that's supported by tax dollars needs to be treating farmers fairly, giving them every benefit that's possible, knowing that we were experiencing a widespread farm crisis that we hadn't experienced since the 1930s in the Great Depression. So we need leniency and we need understanding on the part of these lenders. We worked hard to learn about how to make Farmers Home Administration really work for farmers. We, I mainly, on the project wrote a bunch of different pamphlets that farmers could read about their rights as a borrower. We did one on what are the different kinds of bankruptcy, under legal definitions, that sort of thing. Anyway, because I did all that, I knew about how to get a beginning farmer a loan.

Yes, you became an expert on this.

I became an expert. I used my knowledge to apply for a loan. I went to the local county committee—I didn't go before them, I gave the application to the county director. The county director takes my farm plan and presents it before the county committee. There are three people on the county committee, none of whom are farmers. They are just big businessmen. I can't remember—Louis Rinn was one of their names. What did he do? They were all from Chatham. One of them did something like run a sawmill, run a big factory, or something. They were partly rural but mostly just into business deals, and that's how they got onto the committee. One of the things we did in some of the counties where we were organizing was get good farmers on these committees. That was one of the ways we could change things. Congress actually passed a law that there would have to be two full-time farmers on the committee making loans. They're making loans to their peers. That still leaves room for problems because there can be jealousies and all that. But it's much better to have farmers who understand what it is to farm. If somebody says, "Can't pay a loan back this year," the farmers know that there was a drought this year or whether the guy just not really trying. Anyway, I applied, and the county committee said they were not going to give me a loan. There were two reasons: you don't have enough experience, and you know, it's real hard to show you have experience running a farm when you're a beginning farmer. But here I had my grandfather, and I had my demostration garden, and I had a degree, but still insufficient experience. The other one was that the farm plan was atypical for the area. In other words, no one has ever done this, therefore it can't work. Well, it was such bad logic, because what everybody else was doing was not working. And I appealed. And I knew about how to appeal. I don't think anybody had ever appealed in Chatham County before. So I appealed, and I went to the district director. This was just appearing before one person, who happened to be an African American. Perhaps a little more sympathetic to the ideas of discrimination, that sort of thing, although I couldn't detect that, I just thought maybe this was a good thing to have an African American who would understand. He wouldn't be part of—Do you understand what I mean when I say the good old boy system? That's a slogan, a saying, in the South. The good old boys are those powerful white guys like who are on the county committee. Those business types who tend to run the county. And often they aren't in a rural place, like Chatham has been, they aren't sophisticated in a traditional way. They don't wear three-piece suits. They might just be farmers, but they still are— those are some of the good old boys, and then they can be lawyers or doctors too. But there's a network. Those guys kind of help each other. I bet it's the same in every country. And they're usually male, almost without exception, and who they know and who they are related to get a lot of benefits and get the land, and when it comes to politics, they get their people elected. You know that? Does it work that way in China?

Yes, this kind of network is very popular in China.

Parochialism might be another way of putting it. The good old boys system keeps outsiders out, any new ideas out. It keeps minorities out. It keeps the status quo, maintains the status quo. It doesn't give loans to people like me. It's a system. So I thought this African American guy, who was the district director, might not be part of that system and might understand what it is to try to break into it when everyone else is resistant to the idea.

So this is like a court?

Yes, it is, but there's only one guy there with a tape recorder, much like this. He's taping the entire thing. We're sitting in this room with no windows. So he says, "Okay, let me hear your appeal." I was my own lawyer, so to speak. I had to organize it all. I said, "Okay, my opening statement is that I've been denied the loan because of these two reasons. But my file shows that I have had a lot of experience and my farm plan will work." So I brought one person named Mark Epp, who was from the Rural Advancement Fund, who gave testimony about me working for a farm demonstration organization and that I was in charge of that. He was my supervisor on that, so I brought him in. The other person was Bill Dow. Hope didn't say very much. She just came in support. Bill Dow, who talked about alternative farming working in Chatham County because of the market in Chapel Hill. So we walked out of there, we said everything. The district director was not there to argue with us, he wasn't representing the other side, trying to convict me, or anything. He was supposed to be an unbiased listener, so to speak. Oh, the other guy who was in there was the county director of the Farmers Home Administration who represented what the county committee said.

When was that?

1984. That was a good question. Meanwhile, I had found this land, I had found twenty-two acres, that I wanted to buy. It was owned by this guy, this dentist, who was named Dr. Rainer. Dr. Rainer didn't want to deal with realtors. He was a crotchety old man, well, not that old, but he—He didn't like realtors and he didn't like official agreements. He was sort of the good old boy type, who wanted to just do business directly with people. He liked the idea of me getting the farm a lot.

Is he a farmer?

