1983OH02.7
1983OH02.7
Family Farm Oral History Project
Interview with Maurice Coyle
July 28, 1983
Conducted by Ginny Scott
© 1983 Kentucky Oral History Commission
Kentucky Historical Society
�
Kentucky Oral History Commission
100 W. Broadway ( Frankfort, KY 40601
502-564-1792 ( (fax) 502-564-0475 ( history.ky.gov
Use and Quotation Policy
Authorization must be granted by the Kentucky Historical Society (which includes
the Kentucky Oral History Commission) to use or publish by any means any archival material to which the Society holds copyright. To obtain authorization, users will submit a completed Use Agreement to the Kentucky Historical Society Special Collections & Reference Services. Fees for all uses, excepting non-profit or other use, with the intent to enhance understanding of or appreciation for Kentucky’s heritage will be assessed on a case-by-case basis and added to the cost of reproduction.Users may not alter, distort, or change in any way the text or the image to be
used, unless otherwise authorized by the Society. Researchers are responsible for obtaining permission to publish by any means any material held at the Society but to which the KHS does not hold copyright. The Society is not responsible for any copyright infringement.Users will not quote or otherwise reproduce in part or in whole any archival
material, without citing the “Kentucky Historical Society,” and without giving explicit written acknowledgement of the collection from which it was obtained, as designated by the Society.Users will present to the Kentucky Historical Society Special Collections &
Reference Services one (1) copy of any publication using materials held by the Society or will provide any other proof of appropriate acknowledgment and citation as the Society will designate.Only material that will not be physically damaged by the process of duplication
will be copied. The Society reserves the right to withhold permission for the reproduction of any material involving unusual difficulty or great risk to the original.This is an unedited transcript. Quotation of materials from this transcript
should be corroborated with the original audio recording if possible.The following is an unrehearsed taped interview with Maurice Coyle, a farmer in
Berea, Kentucky. The interview was conducted by Ginny Scott, for the Family Farm Project for the Kentucky Oral History Commission. The interview was conducted on July 28, 1983, 1:00 A.M.An Interview with Maurice Coyle:
Scott: Okay, first of all, Mr. Coyle, I want to thank you for letting me come
and see you this morning. Let’s begin by you telling me your name, full name, age, your parents’ names, and your background.Coyle: Well, my name is Maurice Coyle, 56 years old, and my father was McKinley
Coyle, and mother was Grace Johnson.Scott: Were they from Madison County?
Coyle: Yes, they were raised in Madison County.
Scott: In this part of the county?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: What did you father do for a living?
Coyle: He was an insurance man.
Scott: Hmm. Here in the county?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Where did he live?
Coyle: We lived here in Berea.
Scott: In the city limits?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: So you weren’t a farmer when you were young?
Coyle: No.
Scott: Do you remember your grandparents?
Coyle: One of them. He died in, I think it was 1940. That’s the only one I can remember.
Scott: Were they from here?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: So the family has been around for a while, in this part of the county.
Coyle: Right.
Scott: And your farm is located in what part of Madison County?
Coyle: Southeastern part, two miles from the city limits of Berea…Big Hill Road.
Scott: Big Hill Road, how big is it?
Coyle: Sixty acres.
Scott: And how long have you owned it?
Coyle: Six years.
Scott: Who owned it before you did?
Coyle: My uncle; he was a retired bricklayer.
Scott: How long had he owned it?
Coyle: It was just passed down from generation to generation.
Scott: So it has been in the family for a long time?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: You remember working on the farm with your uncle?
Coyle: Yes, all my life.
Scott: What did you grow then, when you were a young man?
Coyle: We grew corn and tobacco.
Scott: Did you sell the corn?
Coyle: No, most of it we fed it to cattle. We always had some kind of cattle
around here.Scott: Raised beef cattle then, or just….
Coyle: Mixed, beef cattle and cows and calves.
Scott: How much tobacco did you have then, do you remember?
Coyle: I’ve got close to 5,000 pounds.
Scott: How many did he have then?
Coyle: Oh, about half that.
Scott: About half that. Did you remember how much it brought?
Coyle: No, but it just brought 30 or 40 cents, maybe not even that much, years ago.
Scott: But you didn’t have the fuel to pay for…
Coyle: No, and they didn’t use fertilize like they do now.
Scott: How much will it cost you to raise your 5,000 pounds this year?
Coyle: About $3,000.
Scott: How much will you make on it?
Coyle: It’ll bring somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000.
Scott: Do you have to hire labor?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: How much do you pay, how much do farm workers, just general workers….
