Oral History Interview with James D. Wells

[Begin Tape #1, Side #1]

KLEE: The following is an unrehearsed interview with Jim Wells of the Red Oak Community in . The interview is being conducted for the Kentucky Oral History Commission. It's September 16, 1983 and we're at Mr. Well's home. [pause in tape] Mr. Wells, tell me about your background and how it relates to tobacco. You know, just really kind of start back at the beginning if you want to, with family and . . .

WELLS: All right. Course I'm a native Kentuckian, John. I grew up in eastern , near Prestonsburg. Course at that . . . at that particular part in time of my life, there wasn't much tobacco involved in it cause you know tobacco in eastern Kentucky is not nearly as prominent as it is in northern Kentucky or central Kentucky or even southern Ohio. But after I went to college, which I did go to the of and graduated from there in the , became an extension agent. Worked in extension service in , way down in the mountains in for about three years and . . .

KLEE: And now did they do anything with tobacco down in . . .

WELLS: Oh yeah. Yeah, we had tobacco in . Not as much as in Mason County or Brown County, Ohio, but there was . . . and so I began to work with farmers there and created an interest in it and . . . course it grew and then when I came to Ohio in . . . in the mid-50's as an extension agent, we were very much involved in tobacco and it was the type of program that I enjoyed and . . . and just kept learning and working and developing expertise in the field. And I worked in , which is about two and a half years in 1955, `56, and `57. And came then to which is this particular county where we are now in July 1957 as an agricultural extension agent. And while here, of course, tobacco is the main agricultural income in this county . . . several million dollars a year. Just about every farm in the county has a tobacco allotment nearly.

KLEE: Let me take you back a little bit, and ask you a few questions. Now, in those first couple years, well, first . . . go back to the university. What kind of . . . I guess tobacco was the . . . the main . . . you know, one of the main topics for your study at that time?

WELLS: Well, not necessarily just tobacco. The . . . the agronomy . . . in the agronomy program at our universities, like the , you don't just study tobacco. You study fertility and weed control and all aspects of agronomy and even into the forages and grain crops and so forth. But there was some tobacco courses offered, which I did take. But you get into entomology and plant pathology and they all relate to whatever crop you're interested in. Course I just had a bachelor's degree from there, and did not specialize in anything, like maybe weed control or plant pathology or entomology . . . any particular area. But you get the basic background for any agronomy training and then you go from there.

KLEE: Yeah. Now, that was kind of a volatile time, I think, for tobacco because I think around that time period was the first time they came out with some things about cancer relating and so forth. Was there . . .

WELLS: I'm not sure when . . . when that first came out. See, this was 1951. I was there in the late 40's and the early 50's in school, and there wasn't much said about tobacco health aspects at that particular time. I don't recall . . . could have been, but I don't recall any emphasis . . .

KLEE: What was the tobacco . . . like, I'm sure . . . did you . . . they probably had an experimental crop or . . .

WELLS: Oh yeah.

KLEE: . . . what did tobacco . . . what was tobacco like then? Same kind of variety and . . .

WELLS: I don't know. You take . . . in those early 50's, we were growing varieties then that we are not growing at all now. We had a variety called 57 and 58 and 41A and Old 16 and a few of those varieties that we no longer grow. Now prior to that time, course those . . . those varieties were breakthroughs.

KLEE: Sure. [chuckle]

WELLS: Prior to that time, they had, oh, varieties like Judy's pride and some of those that were not developed as such. They were kind of selections and those things from growing in the field. But, yeah, these new varieties at that time which those we mentioned were real improvements. And course today, we don't grow any of those. Oh, there might be a very isolated case somewhere, a farmer that would grow Kentucky 16, but I don't know of any personally but if you talk with some of the seedsmen, and this would be a good topic to talk to the seedsmen . . . like Bill Wilson at Clay's Seed in Carlisle, Kentucky or Mr. [F.W.] Rickard at Winchester, Kentucky at F. W. Rickard Seed . . . they . . . they deal in just the selling of tobacco seed all over the burley-producing area. And those would be people that, I'm sure, could tell you . . . almost, Mr. Rickard could tell you almost to the day that some of these varieties came on board.

