Telegraph Staff Writer
Bradford County’s UF/IFAS Extension office has been recognizing Farm-City Week since 1998, when former Extension Director David Dinkins organized the first local event.
Dinkins was the keynote speaker at the Farm-City luncheon on Nov. 18 at the Bradford Agricultural Fairgrounds. He talked about the future of farming, but before he did, he talked of how Farm-City, as a national observance, began and reminisced about the start of its celebration locally.
Farm-City Week was born from a conversation between Charles Bennett, a Vermont businessman, and Merle Tucker, chairman the of Kiwanis International Agriculture and Conservation Committee, while they were traveling on a train in 1955.
“They talked about the plight of the farm industry back then,” Dinkins said. “One of the biggest things was the farmers weren’t making any money. There was very little profitability.”
Dinkins said people had lost touch with agriculture, having been two or three generations removed from a period of time when so many people grew up on farms.
The goal of Farm-City Week, which was recognized by a proclamation signed by President Eisenhower, is to highlight the beneficial partnership between people in rural and urban communities.
Fast forward to 1994. That’s the year Dinkins came to Bradford as an Extension agent. He said one of the first people he met was Shirley Gaskins, who told him he needed to do something to help people understand agriculture. She told Dinkins, “We’re getting all this produce from foreign countries. We’re losing our ag land. You really need to do something about it.”
Dinkins admitted he kept putting Gaskins off until 1998, when Bradford hosted its first Farm-City celebration.
“It was right outside the Extension office, just in the parking lot,” Dinkins said. “It was on a Saturday. The focus was on children.”
The event, which featured a live band, allowed children to plant strawberry plants, which they could take home.
Dinkins said Bradford has been celebrating Farm-City every year since and that the current Extension faculty in Bradford will keep it going. He has a good feeling they will.
“I think I can recognize a good team when you have one,” said Dinkins, who’s worked in Extension for 38 years. “I think I can recognize a family. That’s how Extension’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a family.”
Speaking of family, Dinkins shared how he had tied to Bradford County before making it (specifically, Lawtey) his home. Both sets of his grandparents lived in Lawtey: Paul and Mary Dinkins, who lived across from Lawtey’s school, and Bub and Mildred Carter, who lived in what was known as “Cracker Six.”
“That was the original settlement in Lawtey, and it had six Cracker-style houses there,” Dinkins said of Cracker Six.
Because of his grandparents, Dinkins was no stranger to Bradford County.
“About every weekend or every other weekend, as a child, I was in Lawtey,” he said. “The main place I was is where I’m at now, on my grandfather Bub Carter’s property. He had 40 acres and was doing strawberries. That was his money crop.”
Farming: present day and the future
In talking about farming, Dinkins discussed some of the figures on the 2017 United States Department of Agriculture Census as they related to Bradford County. He pointed out the census, which is conducted every five years, listed 490 farms in the county.
“Does that surprise anybody? Yeah, I’d like somebody to take me around and show me those 490 farms,” Dinkins said, “but remember, this is a government report. How the USDA counts a farm is if the farm has the potential to make a gross revenue of $1,000 or more.”
Dinkins then discussed farms’ value of sales, In Bradford County, 306 of those 490 farms had sales of less than $2,500.
“It’s that way across the state of Florida,” Dinkins said, explaining that 34,000 of the state’s 47,000-plus farms, which are situated on 9.5 million acres, had net farm-income losses.
“Seventy one percent of our Florida farms lost money and are losing money,” Dinkins said, adding, “If you look at most of these counties, there are only 1 to 5 percent of the farms that are actually making over $1 million.”
That’s not a lot of money, however. Dinkins gave the example of potato farmers in Hastings/St. Johns County.
“In the 1970s, there were 170 potato farms in Hastings, St. Johns County. Today, there are 20,” Dinkins said. “The average farm back then was 50 to 100 acres. Today, it’s 600 acres. For a potato farmer to plant and harvest an acre is $3,500 to $5,000, so a 600-acre, average-size farm, they’re going to need $2 million to $3 million. They’ve got six weeks. They’ve got from the middle of April to the first of June to pull $2 million to $3 million of potatoes out of that ground just to break even.
“That’s what the farmers are up against.”
So, what does the future of farming hold? One obvious answer is the continued reliance upon and introduction of automation.
“I think the biggest thing you’re going to see is in the area of labor and a lot of robots harvesting, a lot of robots planting, a lot of robots killing weeds — that’s just the reality. That’s already happening,” Dinkins said.
Dinkins said the future will also consist of what he termed “crazy, new crops.” He provided a few visual examples, such as displaying a yaupon holly, which can be found growing in the woods in this area. It is being used to make tea and sold by companies such as Florida-based Yaupon Brothers American Tea, which was started by Bryon White and Kyle White. The company recently partnered with actor Morgan Freeman.
“Right now, they’re harvesting 100 acres in the wild,” Dinkins said, adding, “I had one of the Yaupon Brothers in this area the other day looking at (plants) on some property they’re going to harvest.”
Dinkins then talked about how the second-most popular supplement people began taking during the COVID-19 pandemic was Sambucol, made from elderberry extract. He said a company that extracts chemicals from botanicals and is located in eight countries recently moved into Bunnell and is providing funding for UF to study approximately 30 varieties of elderberry to determine which ones would be viable for production in this state.
“Nobody is growing this in Florida commercially,” Dinkins said.
Dinkins displayed a passion-fruit vine, saying the fruit were grown in the Miami area until Gene Altman planted a 10th of an acre in Brooksville.
“The university literature says you’ll get 10,000 to 30,000 fruit per acre,” Dinkins said. “He got 10,000 fruit on a 10th of an acre. We think we can grow these in North Florida.”
Then, looking at the vine he was holding, Dinkins said, “Believe it or not, this came off a fence at Cracker Six Farms in Lawtey.”
Dinkins held up a couple of sweet potatoes, asking the audience to guess what color each would be on the inside before actually cutting them, showing that one was orange and the other purple. He then held up another potato, which he cut and showed to be white inside.
“This could replace an Irish potato,” Dinkins said of the white variety. “Why? If you have diabetes, you need to eat low-glycemic food. This tastes great. It’s sweet, but it has a much lower glycemic index.”
Dinkins said UF is evaluating 10 different varieties of sweet potato that have been planted in Hastings, Fort Pierce and Live Oak.
Lastly, Dinkins held up a plastic bag that appeared to be filled with dirt. He said the bag contained a mixture of yard waste and biosolids.
“What is that? Right, that’s our poop,” Dinkins said of biosolids. He then said, “The reason I bring this up is the two biggest waste products in our state are yard trash and biosolids. We have to find something to do with them.”
The mixture can be used as fertilizer.
“We have no problem eating things grown on cow poop and chicken poop,” Dinkins said.
Dinkins said water-management personnel, for example, are against the mixture’s use because they think it’s bad, not because they know it’s bad.
“They haven’t studied the research, and we need to do more research,” Dinkins said. “The take-home message here — the challenge — is things are going to be changing in the ag community. When you hear about things like this, study them.”
Then, looking at the bag in his hand, Dinkins cracked, “This is a heck of a way to end, ain’t it?”
