Chapter 5. The Grower

Raising crops is no easy way to make a living

Before launching this project, as an occasional outreach volunteer driving away from one depressing farm labor camp after another, I found myself angry. How can growers be so heartless? I wondered. Would they ever spend a night in their own labor camps? My questions, however, were knee-jerk reactions. My compassion for farmworkers living in crappy housing was spot-on. But my understanding of the grower’s challenge was off by a country mile.

 

According to family records and what I could find online, forty-six-year-old Robert Dawson is the ninth generation of Dawsons to grow crops in eastern North Carolina. His family is the only owner on record for their land in Bullhead Township, a municipal speck halfway between Snow Hill and Stantonsburg in Greene County, about an hour’s drive east of Raleigh. They believe the land came into the family before the American Revolution, by way of a land grant from the British Crown. Robert is proud to be the latest in a long line of Dawsons to farm this land. But he fears, and has good reason to believe, he may be the last. It’s been a rough few years.

As you’d expect in these parts, for most of their history, the Dawsons’ main crop was tobacco. They’ve also grown cotton and peanuts. One recent year they grew hemp, but Robert lost so much money he doesn’t plan to do that again. Today, they grow wheat, wheat straw, soybeans, and corn.

Robert gets help running the farm from his dad, Earl, and his mom, Pam. They took over the farm from Earl’s father, Charles, in 1966, the year they were married. There’s a Dawson Road just up Highway 58 from the Dawson farm. It’s named for Earl’s dad, and the old family homestead is still there, built in the early 1800s. During the Civil War, the Union Army seized the handsome home, perched on a rise, and used it as a hospital.

Robert has an older brother and a sister who did not stay in farming. “They were smarter than me,” Robert jokes. Robert was exceptionally enthusiastic about farming from a very young age. When he was four, his parents had a hard time just keeping him inside the house. “I just always wanted to be out on the farm with my dad,” Robert told me.

Today, the Dawsons plant wheat in October or November. In June, they use a combine to harvest grain from the tops of each plant. Another machine follows close behind to harvest the remaining stalks as wheat straw. Once the wheat is harvested, they plant soybeans in the same rows, sometimes burning off the few inches of remaining wheat stalk or plowing it under. Thus, in one year they harvest three different crops from the same field: wheat, wheat straw, and soybeans.

Their combine is an imposing John Deere X9 featuring a detachable header with rows of sharp metal teeth that chop easily through the stalk of a wheat, soybean, or other plant. It’s an impressive machine but an expensive one.

“I’ll never be able to afford another one,” Robert says, “so I need to maintain and repair this one all the time.”

He and I approached the header and Robert put his right thumb, clearly misshapen, between two of its teeth. “This is how I nearly lost my thumb.” He explains how thirteen years ago, he was trying to unjam it when the teeth came to life and took off 80 percent of his thumb. It’s been reattached but is not fully functional. “I’ll never again be able to button the top of a shirt.”

Although they prefer not to dwell on the topic, the Dawsons presume their ancestors here, prior to the Civil War, secured farm labor by enslaving Blacks. I can relate to the reticence, having at least one ancestor myself who was known to have enslaved Blacks on a farm in Kentucky. Like the Dawsons, we Durbins don’t talk much about this fact. But we own it.

Following ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the Dawsons followed local custom and turned to sharecroppers to raise their tobacco and other crops. One hundred years later, in 1966, when Earl and Pam took over, about a dozen “tenants,” as they refer to them, provided labor to the farm.

“They were sharecroppers,” adds Robert. “They farmed on the halves.”

This was a common arrangement during the sharecropping era. Sharecroppers, typically Black, lived on a piece of land rent-free, as they did on the Dawson farm, responsible only for their light bill and other household expenses. The Dawsons provided the farmland and a space for a garden. The workers paid for half of the fertilizer and other costs of growing the crop, borrowing money from the Dawsons to do so, and paid for their own food and other housing costs. They prepared fields, planted crops, and did whatever else work was needed to bring the crop to harvest. Then they sold the crop and split the proceeds fifty-fifty with the Dawsons.