KLEE: Okay. What was the emphasis down in, you said ?

WELLS: Yes.

KLEE: Course there were little . . . I guess there were little plots of tobacco.

WELLS: Yeah, well you know typically the burley tobacco program and our whole burley belt is small. Back a few years ago when we were on acreage programs, I believe that sixty percent of the burley tobacco acreage was a half an acre or less.

KLEE: Gee.

WELLS: And then we just transferred that to pounds, so I would say today if you checked the stats, I . . .

KLEE: [inaudible]

WELLS: . . . I . . . a thousand pounds or less would be the . . . fifty percent or more. So we're talking about little farmers and even here in this county, we've got a lot of small growers, and particularly in southeastern where . . . over toward Scioto and and , we have a lot of small growers, and the same was true down there. They had little quarter-acre patches and half-acre patches. If a guy had two or three acres, he was a big grower. But it's pretty basic all over the burley belt, I think, whether you're in or . The basic allotments are small.

KLEE: Okay. What . . . what kind of . . . well for one thing, how did farmers back in the 50's look upon extension agents? What kind of reaction did you get? Were they usually pretty . . .

WELLS: Oh very good. Some of the happiest days of my extension work was down in the mountains of eastern . Course I was kind of one of them, so to speak. My kind of people, so to speak, but . . . and just to give you an idea, John, when I applied for the job and appeared before the . . . wasn't county commissioners . . . magistrates. The fiscal court. One of the questions they wanted to know of me is where was I born and raised. If I was a mountain boy. And I was pretty well accepted and if I wasn't . . .

KLEE: [chuckle] You were out.

WELLS: But the attitude toward extension agents was very good. I've had . . . course I worked for and the both about thirty years in extension and my . . . my relationship with the farm people through extension has been excellent.

KLEE: What was the thrust of your work down there? What were . . . what was extension trying to do? I guess the same type things now, but was there anything . . . anything in particular? Were they trying to introduce new varieties or new methods or chemicals at the time or . . .

WELLS: Well, yeah. You always did that. You always take care of insect problems and disease problems. Just like today, if a new variety came out, you tried to find some way you could demonstrate this new variety with a tobacco farmer and he would try it for the first time and he might have a small meeting there at his place some afternoon, late, and he'd invite some of the neighbors around to say, look, here's a new tobacco variety, maybe you ought to be trying it on your farm on a small scale. And then that was about the time in southeastern that strawberries were quite popular so we did a lot of work with strawberries and small fruits and poultry projects. And oh gee, I don't know, on and on. It's . . . people that never lived in the mountains don't really understand. They think that, you know, because they're small they don't do them, but they're just as progressive on those things. For instance, the best gardener, the person who grew the best garden that I've ever known was an ol-, older gentleman that lived in and today I've never met another person who was as competent in gardening as he was. So, you know, they did a fine job and . . . and you worked with them and they were up to date on . . . in the 50's just like that farmers are today, you know. Farmers today are . . . are 'way out in front, you know. They have to be in order to survive, and the same was true then.

KLEE: What kind of . . . move up, you know, from the Harlan County up here to southern Ohio now, when you first started working in extension, what kinds of problems . . . for example, disease. Were there any prevalent kinds of diseases? Something in particular you were trying to combat?

WELLS: In . . . in tobacco?

KLEE: Uh-huh. Yeah, certainly. One . . . one of the problems that we have had continually and still have, although we have varieties now that are resistant somewhat to those, the disease that probably goes back the longest of any that I'm familiar with was diseases like black root rot, fusarium wilt, mosaic, and . . . and in those early days, we had no disease resistance to those. So you had to try to manipulate the . . . the growing procedure or the method that you did to overcome those. Like, for instance, on black root rot, today we don't worry about it because all of our varieties that are released no are resistant to black root rot. And those . . . back in those days, you did not have resistance so what you did, you let the soil get a little more acid than you would because black root rot will not grow too well in acid soil conditions. Today some of our older farmers are carrying over from that because they are just a little bit reluctant to lime tobacco ground about to say a pH of 6.4 or 6.5 which we now recommend. Back in those days, you'd never recommend to a farmer to lime his tobacco field that high because if he did, then the black root rot would take your profits. So that has been a tremendous change.