Coyle: Cutting and housing, they get anywhere from five to six dollars an hour.
Scott: That cuts into profits, then.
Coyle: That cuts into profits.
Scott: But you still work in it yourself, raise it yourself.
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Do you just have the one son?
Coyle: One son, one daughter.
Scott: And your son works here on the farm with you?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: You work outside the farm, have you always….
Coyle: I retired from the post office about six years ago.
Scott: Oh, you did. How many years had you been with them?
Coyle: Twenty-three.
Scott: And then bought this, and started farming.
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Could you have gone out and bought this farm without outside employment?
Could your son have gone and bought a farm, say 80 acres, and started farming, and made a living?Coyle: No, I don’t think so.
Scott: Why not?
Coyle: Interest is too high.
Scott: How much does it cost to get one started? How much, say, would you son
have to go in debt to buy a farm, and get it started?Coyle: It takes just about as little equipment as you can get by with $20,000
worth of tractors, and plows, and things like that—just equipment.Scott: How much would the farm cost?
Coyle: Well, an 80 acre farm would cost anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000,
probably, about $2,000 an acre.Scott: Would he make enough off the farm that first year to pay his interest?
Coyle: I doubt it; I sure doubt it.
Scott: Well, when you were a young man, let’s go back to that. When you were
young, where did you go to school?Coyle: Silver Creek.
Scott: Here in the county?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Where did you attend high school?
Coyle: Kingston.
Scott: Kingston. What did you do for entertainment, then? What did the young
people do for entertainment then?Coyle: You didn’t do much. Go to the movie on Saturday afternoons, was about all.
Scott: Was that the movie here in Berea?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: What about church? Did you go to church?
Coyle: Yes, I went down here to the Silver Creek Baptist Church.
Scott: Was that a big social thing for young kids then?
Coyle: It was about the only place to go.
Scott: How’d you go?
Coyle: Walked, it was just a quarter of a mile.
Scott: Young people now have the same kind of entertainment? What do they do now
for entertainment here, recreation?Coyle: They have seems like a lot of dances, and lot of softball being played,
swimming pool.Scott: You didn’t have any of that when you were a young man?
Coyle: No, sure never.
Scott: Now on your farm now what do you raise?
Coyle: This year just got tobacco.
Scott: Don’t raise any corn?
Coyle: No, not this year.
Scott: Don’t run any cattle?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Oh, you run cattle. What kind of cattle do you have?
Coyle: Cows and calves.
Scott: Any particular breed, or mixed breeds?
Coyle: No, just mixed.
Scott: How many head?
Coyle: Ten, right now, is all.
Scott: Do you grow corn to feed them?
Coyle: I did up until this year.
Scott: Okay, now you’re running mixed cattle and tobacco on this farm. And your
son helps, is that right?Coyle: Yes.
Scott: You all share the profit and the work, of course.
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: What will happen to the farm, when you retire, when you….
Coyle: It goes to the two kids.
Scott: Will either one of them keep it running as a farm?
Coyle: Probably. They’ll probably farm it.
Scott: Where does your daughter live?
Coyle: She lives in Berea, city limits.
Scott: And your son, lives here on the farm?
Coyle: Lives here, yes.
Scott: What does your daughter do?
Coyle: Just housekeep.
Scott: Just housekeep, and your son?
Coyle: He’s a state trooper.
Scott: How long’s he been in that?
Coyle: Twelve years, I believe.
Scott: What did he do before that?
Coyle: He went to college. After he got out of college, he went to state police.
Scott: Did he graduate from Eastern or Berea?
Coyle: Yes, Eastern, graduated from Berea High School.
Scott: Does he like the farm?
Coyle: Yes, he sure does.
Scott: A lot of the farms in Madison County are being broken up, I know, up in
our end, anyway; the large family farms, people are retiring and they are being sold off into small portions. Is this what’s going to happen do you think? Is it getting too much expense to keep going?Coyle: Yes, I think it’s getting too expensive to farm, and then, whenever they
subdivide farms, you get so much more out of them. I think that’s the reason they’re selling off.Scott: What’s going to happen to all of them? We’re raising a lot of food, and
feeding a lot of people off of them; what’s going to happen to all of them?Coyle: Well, it just seems like they can raise more on less ground.
Scott: How much equipment do you own?
Coyle: In dollars and cents?
Scott: No, in how many tractors.
Coyle: Oh, I’ve got two tractors.
Scott: You just about have to have two to….
Coyle: Yeah, I’ve got a big one and a small one.
Scott: A big one and a small one. Do you grow any hay at all?
