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By Lonnie Adamson
Staff Reporter
Elkin Tribune

Surry County farmers got the ear of U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx (RBanner Elk) Tuesday, convincing her to investigate development of an ethanol production plant.

Five farmers, Farm Bureau representatives and the county cooperative extension director met with Foxx at Elkin’s Cimarron Steak House in a third “listening tour” of her three-monthlong term of office.

She was traveling the district listening to farmers dealing with loss of tobacco revenue and wondering how to invest tobacco buyout funds.

County Farm Bureau President David Haynes, a farmer in Dobson, said of North Carolina farmers, “We are the best at growing and the worst at selling.”

Grains must be trucked to Kershaw, S.C., or Raleigh for a premium price, he told Foxx. Rising fuel prices will cut into profits, he said.

One solution would be creation of a co-op to purchase grains for production of ethanol fuel. That would provide a market for farmers with a need for another product in the absence of tobacco. It would also offer a solution to rising fuel prices, Haynes said.

Growing more grains will be a first and most natural response farmers will make to declining tobacco production.

“Many farmers in the Midwest sell to ethanol plants. There is one down east (North Carolina),” he said. “We grow a lot more grain around here than down there.”

“Most of us diversified many years ago and already grow grains,” said Jimmy Draughn of Draughn Farms in Red Brush. The four farmers at Draughn’s table all had some combination of tobacco, grains, soybeans and poultry. He finds other products less attractive.

A proposal for vegetable farming did not go over well at the meeting because of the short growing season in Surry County.

“Wine grapes will be very ex- pensive, “ he said. “It is estimated to cost $10,000 per acre. Wine produces about the same per acre as tobacco. I grew 140 acres of tobacco. That’s an investment of $1.4 million.”

He got a tobacco allotment buy-out sufficient to cover that cost, but says most farmers looked on allotment revenue as a retirement fund. “We planned to rent our allotment and live off the income. Now we need to be putting that away somewhere, so we’re not working into our 70s,” Draughn said.

“Even if we did invest in wine, we’d have at least three to five years before seeing any revenue. How are you going to go to a bank and ask for operating loans on that basis? ‘I want to borrow money, but I can’t pay you for three years, and I don’t know how much I’ll pay you when I do pay you.’”

Kerry Johnson and brother Von developed a cooperative to sell grapes produced in Winnbrose Vineyard to Old North State Winery. He serves on the board at Old North State.

Making that leap from tobacco to grapes in 2001 was a scary proposition, Johnson said.

“I was always second guessing myself,” he said. “You need to develop it a little at a time, plant enough to support the machinery that you need and grow from there. You can’t grow enough grapes now to fill the market. That will not always be the case. The time will come when there will be more production than needed. You’re going to have to have a contract and a market to sell to.

Farm Bureau representative Chris Robertson of Mount Airy said he thinks that agri-tourism is a wave of the future in which farmer’s charge $10 a person to see a working farm.

Foxx said she would investigate what it would take to establish a fuel production facility.

Farmers also questioned Foxx about relief from federal regulations that require farm laborers to be paid $8.26 per hour and be supplied a place to live.