KLEE: So the . . . the agent was involved in coming out and doing a lot of field testing?

WELLS: Oh yeah.

KLEE: Soil testing?

WELLS: As I recall, my . . . course I haven't been in the county agent position now for about twenty years, but back when I was a county agent, we did a lot of on-farm visitation where you can go right out on the farm with the farmer or with a group of farmers and talk about problems and demonstrate different things. And of course, today, county agents don't seem to have . . . have the time to do that because of all the other responsibilities they have. But it was a . . . a thing that you had to really work. And with diseases, those were the ones that used to be a real problem. Course today they're not.

KLEE: Yeah. You mentioned the black root rot and what you did with that. Another one was mosaic. Do you remember . . .

WELLS: Yeah, mosaic . . . one of the things that was always recommended that if you're pulling tobacco plants out of the plant bed, getting ready to go to the field, be careful about smoking tobacco products around them, because you distributed the mosaic virus by . . . from your hands to the plants. Even to the place where they would suggest that you would wash your hands in milk and . . . and I noticed in some publications that I read not too long ago, someway or another they were using some varieties or some types of tobacco that did not have mosaic resistance, and they were still doing that. So, you know, it's something that's still carrying over. But mosaic was . . . is a virus and you can transmit it by just handling the plants. So if you smoked or chewed tobacco while you were pulling plants and then you could transmit the virus from that dry tobacco from the cigarette or the pipe or the chewing over to the tobacco and then you'd transplant it into the field and you'd have this virus disease. So but now we have varieties that are resistant to those. So we're not worried about mosaic. They're not worried about black root rot too much. We still have it. It's not saying we're not . . . well, maybe I should say we're not worried about it, but it's not the problem that it once was because we now have resistant varieties and through rotations and resistant varieties, we can pretty well eliminate those problems.

KLEE: When . . . when you were in that position, what were they doing at that time with . . . for example, preparing seed beds? Were they gassing then?

WELLS: Oh no. No, everything was burned. Usually burned in the fall . . . or excuse me, in the spring. I don't ever remember a bed being treated in the fall back twenty-five years ago. But everybody burned the bed.

KLEE: Do you remember when that transition started coming in? Was that in the 60's or . . .

WELLS: Oh, I would imagine . . . no, it came in, in the 50's. When I came . . . when I came to and and over into here, the Ripley area, it was being used, but not to a great extent. And through a lot of demonstrations . . . I know I worked with farmers a lot. Put on demonstrations on how to gas a bed with methyl bromide and a few of those names. Since then, you've gotten into custom applicators with Vorlex and methyl bromide where they will use one application and . . . and at that movement down through the bed, they'll apply the liquid material, knife it in the soil, put a plastic cover on it and cover it all in one operation. Well, back in the early days when . . . when they started using chemicals for control, you had to put the plastic cover on with a shovel. You had to take a shovel and . . . and furrow out a ditch all the way around your bed, put the material on, and then put that cover on it and cover it up again. So we made a lot of progress there. Some of the chemicals that we used back in the early 50's was . . . like . . . drenches. We used a lot of drenches. Al-, alcohol was one, V-Pam and a few others, I guess, that you literally mixed the chemical with water and put it through a . . . either a sprinkling can or a pump from a barrel on the tractor wagon and sprayed it on the soil and just saturated the soil with this chemical. And they call those drenches. And they did a pretty good job. There was some other materials like calcium cyanamid which was a dry material that you put on the beds over winter. Now those were put on in the fall, that one was. You had to put it on in the fall.

KLEE: Most of these were for weed control, not disease control.

WELLS: Strictly weed control.

KLEE: Now the . . . what they're doing now, is there some . . . WELLS: Yeah, you get both. Like, with . . . if you use methyl bromide, you not only get weed control, but you'll get soil sterilization as far as disease problems are concerned.

KLEE: I see. It sounds to me . . . you know, one of the impressions that people have of . . . of farmers is that they're maybe a little bit contrary, but it looks to me like . . . and from talking with other people that if a farmer could see that it would benefit him, they were very adaptable.