Coyle: Yes, I’ve got quite a bit of hay.
Scott: What kind?
Coyle: Timothy and fescue and ( ).
Scott: Now you keep that, do you raise that to sell or do you….
Coyle: No, I feed it.
Scott: …raise it to feed.
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: How do you take care of it?
Coyle: Some square bales, some round bales.
Scott: Which do you prefer?
Coyle: Oh, round bales are a lot easier to feed and to have, but I just kind of
like both of them.Scott: Do you have any problem with the round bales rotting?
Coyle: No.
Scott: Do you have a conditioner, or do you use one? And what is one?
Coyle: Well, a conditioner, is when you cut the hay, it takes about 60% of the
moisture out of it right then. You put it up most times the next day after you cut it.Scott: Was it used with the, or instead of, the mowing machine, as I know a
mowing machine?Coyle: Well, most people, or not most people, a lot of people are using a hay
bine. It cuts it and conditions it at the same time.Scott: Just squeezes, kind of squeezes the moisture out of it.
Coyle: Squeezes the moisture out of it.
Scott: Where do you store those?
Coyle: The round bales, just put in the fence corner somewhere.
Scott: Just out in the open.
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Well, then can you, are they easily handled then to feed?
Coyle: Yes, just pick them up with the tractor. Set them anywhere you want them.
Scott: And the square ones, now you still house in the barn.
Coyle: Put them in the barn.
Scott: When you were a young man raising hay, when your family was raising hay,
how’d they handle it then?Coyle: Handled it loose. Put it in the stack, or put it in the barn loose.
Scott: Tell me what a stack is.
Coyle: That’s just where you rake it up off the ground, and make you a big pile
out of it, twelve, fifteen, twenty foot tall.Scott: Post in the center?
Coyle: Yes, if you stack it right.
Scott: What did you do with it then? Did you haul it to feed to the cattle, or
did they just turn them in on it? When it was stacked?Coyle: We usually moved it with a wagon, and take different places.
Scott: Different places you had to feed.
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: How did they handle corn, Mr. Coyle?
Coyle: Well, about like they do now, they just go out, and you had to pick it by
hand, and put it in the barn, and store it. There were no corn pickers to be used then.Scott: Kind of hard work, wasn’t it?
Coyle: It sure was.
Scott: I remember a few blisters from that [laughter]. Did you ever cut any corn?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Was that worth it?
Coyle: Well, lots of times, you’d cut it, and then go back and shuck it in the
wintertime or something, but it made pretty good feed.Scott: Corn now—you just pick it with a corn picker, and haul it and put it in
the barn.Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Well when your family lived on the farm and you were young, did they
grind their own corn meal, or have it ground?Coyle: Yes, take it somewhere and have it ground.
Scott: Did they have wheat also?
Coyle: No.
Scott: Just the corn.
Coyle: Just the corn.
Scott: Of course, they raised most of what they ate, didn’t they?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Do you still have a garden?
Coyle: Oh yes.
Scott: What do you raise in your garden now?
Coyle: Oh, let’s see, squash, and melons, and corn, and beans, beets, tomatoes, peppers.
Scott: I’ll have to visit back about August, sometime in August then [laughs].
You family canned, I’m sure?Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Do you and your wife still can your food? Freeze it?
Coyle: Yes, we all, three families.
Scott: All of you share; that’s like us. It sure makes a difference when you
have to go out and buy it.Coyle: Sure does.
Scott: Have you ever raised hogs?
Coyle: Yes, but no profit in it, and we quit it.
Scott: Why no profit?
Coyle: The market would go up and down too much on it.
Scott: You’d be stuck with a bunch.
Coyle: Be stuck with them.
Scott: Do you kill your own beef?
Coyle: No.
Scott: You sell cattle though?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: But don’t kill your own. Well, when electricity came through, and the
tractors and everything, it sure made a big difference in farming, didn’t it?Coyle: Oh, yes. But we’ve always had electric here, seem like.
Scott: But not always tractors?
Coyle: No.
Scott: Well, what’d your family use, horses or mules?
Coyle: Mules.
Scott: It was a lot cheaper, wasn’t it?
Coyle: Oh, yes, but it was a whole lot harder work.
Scott: You couldn’t do half as much, right, with mules, or a set of team mules,
as you can the tractor, couldn’t raise as half as much.Coyle: No. You can do about as much with a tractor in an hour’s time as you
could with a team in today’s time.Scott: So the property’s really better now, even with all the expense in it.
Coyle: Yes, I think so.
