Over 12 years, N.C. loses 1 million acres of farmland

Families with a hundred years of farming history reunite and share stories of struggle, stubbornness

RALEIGH -- Tommy and Elizabeth Winston are in the short rows of their farming careers. Both 69, they have one son, a banker in Durham, who loves the 500 Granville County acres on which he was raised but can't see a way to make a living there.

The Winstons just hope he'll hold on to the land, which Tommy Winston's grandfather bought in the 1800s.

In the past 12 years, a million acres of farmland across the state have gone out of production, much of it sold for development, according to the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. On Thursday, Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler told a reunion of the N.C. Century Farm Families -- people who claim their families have tilled their North Carolina soil for 100 years or more -- that the loss of thousands of farms in recent years makes every acre still under cultivation that much more precious.

Farming wasn't Tommy Winston's first career choice. He grew up on a tobacco farm, but what he really wanted was to pitch baseball. And he did, with the Salem Giants, the farm team for the San Francisco Giants. He lasted a year.

When they told him he wasn't good enough, he came back to the farm.

He raised chickens, hogs and tobacco -- until the end of the federal tobacco quota system, when he switched to cattle. Farming wasn't easy, Winston said, but he liked being outside. Most of the time, he was his own boss.

Lynn Pickler Edwards hasn't worked on the farm for years, but her family still owns the land in Stanly County that her great-grandmother managed to hold when Edwards' great-grandfather was killed in the Civil War.

"If my great-grandmother farmed it, and my grandmother farmed it, I'm not woman enough to let go of it," Edwards said.

Her sister, Leisel Pickler Owen, also owns a share of the farm. Both attended the reunion, which drew hundreds of farmers.

They don't work the land, but both say they feel responsible for keeping it in cultivation, which they do by leasing. On Edwards' 35 acres, wheat, corn, cotton and soybeans are grown.

"We need it to be productive," Edwards said. "It gives the farmer a way to make a living, and it puts food on other people's tables."