WELLS: Oh yeah. If you can demonstrate to a farmer that, by going to a new variety or a new practice or anything like that, was gonna make him money, he's interested. He's interested in changing. Now . . . course now change is interesting. There's processes of change. When I did my Master's work at , I did it in innovations. Particularly with tobacco growing innovations and what I was interested in is the diffusion of information from research to the farmer. And you . . . you get in . . . in the change process, you've got innovators that really are out there seeking information. They're the type of people . . .

KLEE: These are farmers?

WELLS: . . . farmers . . . they're the type of a farmer that goes to the researcher at the research station. And you've got another group of farmers that are . . . they wait until the information comes down to the county level before it's accepted. Then you've got another group, what we call late adaptors that . . . well, you've got the innovator, who . . . who's up there first getting it; then you got your early adaptor who, as soon as it comes out, he's willing to try it. But the late adaptor is the guy that says, well I'll just wait for . . . see if it really works. I'll wait 'til you try it, John, and if it works for you, then I'll try it. So you've got various degrees of adaptation, but the . . . the farmer, tobacco farmers particularly are eager to find new ways and better ways and, yeah, I've . . . I've been just amazed how fast information gets from the inception that the researcher has to the time that the farmer applies it on the land. And if you can cut that time span down, and that's what I was interested in as an extension agent with my Master's program, you know, hey . . . this . . . this needs to be done. So I was willing to . . . to spend some time doing that.

KLEE: When were you doing this? Your graduate work?

WELLS: Early 60's.

KLEE: Okay.

WELLS: I . . . I'd been out of college about ten years when I started my Master's program. I wouldn't advise that, John. [chuckles] I was [inaudible] if you could go from a Bachelor's to a Master's in a short time, it's to your advantage.

KLEE: Yeah. You . . . you told me a little bit about that graduate work, talking about the different types of, you know, farmers and how they'd adapt to it. What were some of the innovations that you were particularly interested in and how many of them . . . can you remember any of those or . . .

WELLS: I thought I would never forget. After working . . . writing a thesis on things like that. [chuckles] Course my . . . my main thrust was that I wanted to find out the . . . the channel of communication, and who were these people that John Doe, the farmer . . . tobacco farmer . . . looked to for information? Now I was not naive enough to think, John, that I as a county agent was the only source of information, and . . . and I hope that no county agent ever feels that way because there are many sources of information and many people who are looked to as sources of information, and I wanted to find out who these people were and how they received this information. And I found out that we have a lot of people out here growing tobacco that are . . . the people that . . . a number of other farmers look to for information and they're leaders. They're . . . they're right at the top. They're those fellows that, if you can find out who they are, any new innovation that you have, whether it's a new innovation in surgery with a group of doctors, there's always one doctor, somewhere or another, that these other doctors go to do look. But with these tobacco farmers, I wanted to know who these people were, and I did personal interviews. Spent a lot of time on farms interviewing people: where do you get your information? What radio programs do you listen? And if you had a disease problem in tobacco, where would you go? Or if your tobacco was . . . you was out in your tobacco patch and you found some plants dying, who would you contact to find out what the problem was? And this is a long, drawn-out process, but it works. You can find out who these people are, then you can go to these people and be much more effective in the . . . in a process of diffusing information. You can't . . . you can't reach the last farmer down the last road individually, but you can do through other leaders and this was my . . . the gist of my research. And course it covered a lot of things, but basically that's what it was.

KLEE: So one of the conclusions was that if county agents, for example, could identify these people . . .

WELLS: That's right.

KLEE: . . . then that would . . . that was the person you'd work with.

WELLS: That's right. Well, you'd work more with that person . . .

KLEE: Sure.

WELLS: . . . giv-, giving him the . . . the latest information or the latest innovations coming out. Now you'd still work with everybody . . .

KLEE: Oh yeah.

WELLS: . . . on the basis of individual problems, but when you wanted to introduce a new demonstration or a new process or whatever it was, then . . . if you knew three or four guys in the area, you could get it done much, much quicker.