This arrangement lasted until the 1980s when the Dawson tenants became employees. Earl recalls one was named Angelo, another Jasper. They were still permitted to live rent-free on the property, in houses no longer standing. At some point, the Dawsons also hired five or six Black workers who had moved to North Carolina from Mississippi. They too lived rent-free on the property and were paid wages. At some point, the tenants and migrants found other work and moved away, some to Maryland.

In 1990, the Dawsons began hiring workers on temporary seasonal H-2A visas as a member of the North Carolina Growers Association, which takes care of worker recruitment, transportation, visa processing, and other matters on behalf of its member farms. For the 2022 season, the Dawsons hired twelve workers, nearly all of whom have been coming to their farm year after year, some for more than two decades. They did not need all twelve workers for the entire season, so they lent some out to another farmer who grows tobacco. This ability to move workers to where they are most needed is one of the advantages of working through the NCGA, rather than securing workers directly, in which case those workers would be allowed to work only for them.

The Dawsons have many good things to say about the NCGA. The association has been very helpful to this family farm, and only once did the Dawsons have issues with one of the workers, and that was some years ago. Pam and Earl’s only current complaint, a mild one, is the stack of paperwork they must comb through each year when they apply for workers.

“No farmer has time for that,” says Pam. But she knows the NCGA is asking only for paperwork required by law.

The Dawsons’ H-2A workers live in a pair of trailers on their property, located about a half a mile down the highway, purchased when the Dawsons began using the H-2A program. When the workers arrive each season from Mexico, one of the Dawsons goes to pick them up from the NCGA drop point in Kinston. Pam tries to have clean linens on their beds and some food in the trailers, such as peanuts or oranges. In the days before everyone had a mobile phone, she would take photos and put them on CDs for the workers to take home to Mexico.

By the time I first met them in December 2022, the Dawsons had already submitted their paperwork to the NCGA for the next year’s team of farmworkers: twelve men, preferably the same ones as last year.

They have no other reliable source of farm labor. Pam puts it bluntly: “If not for H-2A workers, we would not have an operation.”

The Dawsons would love for more people to know how difficult it is to run a profitable farming operation. Says Pam, “People don’t understand the plight of the farmer, the same as you wouldn’t understand a teacher or a nurse, unless you walk in their shoes.”

 

Like most farming operations, the Dawsons face three major risks, each of them daunting. The first is market risk. This is simply the risk a grower won’t be able to sell their crops, which must be planted months before delivery, at a profit. The Dawsons mitigate this in part by “booking” their sales months in advance, at a set price, using a forward contract negotiated with a grain company.

For example, when I met the Dawsons in December, they had just booked 20 thousand bushels of wheat, for delivery six months later in June at a price of 8 dollars per bushel. This assured them they will receive exactly that much money for each of those bushels. The 8 dollar price was based on the then-current futures price of wheat at the Chicago Board of Trade. No matter how the price of wheat fluctuates between now and then—it might be going for more or less than 8 dollars in June—Robert knows he can sell his 20 thousand bushels for 8 dollars each. That gives him some obvious comfort, in return for giving up the possibility of doing even better should the going price of wheat be more than 8 dollars in June. By mitigating his market risk, however, he has exacerbated a second risk: weather. And this one is out of everyone’s control.

No farmer knows how weather might affect the next year’s growing season. Robert hopes to harvest 20 thousand bushels of wheat next June, but much of that depends on Mother Nature. Just this year, Robert grew a nearly perfect crop of soybeans. “I think they were the best beans I had ever seen.” Then a heat spell came through and all but killed them. If something like that happens to the wheat, and he does not have 20 thousand bushels to honor his forward contract, then he must buy what he doesn’t have. “You have to deliver either crops or cash.” For example, if he has only 15 thousand bushels, he will need to effectively buy another 5 thousand at the going rate, using money he doesn’t have, to fulfill his contract. And if the spot rate of wheat spikes well above 8 dollars a bushel in such a scenario, it could spell disaster.