No, he wasn't the farmer, he had just bought it—he was a dentist—as an investment. He lived all over in Garner, which is near Raleigh. That's where his dental practice was. He rented it for years, but then he got tired of owning it. He owned forty-some other places to rent out to people. He said, "The only reason I'm getting rid of that place is because it's too far away for me to manage." You know, he didn't want to come forty miles over to see if his rental property was doing okay. The thing is, all this was taking time. The county committee is letting me know three weeks after I submit my application that I don't get a loan, and then we have the district hearing. Meanwhile I have to tell Dr. Rainer, "They're still saying they might give me a loan." I'm having to say, "I think I can get this loan," of course, not exactly believing that I could, just trying to keep him going.

How much did it cost?

To buy that land, it had a house, and it had a farm, had cleared fields, and a pond. It was a nice little farm to start with. He wanted $60,000 for it. It was over fifteen years ago. It was a good deal, it was a low price. It was a good price I could afford. I had a job, I was working as a community organizer, not making great dollars, but I had a steady job. I could make a case for being able to pay that loan back. Of course I was going to try to pay it back with farming eventually. So, the district director overturned the decision. I never found out exactly why. He changed his mind, he changed the organization's mind, changed their direction, and said now I was eligible for the loan. But that was only one step. That was only to determine my eligibility. Once that was established, then the county director said to me, "That only means you're eligible, that doesn't mean I'm going to give you the loan." So I said, "What I need to do to get the loan." He said, "I have to be convinced that you're going to be able to pay this back. I can't just be giving out loans and not getting any money back. I represent the federal government, you know, I can't be just throwing money away." So, okay, well, "I'm eligible. Here's my farm plan, I'll walk through the farm with you, I'll show you what I'm going to do." I never did know—I thought maybe because I worked for Rural Advancement Fund and we were already causing problems and having some victories, including having congressional hearings in various districts, congresspeople coming and having a hearing to find out about Farmers Home Administration policies and how they were working on the local level, which was making democracy work, that's what we were doing. I think it could have been that that caused them to change their minds. And it also could have been that this guy just had a little bit of a heart in there somewhere. He wasn't a bad guy. His name was Kenny something, I can't remember. He was just a nice fella, but he wasn't about to rock the boat. He wasn't about to try to get himself in trouble in order to help me. He had to still go by the book. As long as he could see that what I was doing could be supported by his book, so to speak, he was willing to go along, and he did.

But meanwhile, this doctor had to wait about six months for all this to happen before I ever got a check. How many people would be willing to do that? It was amazing, but it all worked. He said, "I'd given up on that loan," when I finally got the check and was able to write him a check. "I was about to give up on that, and if you hadn't bought that farm, I was going to turn it into a trailer park." Mobile homes, that's what he decided he was going to do.

Does every farm have a name?

No, not every farm has a name. Tends to be, some of the newer farms have names. Some of the old established farms don't need a name, people just know them by who runs them, who owns them. I thought it would be good to have a name because I was going to begin to sell products, to farmers markets and to restaurants, and they need some name recognition, just like we remember Coke, everybody has to have their brand. So that began to be mine. I was a small businessperson, not interested in mass marketing like Coke or anything, but I was interested in establishing a name and a reputation. So I did, I began to do that, selling at a farmers market. The very first season, really, I sold things like flowers, and—I can't remember all the things I sold that first season—squash, and a few measly things that barely brought anything. I can remember the first time on a Saturday that I made $100, that was a big event. It took me weeks to build up. The first week I made $15, the next week I might have made $40. Then I can remember that first week, "Yes, $100!" It was a day of celebration, to work so hard and make $100.

One week you can have a harvest.

Then I began to planting blackberries and blueberries, profitable crops. Also I got sheep. I even got llamas, the South American animal, to sell for novelty reasons, just as pets. I started working through all these networks and met people from all over the country, really, doing different things. From blackberries I met people from Arkansas. That sort of thing. It was a good experience. I think I worked well as a small businessperson, although there were disappointments in the farm as well. One of the main ones was that I was alone all the time and that I had nobody to work with. My wife never said she wanted to be a full-time farmer. We got married—did I say that?—in 1985, that same person that I had come to Pittsboro to see and be near. We got the farm in 1984 and had the big marriage celebration on the farm in June of 1985. A lot of people came, it was great. We got neighbors to come and that was a real celebration. But for the most part, I worked alone. She worked in an office in Pittsboro at the Rural Advancement Fund, which eventually became the Rural Advancement Foundation International. She still works with them, but she works in Carrboro now. They still have an organization down there. Incidentally, the woman who broke her arm, named Betty Bailey, she is now the executive director of the organization. She's still there, she's been there fifteen years now. So anyway, I was there for nine years, from 1984 to 1993. I guess the entire time I was a farmer, I had various emotions involved. By the way, as I worked harder and harder, and got better, and my plants began to mature, I began to make pretty good money. I was making, instead of $100, once I made $2000 at the farmers market in one day.