KLEE: Were those . . . were those kinds of people . . . did . . . were they . . . did they . . . do they vary from county to county or do they . . . are they kind of . . . do they represent a certain type . . . for . . . specifically alike? Are most of them older gentlemen, are they younger ones? Are they . . . do they have big operations or small operations?

WELLS: They vary . . . they vary all over the spectrum. You'll find that some of these fellows are guys who have Master's degrees from colleges of agriculture and are well-respected within their communities. You find some of these innovative leaders are just good tobacco farmers that are interested and have always made their living from tobacco and just, you know, you've got all kinds. You might find that some of them are just small farmers. You know, just happen to have a small farm, but does a tremendous job with what he's doing. And they're scattered all over and . . . and this . . . it's real interesting but, you know, that's off of the subject a little bit.

KLEE: Now when did you . . . you made a career change, then, a little . . . you went from an extension agent to . . .

WELLS: Well, yeah, I had worked in this county about ten years. I came here in `57 and in about 1967 an opportunity in our extension service in , we had a program where they had area centers and they put a group of area specialists in there and worked with the county agents and farmers in a five- to ten-county area. And they had a position that they called an area agronomist which would cover not only tobacco but grain and forage crops in the area. But basically the major responsibility of that agent was tobacco, and of course I applied for the job and got the job. Worked out of the Hillsboro area center in Hillsboro, Ohio for about a year and then was transferred over to Jackson, Ohio which is east of here and . . . seventy-five miles or so, and worked out of there. But even in . . . in those locations, I still worked with the tobacco-producing counties from to Gallipolis, all the way across the southern part of the state. And I worked at those . . . that position for a couple, three years, and then I . . . there was a change in the manager's position at the research farm near Ripley, which does tobacco research, beef cattle research, fruit and forage and agronomy type of research there. And at the time, they had . . . had never had a manager with a joint appointment. He'd always been strictly a farm manager with no extension responsibilities. But they offered me the job as a manager of the research farm with extension responsibilities as a state extension tobacco specialist, where I'd work part of my time as a tobacco specialist and the other part of the time actually managing the research farm, conducting the tobacco research and directing the rest of it. So I spent the last fifteen years of my extension career at that location, which is just close by here.

KLEE: Well let me . . . let me ask some questions about that, then. While you were this area's specialist for tobacco, you know, those two or three years, what were some of the . . . thrust of you work in? Was there . . . were there any developments in particular at that time that . . .

WELLS: Well, course we had a lot of new insecticides and fungicides that were coming out. The area specialist's job, of course, was just . . . enhanced the local county agent. It gave him an individual who was more specialized in the field closer to him, rather than having all the extension specialists located at the college level in or in , if it was in , where you had a fellow who was just over in the next county at an area center. And we planned programs more concentrated in those areas where we were working. I don't know that there was anything more that we did there than we would as a . . . if I'd been located in , except I was closer to the counties, and my area of responsibility was smaller. Course tobacco's only grown here in the southern part of the state and . . . basically here in the southern part of the state. We do have some tobacco that's grown up around . . . mostly cigar-type tobacco, but most all of our burley tobacco is grown along the river.

KLEE: Now when you started here in the early 70's at the research farms . . . at the research farm, what kind of . . . what kind of projects were you working on then? Can you talk about some of those?

WELLS: Yeah. One of the big projects that we had, and it has been since the farm was established. The farm was established in 1957 basically to do tobacco research and then along with that, they did research with beef cattle and fruit and other agronomic crops. We were looking varieties. We always had variety testing programs where the farmers could come in and look at fifteen or twenty different burley tobacco varieties growing side by side and we kept information. So then when I would go out and meet with farmers in tobacco production meetings, I could present the information that here's what Burley 21 crossed with Kentucky 10 hybrid did compared to something else and we had a real good program, and still have . . . that program going on, the varieties.

KLEE: Let me ask you a little bit about that, okay? Is there . . . is there . . . are . . . do varieties, are they kind of faddish or do . . . you know, do farmers do one for awhile and then another? Or do you try to . . . do different plots of land for example lend themselves better to different varieties? How . . . how does a farmer decide and, you know, what kind of advice does an extension person give a farmer?