The third major risk is inflation, or the risk that the prices of the of goods and services a farmer requires to produce a crop will increase. For Robert Dawson, the top expenses are fertilizer, fuel, equipment repair, and the hourly rate he must pay his H-2A workers. In 2022, the Adverse Effect Wage Rate was $14.16 per hour, up from $13.15 the year before, a jump of nearly 8 percent. When you add in other labor costs, such as NCGA fees, workers’ compensation insurance premiums, and transportation, Robert estimates his all-in hourly cost in 2022 was around $20 per hour. When I first met with him in early December of 2022, the AEWR had not yet been announced for 2023, so he could not even say what his labor costs would be next season. That uncertainly only adds to his stress.

During a later visit, a guy dropped by to deliver a new oil filter for their tractor. Robert held up the invoice. “This is one of our issues: 129 dollars for one of these filters, and 165 dollars for the other. We used to get both for under a hundred.”

“And that’s not counting the oil,” adds Earl. The price of that is going up too.

“People don’t realize that farmers are right here,” adds Robert, holding a flattened hand under his jaw, “just holding their heads above water.”

Robert goes on to explain that they normally would replace the tractor’s air filter each year but decided instead to clean it out with pressurized air to get an extra year. This increases the risk of engine failure, should the air filter fail and allow dirt to get sucked in. But it saves them money.

“We don’t know how much longer we can absorb all these rising costs. But we have to,” says Robert. “Or we stop farming,” he adds, referring to all farmers, going on to predict that “maybe then people will realize that food doesn’t come from the Food Lion.”[1]

In 2017, the Dawsons felt a financial shock unique to tobacco farmers. That was the last year of a five-year contract with Alliance One, an international agricultural company that commits to buy tobacco from growers each year, giving those growers some degree of confidence they will recover their costs and earn a small profit. This is how most tobacco growers sell their leaf nowadays, replacing the historic auction system that has all but disappeared. As their contract period came to an end, North Carolina’s tobacco industry was suffering. Annual production had fallen from 700 million pounds in 1997 to around 364 million.[2]

Alliance One decided not to renew the Dawson contract. No longer could Robert count on annual revenues of more than $7 million from growing tobacco. They shifted gears and decided to plant other crops: wheat, soybeans, corn, and the ultimately unprofitable hemp. But without a contract, they were unable to obtain an operating loan, and without that cash, they quickly found themselves unable to pay their bills.

In May 2018, the Dawson’s lawyer submitted a Chapter 11 filing with the North Carolina Eastern Bankruptcy Court on their behalf. Unlike Chapter 7 bankruptcy, in which an individual or business liquidates everything they own and can essentially walk away from their debts for a clean start, Chapter 11 reorganization involves making a plan to pay your financial obligations over time.

“We didn’t want to just walk away from our debts,” Robert stresses to me. “We intend to make good on our obligations.”

Doing so hasn’t been easy. They cut costs wherever they can, blowing out air filters, cutting salaries, and saving a few bucks at every opportunity. With far less revenue these days, and many of the same expenses from the tobacco days, Robert projects that he’ll end the 2023 growing season in the red, “probably by about 150 thousand dollars.” And that’s if all goes according to plan.

Between market risk, weather uncertainty, and inflation, plus other risks—a farmer’s health, unanticipated changes in the law, the list goes on—there are any number of ways a farmer might have a bad year. Or a string of them.

Anyone can read about the economic pressures on farmers in news articles and press releases. But it’s different when you go talk with a farmer. Sitting in the Dawsons’ modest farm office, crowded with decades of aging furniture, piles of paper, and hundreds of family photos and memorabilia on the walls, listening to Robert and his mom and dad, I could feel the stress. It hangs in the air.

