A Cropless Farm

“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

When I talk about Wyldswood with strangers I often hear the question, "So, what do you grow there?" It's an honest inquiry; I mean, we call the place "Wyldswood Farms" after all.

Why "farms"? Why plural? I dunno. Peg directed me to register the LLC in the singular, but I got excited on the Florida Secretary of State web page and, before you knew it, we were "farms" rather than "farm". I could change it, but am too lazy and will likely resolve the crisis by purchasing the property next door. Two farms. Problem solved.

But back to the problem of crops.

We do have cattle, fifteen or so of them. They're the best kind of livestock, owned by a friend who only grazes them at Wyldswood as part of a cost-sharing arrangement. But if all we have is cattle, wouldn't that be a "ranch"? We have ranches in Florida, of course, but Peg grew up on a farm, not a ranch, and this is at some level a reprise of her childhood. So "farm" it is. Now we just need to grow something.

The ubiquitous crop in our corner of north Florida consists of neat rows of planted pines. They're easy, and they don't mind the sandy soil. The downsides, however, are abundant. Pine bark beetles see them as wood candy, and can sweep through a stand of trees in no time, rendering the whole crop worthless. Or you could have the experience of many of my friends and their parents in October of 2018, when a Cat 5 hurricane wiped out their retirement savings in the space of an afternoon, leaving miles of trees that took eighteen years or so to grow snapped off a dozen feet in the air, as far as the eye could see.

And if they do make it to maturity, the mess left behind by the loggers, a tangle of stumps and branches and muddy, torn up soil, looks like something from a World War I battlefield. All that costs money to clean up. When we sold some mature pines during the pandemic, the nice guy who harvested them left behind such a wasteland that we've ended up spending almost what we made, grinding stumps and burning debris piles. I think our net on that little venture was maybe $200.00.

I remember years ago, at a convenience store on the road between Atlanta and Savannah, a wiry fellow with leathery skin that suggested a lifetime of working in the south Georgia countryside, wearing a t-shirt that proclaimed, "If Polly Parton was a farmer, she'd be flat busted."

I get that now.

On top of all that, Peg hates pine trees, sees them as messy weeds. It's a southern thing. So the "easy" farm option is out.

For a while we toyed with the idea of satsumas, after noticing down on the bend in Highway 98 just past Rocky's gas station and bait shop, just before the road disappears west into miles of swamp and dolomite pit mines, that someone had planted a grove that kept growing larger over time. What did they know that we didn't know?

Oranges would certainly have had an aesthetic appeal. I went to high school in a town ringed by orange groves, and the smell of the blossoms on a spring day, subtle and sweet, made that patch of scrubland feel like paradise for a few weeks.

But satsumas require some infrastructure, irrigation lines and smudge pots and little white tubes to protect the trunks of the baby trees that run around $35 a pop. The whole thing costs several thousand dollars an acre to get off the ground, according to the articles published by our local ag agent.

And then we talked up our friend and neighbor Benji about the whole idea as he was loading his golf clubs into the back of his truck at the Perry Country Club, and we were dropping ours onto the back of the cart after work. Benji runs a logging company, so he's not completely impartial, but he gave a warning that resonated with us.

"First time it freezes and you're not here, those trees will be gone, along with whatever you invested. All those folks planting oranges haven't figured that out yet. There's a reason you see orange trees down south, and not up here. Plant pines. Can't go wrong with them."

I remember this from my California days, the bright flames sprinkled among the groves, soot covering the trees as the farmers tried desperately to save their crops on a freezing night.

Peg and I aren't around for that, she with her wonderful gig in Corning and me trying to run a law practice in Panama City. So the first big freeze means no more orange grove. Maybe we'll plant a few trees anyway, but I don't see a major investment in becoming orange farmers.

And that's sort of the rub. We can grow peanuts all day long, grow great watermelons, grow wonderful zipper peas. But those things require someone to actually farm, to weed and water and tend the crops. And did you know coyotes will eat the core out of a watermelon?

Which is why we decided that, notwithstanding the word "farms" in the title, we'll likely stick to growing happy marriages and family gatherings in a beautiful setting surrounded by authentic farm stuff.