WELLS: Let me back up just a little bit and then . . . and talk about the process that a variety goes through before it is adapted by the farmer.

KLEE: Okay.

WELLS: When the plant breeder, whether he's a university plant breeder or a private company plant breeder, decides that he wants to work on a new variety, from that point until it's available to the farmer, is about ten to twelve years, a long span of time. Because you have to have a lot of crossings and back crossings in the greenhouse and the laboratory and then he's got to prove that that variety is a better variety than what's existed. He's got to make sure that that variety has all of the disease resistance built in. Now, we cooperate here in Ohio very closely with the University of Kentucky in all the tobacco research programs because they've got a tremendous program there and we don't have very much in this part of the state. So we . . .

[End Tape #1, Side #1]

[Begin Tape #1, Side #2]

KLEE: This is side two of a tape with Jim Wells. We were talking about how you cooperate with and talking variety development.

WELLS: Yeah. I just mentioned that from the time that a plant breeder decides to start working on a new variety until it's available to the farmer is about ten or twelve years, and it goes through a long, drawn-out process of crossings and back crossings and incorporating material into the breeding program that will carry disease resistance.

KLEE: Now this . . . this is done usually by a university or do . . . do seed companies do this kind of work too?

WELLS: Back in the early days, only universities did much of this. Most all the varieties that we had were either a variety or a variety or something like that where they had the facilities. In recent years, private individual companies are developing their own varieties. They . . . they will not release, for instance, the crossings and back crossings. Kind of . . . kind of like the corn variety program, you know. You have a lot of varieties of corn by any number of companies, but they're private certified varieties. Well, in the olden days, only the university did the breeding work, but now individual seed companies like Clay's and Rickard's . . . a lot of those people are coming into developing their own varieties. But we were talking about the research variety program. We have what we call a nursery. When a plant breeder gets a variety and these varieties, to be released, a committee has set . . . set up some standards. They have to have disease resistance. They have to have black root rot resistance. They have to have mosaic resistance, fusarium wilt resistance and let's see . . . maybe another one. I can't . . . black root rot, mosaic and fusarium wilt, and wildfire. Those are the four diseases that all varieties must have in order to be released. So he incorporates all this material into it, and he has these resistants, he wants to put a variety out to be tested for different locations in the growing area, for yield and quality and smoke test in a cigarette and so forth. Then, all of the universities that grow tobacco, all the states that grow tobacco, those universities and research farms, like Kentucky and our research center here at Ripley, and Tennessee and Virginia and North Carolina, they'll all take these new varieties that this plant breeder has developed and put them out on a small patch. And they'll record a lot of things. They'll record blooming dates, the number of leaves per plant, how tall the plant is when it blooms, how wide the leaves are, how long the leaves are, just an awful low of information. Then the tobacco is . . . is harvested and cured and then samples are taken and given to domestic cigarette manufacturers and they manufacture cigarettes from them and they go through their processes of evaluation, smoke tests, taste tests, all those things. So let's say out of the group of twenty of those, you might come up with one or two that look real promising. That meet . . . meet all the standards. They would be a good yielder and standability and it would meet the farmers requirements, so to speak. It would also meet the manufacturers requirements. Then that variety, then would be expanded and put into another test and tested further, and maybe twenty would start and you might be lucky if one ever made it to the farm as . . . as a variety that a farmer would use. But one of the tests that's always been real interesting to farmers where you would take some of the fifteen or so varieties that are on the market now, and see them perform on the same location, side by side. And we gathered information like yield and quality and so forth. And then when we would talk with farmers, we'd say now here is a variety, if you're not using, you ought to try. Now we're not saying for you to go out here and put your whole field out with it but put a stick row or two down through the field. Now stick row means just a couple of rows, or four rows or something, that you can compare what you're now growing against a new one. And if this new one proves out to be better and higher yielding, well then maybe you ought to change. But if the variety you're now growing meets all your needs, you have no disease problems and you're in a good rotational program and so forth, then maybe there's no need to change.

KLEE: In our . . . in our burley belt here, how many varieties . . . you know, for example are popular? Would there be . . .