 

Crop growers aren’t the only employers who hire workers through the H-2A program. Forty-seven-year-old Ariel Montanez, a former Marine, manages the Pender Nursery. Located just south of Raleigh on a onetime tobacco farm—the old stick barn[3] is still there, long-ago covered with siding and used now for general storage—this wholesale nursery sells six hundred varieties of plants to roughly fifteen hundred retail garden centers, landscapers, and other such customers up and down the East Coast. The nursery hires six H-2A workers every year and puts them up in a house on the property where the owner once lived. Ariel would hire more, but that’s all the old septic system will allow.

For years, and just like countless other agricultural employers, Pender would hire local residents each season as needed. These workers would simply show up for work every day like any other employee. That all changed around 2013, when North Carolina began requiring that employers use the E-Verify system to confirm employees were legally authorized to work in the United States. Many of their applicants had no such authorization.

With the loss of that regular source of seasonal employees, some of whom they had hired year after year and were experts at their jobs, Pender hired a farm labor contractor to each year provide workers authorized under the H-2A visa program. Their labor costs went up—they had to pay not just the AEWR hourly wage but a contractor fee on top of that—but it seemed the only choice they had. Unfortunately, every season then brought a new crew of workers who had to be trained. And some would occasionally arrive in the morning too intoxicated to work, leaving them shorthanded again and again. Eventually, Pender decided to hire H-2A workers directly, with the help of a lawyer in Clinton, North Carolina, who specializes in helping employers navigate the paperwork and other logistics. Now, they generally have the same workers returning each year.

The arrangement works. Fortunately, they already had worker housing on site, something many potential H-2A employers don’t. Their chief complaint is the ever-changing hourly rate they must pay their workers. The 2023 AEWR for North Carolina was $14.91, on top of which they had pay for workers’ compensation insurance, and whatever they paid the lawyer in Clinton.

One thing that bothers Ariel about the AEWR is the “Adverse Effect” part, meant to protect US workers in these jobs. “The problem is there aren’t any US workers filling these jobs.” So why set the rate to protect workers who don’t exist? To Ariel, this doesn’t make any sense. But he wants me to be clear on one thing.

“I have no problem with the principle of a minimum wage. In the past, I’ve worked for minimum wage myself,” Ariel tells me. “And I know some employers would pay workers pennies per hour if they could.”

Another problem Ariel has with the AEWR is how it assumes every employer can afford the same wage. Why should a small employer like him (his total workforce, including sales and office staff, is around thirty-five people) with razor-thin profit margins have to pay the same wage as a major corporation reporting massive profits year after year?

Ariel points out another factor too. Pender has customers up and down the East Coast. Because the AEWR might differ from state to state, some of his competitors can pay less for labor—a major cost for any nursery—than he does. The 2023 AEWR for South Carolina, for example, was $13.67—more than 8 percent less than the North Carolina’s rate of $14.91. Thus, a Pender customer might spend considerably less for the very same product by simply buying from a competitor located about an hour south on the interstate. These customers buy in volume, so a cost difference like this makes a real difference when deciding where to buy.

 

While relatively few individual growers were keen to speak with me, Jay Hill and Lee Wicker of the North Carolina Growers Association were happy to. With more than seven hundred member growers in the NCGA, Lee and Jay can speak to the struggles of US farmers like few others can. A regular presence in Washington, DC, there to observe and sometimes speak at Congressional hearings, Lee has plenty to say about what growers are up against these days.

“We just have to decide,” he says. “Do we want to grow food in this country or not?”

According to a 2016 Congressional Research Service report, for each of the past twenty years or so, the United States has been importing more fruits and vegetables than it exports. In the early 1990s, we exported around $5 billion worth and imported about the same. Nowadays, we still export around the same amount—but we import roughly $17 billion worth, or three times as much. And here’s what makes US growers climb the walls: The foreign growers of much of those imported fruits and vegetables pay far less for labor than US farmers do.

