A time of change

By Clif Knight  

The buzz of traffic on Bethel Road last week reminded me that school days are back and the hot, humid dog days of August are on their way out. 

I was also reminded how busy we were on the farm when I was growing up three-quarters of a century ago.  

My family’s main concern was harvesting the cotton crop.  

The goal was to carefully pull the locks from the bolls of stalks covering 12 acres in five to six weeks. All of the cotton was expected to be removed from the bolls and remain trash-free until it reached the cotton gin.   

Each of eight pickers was outfitted with a made-to-size sack, which were capable of holding up to 40 pounds of dry lint cotton. When full, sacks were emptied on a large cloth, and the cotton was allowed to fully dry before being weighed, loaded on the pickup truck and carried to the gin – once it weighed 1,200 to 1,300 pounds. 

A bale of cotton weighed approximately 500 pounds and was sold to a cotton buyer for about 40 cents per pound, depending on its cleanliness and fiber length. 

Cotton picking was interrupted to process a half-acre of sorghum cane. The canes were hand-stripped of their leaves and heads and carried to a nearby cane mill for juicing and syrup making. The finished product was stored in tin buckets for home and commercial use. 

An acre each of peanuts and sweet potatoes were plowed up, picked and stored in the field until they dried properly.  

Peanuts vines were stacked around poles and later moved to a vacant building where they were handpicked and used in the home as well as sold commercially.  

Sweet potatoes were stored in piles in the field and covered with layers of straw and dirt for curing. They were removed from their beds later and used in the home as well as sold commercially.  

The hay crop was later cut, cured and stored in the barn loft for feeding the livestock.  

Two mules, a wagon and three pickers were used to harvest a big corn crop. The wagon straddled two rows, and the pickers picked the corn from four rows and threw the ears in the wagon as the mules moved forward without stopping until they reached the end of the rows.