WELLS: Well we have two . . . two types of varieties. We've got what we call the standard varieties, like 10, 15, 14, Burley 21, those type. Then we've got the hybrids, which are crosses between varieties. The hybrids are popular . . . more . . . more popular. There's about . . . I would roughly say about seventy-five percent of the varieties that are grown are hybrids. And of those, you can narrow them down to about, oh, four or five. 2110 is probably a real popular hybrid. That's a cross between Burley 21 and 10. These crosses, by the way, are made by the seed producers. The university people don't make the crosses. The seed producers do. This is part of their process. The most popular standard variety grown today probably is 14. Now they are both real excellent varieties. No . . . no problem with either one of them. So a farmer just decides, you know . . . I drive one kind of a car and you drive another one because of our personal likes, and this is about the way a farmer . . . if . . . if all varieties are equal, and he has no disease problems on his farm, you know it really doesn't make a lot of difference. It comes down to personal preference. Some guys like blond-headed girls, other like brunettes. [chuckles]

KLEE: Do . . . do you find that farmers, like in different regions, say, of a county, all growing the same kind of variety, or do they . . .

WELLS: You . . . you find different areas of the state, yeah, you find some areas of the state are more progressive than others. And then you'll find areas of the state that have specific disease problems, like this black root rot problem we were talking about earlier. We have varieties that are being used . . . the hybrids, for instance, carry less disease resistance to black root rot than does say Kentucky 14 or Kentucky 15. And you'll find, like in eastern , over in Gallia and , around Ironton, and , where 14 may be the leading variety in that area. In this area where we live, here in around this area, I would say the hybrids are more . . . but we have more good tobacco land that we can rotate. You know, we don't have to grow our tobacco in the same spot over and over and over, whereas in that part of the state, they do. is the same way. You'll find standard varieties in eastern Kentucky that is resistant to black root rot grown more there that you would, say, around Lexington or Richmond or somewhere or another that . . . where they have a lot of land that they can rotate.

KLEE: Because of the hills, there's just so much arable land . . .

WELLS: That's right. There's just so . . .

KLEE: They just keep using that over .

WELLS: . . . there's just so much available and then that's all you've got.

KLEE: Okay, that was one of . . . that's one of the . . . one of the things that the farm did. What are some of the other kinds . . .

WELLS: We did a lot of work with herbicides on tobacco, sucker control materials on tobacco, and fertility. Fertility's an interesting thing. You'll find farmers using various amounts and various methods of applying fertilizer. And what we tried to do in the research program there was try all of those and then try to come up with a general recommendation to our farmers that would say this is the best way you can go. And it . . . it'll vary, depending on weather conditions, but I'd say the sucker control material that has been very popular in the past, the herbicides on the tobacco, the variety programs, that's . . . and we had a curing research project on the farm over there that was interesting because . . . I believe in 1968, a tornado came through here and destroyed about thirty or forty tobacco barns right here in this area, and I don't know how many over in Kentucky, and so many barns had to be rebuilt, and we were interested in building a barn for curing that would . . . would be a modern barn, one that was not five, six, or eight tiers high, like we'd see in the olden days. So we built a barn through the cooperation of the , Dr. George Duncan, the agricultural engineer there, helped us greatly. Supplied the plans and everything. And we built what was called a two-tier fourth ventilation barn. Only two tiers high and . . . that you hung the tobacco in it almost double the rate of a conventional barn, but you had fans and LP gas furnaces in the barn that took care of the moisture problem and that was of great interest to a lot of people. That hadn't been done in this area before and it's . . . although it did not catch on as . . . as the way to build a tobacco barn, the principle is still there. And it's still operating, still does a good job.

KLEE: Yeah. What about . . . I was gonna ask you about that. I think farmers that build new barns are going to what? Shorter, longer barns?

WELLS: Yeah, they're . . . they're barns that are not too high. I think maybe a three-tier barn is not as high as the University of Kentucky engineers recommend building, and then as long as you want it. But we still have local builders that still build the old-fashioned four- and five-tier high barns, but the problem, John, comes down to labor. We just don't have the labor today that we had at one time and if it is, we can't afford it. So with two people in these two- or three-tier barns . . . can just about hang those barns, whereas those four- or five-tier barns, you gotta have three or four people up in the barn and one on the wagon, so it's just . . . doesn't make sense to build this type of barn.

