The Good Life on a 25-Acre Farm

Unlike many of the nation's experts, Booker T. Whatley believes in the future of the small farm as a profitable enterprise. To demonstrate his commitment, he has put his 30 years of professional horticultural experience and training into the development of a plan he is confident will bring the small farm back to life, a plan based on a working model set up at Tuskegee Institute in 1974.

“There’s too much talk, in my opinion, around this country about the demise of the small farmer, ” Whatley says. “The new dean of agriculture over at Auburn said that small farming was just going to become a hobby. Nobody from the land grant system opened their mouths. Now, I wrote that guy a letter. I haven’t heard from him. The land grant system hasn’t addressed the problems of the small farmer. They weren’t even doing research that related to small farmers.”

The land grant system that Whatley refers to was established in 1862 when the United States Congress granted public land and funds to each state to underwrite agricultural and technical colleges as a resource to the farmers of the nation. Additional land and monies were set aside in 1890 for separate facilities for Afro-Americans in the Southern states. The original system was expanded in 1887 to include state experimental stations and further in 1914 when county extension offices were set up to make information, resources, and expertise more accessible to the rural population.

This land grant system which once held such promise for farmers has failed to address the needs and problems of small farmers, more and more of whom face bankruptcy as farming incomes decrease. As Whatley points out, there has been little or no research devoted to finding ways to make the small farm economically viable; 95 percent of the system’s research budget is devoted to corporate farming and its methods. Booker T. Whatley wants to change all that.

Whatley grew up on his family’s farm in Anniston, Alabama, and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in agriculture at Alabama A &M and a doctorate in horticulture at Rutgers. In his long career he has developed five new varieties of sweet potatoes and 15 of muscadine grapes. He has also run a hydroponic farm in Japan and done research on biomass fuel production. After many years of teaching and research at Southern University in Louisiana, Whatley came to Tuskegee in 1973 and retired there a couple of years ago.

In this interview Whatley talks about the elements of his plan, how it operates, and why he thinks it holds the promise of a decent income for the small farmer.

 

The plan we are presently advocating grew out of our sweet potato, small fruits, and honeybee research programs at Tuskegee Institute. Now, the first article that I published about this plan was in 1974 when we also set up the 25-acre farm. One of the problems with agriculture, especially as it pertains to small farmers, is that we professionals down through the years have advocated that the small farmer produce exactly the same things that the big farmers do. If you have one farmer growing 1,000 acres and another one with 40 acres, our whole concept was to scale down the small guy and let him grow 10 acres of cotton and 10 acres of soybeans and maybe 10 acres of corn and have a pasture with some beef cattle, and that’s the same thing the big guy is doing.

Now it became crystal clear to me that small farmers cannot play in the same ballpark with the big farmers. So we’re talking about growing blueberries, muscadines, strawberries, sweet potatoes. And we’re not talking about growing them to ship up to New York or Chicago. We’re talking about, if it’s 25 miles to Montgomery, selling it right here in Montgomery.

A problem that even big farmers have is cash flow. In other words, if you’re a big cotton farmer, your cash comes in from September through December. The same holds true with soybeans, peanuts, and all the major agricultural crops. So we devised a plan that took the small farmer out of competition with the big farmer and also provided year-round income. And we did this on 25 acres.

The reason we settled on 25 acres is because everybody in this country would call a 25-acre farm a small farm — except the USDA, that is, because their definition of a small farm is a farm that grosses $20,000 or less a year. In other words, it could be a 1,000-acre farm and they would still classify it as a small farm if its gross sales were $20,000 or less.

 

Before a rash of publicity came Whatley’s way, beginning with a local newspaper article in 1980, and eventually including network television coverage and a lengthy interview in Mother Earth News, Whatley had “just talked about it in scientific circles.” His plan was little known except at Tuskegee and among other professional horticulturalists and agriculturalists.

 

But see, that’s the worst place in the world to talk about it because when you go to a horticulture meeting, you ain’t talking to nobody but horticulturists and they’re not going to set up no farm! So, we kind of rocked along and were revising the thing and getting it more sophisticated until late 1980, when a staff reporter at the Birmingham News wrote an article that was picked up by the major newspapers in this country and the title of the article was “A $100,000 Plan on 25 Acres for Small Farmers.”

One reason I think the article was so appealing to people nationally was that 1980 was a bad crop year across the country. The article came out on the second of November. Between the third of November and the twelfth of November I received over 1,000 letters and about 1,500 phone calls! Now a good 85 percent of those letters and phone calls were from right here in Alabama, but the rest were from all across the country.