Marty Smith helps his dad run Calypso Creek Farms, a grower chiefly of strawberry plants, which they sell to growers in central Florida who then grow the actual berries. They also grow blackberries and a variety of other fruits such as cantaloupe. Based in the mountainous western region of the state, they employ more than two hundred H-2A farmworkers each year.

“A guy growing blackberries in Mexico might be paying [each worker] seven or eight dollars a day,” Marty speculated. “That same day of labor is costing me one hundred and fifty.”

Listening to growers, one hears again and again that the increased globalization of the produce market is great for US consumers but hell on US farmers. Produce is now available in our grocery stores not just year round but at extremely low prices compared to elsewhere. Americans spend only 10 percent of their income on food. In other countries such as India, that number is more like 50 percent. Our produce is cheap and getting cheaper all the time.

There’s another consideration too. Jay Hill at the NCGA fears that our growing dependence on imported food from countries supported by China, as part of so-called economic colonialism, puts us at a risk people might not even be aware of.

“What if China tells Mexico to stop selling to the United States?” Jay wonders.

By all appearances, US farmers can barely keep up with foreign competition. In economic terms, our farmers are price-takers with no control over the price at which they sell their sweet potatoes or strawberries, or any other commodity crop. This makes it harder and harder for a grower to turn a profit, especially when faced with rising input costs they also have little or no control over—not the least of which is labor.

Some growers lose sleep every November, waiting for the US Department of Labor to release the next year’s AEWR, the minimum hourly rate they must pay H-2A farmworkers, so they can make a budget for the next growing season. The AEWR doesn’t always go up. For the 2011 growing season it was $9.30 in North Carolina, a 3 percent decrease from the previous year. But in recent years, in North Carolina, as in most states, it has only increased.

Unlike other big ag states, in North Carolina, most farms are true family operations. According to the NCGA website, nearly 90 percent are owned by individuals or families, and more than 90 percent are under five hundred acres in size. A look at H-2A job orders bears this out. The median number of requested workers is around ten.

Most US crop growers of any size have no choice but to hire H-2A workers and pay the AEWR. But they are increasingly mindful to carefully plan each season, so workers are only doing strictly required crop work. In the past, when workers weren’t needed in the fields, growers I spoke with might have the workers do things like painting a barn or other agricultural maintenance work, to give them more hours. Nowadays, not so much.

 

So growing crops is no easy way to make a living. Nowadays, when I visit a camp, I try to keep that in mind. Might some growers afford more decent living quarters for their workers? Do they keep them in hovels simply because nobody will notice? I suspect that is true in some cases. But I certainly don’t believe that’s true across the board.

Pam Dawson has thought a lot about the stresses farmers are under. “There are mental, physical, financial, and emotional stresses,” she says, adding that she hears suicides among farmers are on the rise. And she doesn’t see any way for a young person or couple to get into farming nowadays, unless there is already land in the family. “It’s really impossible,” Pam tells me.

Nobody at the Dawson farm feels those stresses more than Robert. When I was done sorting through their family history records, cross-checking them with what I could find online, I told him he was most certainly the ninth-generation Dawson farmer. He had thought he was only the seventh. He smiled at the news, but I fear I may have only exacerbated a personal dilemma. Robert and his wife have two children. When I met Robert, their son was in his first year at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and their daughter was still in high school. On one hand, he doesn’t want to be the ninth—and last—generation of Dawson farmer. On the other, he would never wish these stresses on anyone. Certainly not his kids.

[1] The national chain of grocery stores.

[2] The 2018 trade war with China during the first Trump administration would not help. By 2020, production would fall to 179 million pounds before rebounding in 2021 under the Biden administration.

[3] Before the advent of gas-heated drying enclosures, or box barns, tobacco was cured by hanging it from sticks in a tall wooden barn with a fire at the bottom. There are still hundreds of old stick barns, maybe thousands, visible from country roads all over North Carolina.