Scott: What about the elected officials in Madison County? Do you think they
help the farmer any at all?Coyle: Oh, I don’t know it what way. Just seems like they probably do.
Scott: Maybe in roads, are they pretty good roads?
Coyle: The roads seem like they’re in excellent shape.
Scott: What about the state officials?
Coyle: Well, they seem like they keep the roads up in good shape.
Scott: Has there been anything, have there been any laws passed that would help
the farmer in the last fifteen years?Coyle: Not that I know of.
Scott: What about federal, national laws?
Coyle: Federal’s hurting the tobacco program.
Scott: In what way?
Coyle: They’re raising the price on selling it, and then no raise on tobacco
this year.Scott: Is that going to run a lot of farmers out of business, small ones?
Coyle: I think so.
Scott: If a man has, say, a thousand pounds of tobacco, he’s going to have an
awful lot of his profit tied up in getting it to market.Coyle: Yeah, a lot of it. It’ll cost about, seem like, 12-15 cents this year to
sell it a pound of tobacco.Scott: Now, who’s that going to?
Coyle: Most of it goes to the federal government.
Scott: Why do they do it? Doesn’t someone have to know that we….
Coyle: It’s based on that price support, that the government guarantees the
farmer a certain price on the pound.Scott: And then they have to turn back around and pay to sell it?
Coyle: Yes, it’ll cost 4 cents a pound to sell it, which is going to run
somewhere between 12 and 15 cents to sell a pound of tobacco.Scott: So it’s going to be 12 to 15 cents less than you got last year.
Coyle: That’s right. It’ll be about a dime less.
Scott: Well now you work outside the farm, now don’t you? You’re employed
part-time outside the farm?Coyle: Yes, part-time.
Scott: Where do you work?
Coyle: Tobacco warehouse, Richmond.
Scott: Which one?
Coyle: Four and five, Home house.
Scott: Tell me about that. Tell me about a tobacco sale.
Coyle: Well, a farmer brings his tobacco in, and has his marketing card, and
then whatever pounds that he’s got on that, that’s what you weigh up to sell. And then graders come along and put a grade on it, and then buyers come along and that’s when it’s auctioned off. Then whatever the graders put’s the price support on there, that’s what it brings that from there, to two to three cents higher.Scott: What do you do at the warehouse?
Coyle: Weigh quite a bit, mostly.
Scott: How much goes through that warehouse?
Coyle: Hmm…between three and four million pounds.
Scott: Now that’s from just the surrounding counties?
Coyle: Yes, it runs usually from November to around the first of February.
Scott: That’s a lot of tobacco coming through.
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Is the tobacco still in the…I don’t know what it’s called…
Coyle: Bales?
Scott: Yes, is that the new one?
Coyle: That’s the new one, yeah.
Scott: How’s that handled? How do you do that?
Coyle: You just put it in a bale box, and it’s a certain size, and whenever you
get it full, you press it two or three times, and it will weigh around anywhere from 80 to 100 pounds, tied up three strings, and they usually put seven to a basket when they bring it to the warehouse.Scott: Now the farmer does this, is that right?
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Well is the, are the farmers still grading tobacco, like they did when
you and I were young?Coyle: Yes, they just usually put three grades.
Scott: Now when you were young, how many were there?
Coyle: Anywhere from five to seven.
Scott: Five to seven. And the top part is the best, or the top part’s the worst?
Coyle: Usually right in the middle is the best.
Scott: So they just grade it in three grades, and bale in three grades.
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Well, last year, I heard advertised the pickers, or the strippers,
tobacco strippers. Have you seen those?Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Do they work?
Coyle: I don’t think they do, you get too much stalk, and…they think we’re
pretty good, but still you can’t separate it in three grades.Scott: Because it all comes out in one?
Coyle: Just be one grade of it.
Scott: Well, would that bring the price, the selling price, down?
Coyle: Yeah, but it cut your labor down a whole lot too.
Scott: Well, tobacco strippers they just get about the same as cutting?
Coyle: No, they don’t get as much for stripping; usually about three dollars an
hour for stripping.Scott: Well I thought when I heard that, that was the greatest invention since
white bread, was the fact that you didn’t have to stand out and strip tobacco, and someone else told me the grades you ( ).Coyle: It makes most time around 20 cents on a pound difference in the grade.
Scott: So for a large tobacco crop, it might be okay. But a small one, it
wouldn’t, would it?Coyle: It just takes two people, about three people, to strip it when you’re
using a stripper. One putting it in, one to operate and one to take it away.Scott: And how many, well how many strippers will you have to have?