The plan appeals to a lot of folks. It turns out that the American public, say city people, when they think about going out and setting up a farm, they think about 25 acres. And I didn’t know that. We got all kinds of letters from people saying, “I bought 23 acres,” or “I bought 27 acres,” so the plan just fits right into people’s thinking. The plan is built on several principles. One is that it provides year-round weekly income — that’s to solve the cash-flow problem. And that means having the right crops. Here, and all across the South, the first crop we can harvest in the spring is strawberries and they come in in the middle of May and you harvest them for a month. Then in the middle of June the blueberries come in. We got five acres of sweet potatoes and we harvest one of those acres the end of July, and then in August and September we harvest the grapes. You can sell the sweet potatoes on a weekly basis from the first of November to the first of May. Then we got collard greens in there to fill in any gaps. And we got Southern peas and we got honey bees. So that rounds this thing out where you got good cash flow. We also recommend that if a suitable pond site can be found on the farm that you construct an irrigation pond and stock it with fish.

When I talked with the folks from Mother Earth News, I laid out an even more important principle — that each crop must produce an annual gross minimum income of $3,000. I used this example: “If a farmer here in Alabama plants one acre of land in cotton, and has a good year, he can expect to get one bale of cotton from that acre. Now a bale weighs about 500 pounds, and cotton’s selling for around 70 cents a pound, so the man’s annual gross income off that piece of land will be $350. However, if he takes the same acre and plants it in collards, he can get 8,000 bunches of greens. By selling those for 50 cents a bunch, he’ll gross $4,000. And then, if he plants both a spring and a fall crop of collards, he can take in as much as $8,000 per acre versus $350.” You can see our plan here of what we recommend in Alabama.

Another principle is that the components of the farm be compatible and not compete with each other for labor. You don’t want everything coming in at once. And the farm would provide year-round full employment for the farmer. When we set up the model at Tuskegee, we figured it ought to take two-and-a-half person-years of labor — maybe full-time work for a man, three-quarters-time for his wife, and one-quarter-time each for three teenage children. Or some combination like that.

Now here is the innovative twist to this farm. We recommend that each farmer develop a clientele membership club. One of these farms will supply the needs of 1,000 households. So we want the farmer’s membership club to consist of 1,000 families, and we charge $25 to join. If you’ve got a pond, then we say the membership fee should be increased to $40. Being a member entitles the family to come to the farm and harvest everything themselves — except the sweet potatoes and honeybee products, which aren’t pick-your-own crops — for 60 percent of what they would pay in the supermarket.

For this to work, the farm will have to be within 25 to 40 miles of a city, on a hard-surfaced road, so people can get to it. A good source of water is also important, since the whole farm needs to be under irrigation to maintain this kind of high-yield operation. Water weatherproofs the farm against drought and also against frost.

 

Since the original intention was to devise a plan that would appeal to people who were already farming, Whatley is still surprised that he has not attracted as much interest from farmers as from people who are interested in starting farms.

 

This plan appeals to highly trained professional people, dentists, engineers, doctors, lawyers. When we set out we intended to help the farmer that already owned land and equipment, had farming skills, was growing cotton, corn, soybeans, and was about to starve to death. We’re appealing to some people like that, but not as many as I would like. My newsletter is an attempt to do that. I got the idea from reading the letters folks send me, telling me they don’t understand the stuff they get from the USDA and from the extension service, or that it’s too general and that kind of thing.

I don’t have anything against large farmers. I was educated in the system and worked in it for 30 years. But the small farmer has a place in this country and is going to stay.

 

Whatley remains confident that he will still be able to reach his original targeted audience. After his retirement from Tuskegee in 1981 he and Lottie Whatley, his wife and partner, established Whatley Farms and now devote a large share of their time to publicizing and refining the plan. The Southwest Self Help Association of Montgomery is using Whatley as a consultant to help them set up a model of his farm as a training site for local farmers. And they are currently negotiating the purchase of some land in the Montgomery area where they plan to set up a working model.

The Whatleys also write and distribute the Small Farm Technical Newsletter and have developed, in less than three years, a list of close to 8,000 subscribers. “We’ve got subscribers from every state in the union and from 20 foreign countries,” says Whatley. One of his goals is to recruit and train coordinators for each state to act as advisers to individuals and organizations who wish to implement his plan. Thus far, he’s already got coordinators for Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Texas, Kansas, Washington, and Oregon. He counsels that the plan is flexible and may vary from region to region, based on local food preferences and type of land available.

 

In New York state you might grow Concord grapes. Yankees may not want to eat collard greens, but the principle I’m talking about is going to hold true.

 

The Small Farm Technical Newsletter costs $12 a year. The complete file of back issues, dating to October, 1981, is available for $40.80. Write Whatley Farms, Inc., P.O. Box 2827, Montgomery, AL 36105; (205) 265- 7786 or 265-7754.