Coyle: Oh, usually there’s about five of us.
Scott: How long would it take you?
Coyle: We average about a thousand pounds a day.
Scott: So, it would take about five days.
Coyle: About five or six days, yeah.
Scott: Well you’re paying a lot out for labor then.
Coyle: Yeah.
Scott: Well what happens if you, if a farmer takes his tobacco to the warehouse,
and you have too many pounds? He has too many pounds?Coyle: He has to bring it back home and store it, and sell it the next year.
Scott: Can you store it easily?
Coyle: Yeah, you can put a piece of plastic over it, keep it up off so dust
won’t get in it.Scott: And it’ll store like that.
Coyle: Yeah.
Scott: Someone had told me that last year they sold—their base was 43,000 and
yet they sold 49,000.Coyle: Well they had this….
Scott: They do that at times and then you cut down next year?
Coyle: Yeah, this was a special thing they done this year, so farmers could get
rid of it, because they had so much excess. So what they weighed up in ’83, they’ll get paid for it in October.Scott: So they don’t have to store it.
Coyle: No, they didn’t have to store it this year.
Scott: But next year they will, is that right?
Coyle: Yes, it’ll just be a one-time thing.
Scott: Well, supposing you don’t have enough poundage. Do you get to grow more
the next year?Coyle: You get to raise it the next year.
Scott: Who decides on the base? How’s that decided?
Coyle: The ASC office has a committee that works on that.
Scott: How do they figure that a farm is worth three thousand or five thousand,
or what?Coyle: Well, that goes back several years, and whatever you were raising, I
guess it’s been twenty years ago or something, they give you three years to grow so much, and whatever they used to measure, if you had an acre, they’d measure it and make sure it was an acre, and then whatever pounds you got off that was based on what you get to grow now.Scott: So now you don’t, you can’t just petition, or anything, and get more poundage….
Coyle: No, no.
Scott: …it’s all been decided twenty years ago.
Coyle: Yeah.
Scott: Well some of the farmers have very, very little, and you’ll have 135
acres and a very small base, and I wondered who made that decision.Coyle: Well, it was done by this committee, and most of it was what you was
raising at that time.Scott: How much tobacco is raised in Kentucky, do you know?
Coyle: Don’t have no idea. Sure don’t.
Scott: More than any other state?
Coyle: Oh yeah.
Scott: Well a lot of the farmers in Madison County, and I’m sure it’s over the
state, is using tobacco as the only cash crop, aren’t they?Coyle: Yes.
Scott: Their farms are just growing up, and they’re just taking the tobacco off
and leaving the rest of it. One farmer told me that the reason that he raised cattle, he didn’t make any profit off of cattle, but kept his farm clean. Are we going to see a lot more that happening?Coyle: I think so.
Scott: Do you think there’s anything the federal government could do…to help?
Maybe a price support, or something for cattle and hogs, something to….Coyle: I don’t think they’ll ever do it, but it would be nice.
Scott: But you don’t think they will?
Coyle: No.
Scott: What about the Soil Banks? Do you know…?
Coyle: No, I don’t know about the Soil Bank.
Scott: I wondered if anyone you knew had put any land in, any corn land in. That
seems like to me it’s going to hurt the farmers, or the hogs and cattle at rate. Well, I can’t think of anything we haven’t covered, is there anything that you could add?Coyle: I don’t know of anything.
Scott: Oh, what percentage of your land is in pasture and timber?
Coyle: About one-third in timber, and two-thirds in pasture.
Scott: Do you have any big timber?
Coyle: No.
Scott: Been cut? Timber’s kind of like money in the bank, isn’t it? No one wants
to cut it.Coyle: No.
Scott: Well, I think that’s about all. Your primary source of income is that tobacco.
Coyle: Yes.
Scott: That’s running true with every farm.
Coyle: I think so.
Scott: Do you think the small farmer has a chance?
Coyle: Not anymore, I don’t. Seems like everything’s just getting too high for a
small land.Scott: And how much were your ( ).
Coyle: Couple hundred dollars a year.
Scott: If you were farming corn, raising corn, it would go up considerably,
wouldn’t it?Coyle: Sure would.
Scott: The small farmer just don’t have a chance.
Coyle: Nope.
Scott: Well, I think that’s about it. I certainly appreciate you talking to me.
Coyle: All right.
Scott: Thank you very much.
END OF INTERVIEW
©Kentucky Oral History Commission
Kentucky Historical Society�PAGE �
©Kentucky Oral History Commission
Kentucky Historical Society � PAGE �22� 2:00