KLEE: What about the use of gas and the fans as . . . as . . .

WELLS: Yeah, we've gone . . . we've gone through those different methods. The olden method, years ago, just about anybody that used any supplemental heat at all in the barn was coke. And . . . and you had to man those coke stoves and a few growers still do that. If you can find coke. Coke is difficult to find and if you can find it, it's expensive. But we went from . . . most from using coke stoves to LP gas burners in barns and that was a great innovation because you had more control of the temperature. You . . . you could control it. You could set it and go to bed. Well, those old coke stoves, you had to get up and fire those coke stoves all night long, you know. And you had to be careful not to overheat them because you could set the color in the tobacco and they had some problems. Then we've gone through many years of supplemental heat with gas burners and . . . and just by inflation and the cost of . . . of fuel, the gas burners are . . . are not economical to use. So we've gone to fans. And George Duncan, the agricultural engineer at the University of Kentucky that I referred to awhile ago, who's always looking at new engineering projects, is recommending the use of fans and these . . . these are large fans that would be placed horizontal and up in the barns about the first tier in the middle . . . middle binth of the barn that would have a tendency to put the tobacco . . . the air out of the tobacco from the top and push it out the bottom. And they work real well. One of the early innovators, and this is . . . we're talking about the innovations awhile ago, one of the real early innovators with fans in the barn, was this Mr. F. W. Rickard of that I mentioned as being a seedsman. I can remember, oh, a good twenty years ago, Mr. Rickard was using fans in his barns there out of and a lot of the people came and looked and I'm sure put fans in their barns because he used them so effectively. We've got a number of farmers in that do have fans in their barns like that and like them real well.

KLEE: You . . . I was gonna ask you, too, you know you talked about the different chemicals that you use and so forth. There's a lot of things that farmers can do to their beds or, you know, during the setting process, and the suckering and the . . . you know, then with the . . . well, but what about the cost on those? Have you . . .

WELLS: Yeah, you have . . . kind of have to weigh the cost of some of these new . . . new materials. If . . . if by doing one of these practices, and most of them, like on the insects and diseases that . . . we feel that the preventative method is much cheaper than the corrective method. Just like this blue mold problem we've had in tobacco in recent years. We say, you know, put on Ridomil before you transplant. Sure, it'll cost you fifty or sixty dollars an acre, but if you have blue mold and don't have it, you've already lost twenty-five percent of your crop. I think Dr. [William C.] Bill Nesmith at the University of Kentucky, who's a plant pathologist and has worked with blue mold quite extensively, he says if you don't use a preventative method and follow the corrective method, when you find that you have blue mold, you can just mark twenty-five percent of your crop off because you have or will have lost that much by the time you keep . . . get it under control. And so . . .

KLEE: At the experiment station, do you . . . do you do kind of I don't know, financial kind of calculation now too?

WELLS: We . . . we did not do that at Ripley because we didn't have facilities or personnel to do that sort of thing, but they do, do that at the University of Kentucky where they can, you know, actually calculate the cost and time studies and things like that. But I think that most . . . most farmers that have had disease problems and insect problems are willing to pay the cost of chemicals to take care of them. One of the things that . . . you mentioned sucker control. I can remember back when I first came to was about the time that MH30 came out and MH30 of course is maleic hydrazide. It's a chemical that retards the growth of suckers. It prevents cell division in the plant. After you top it, you spray it with this maleic hydrazide and then no suckers will grow. In the early days, it was thought that the companies wouldn't buy the tobacco if the MH30 was applied, and I have a friend here that I tell this story on him that he . . . he . . . was one of the earlier fellows to use MH30 on tobacco and he'd be down in his tobacco fields spraying with a hand sprayer and he'd hear a car coming down the road, so he'd duck down in the tobacco so nobody could see him and then after the car passed, he'd get back up and spray on. Well, that . . . today is . . . is one of the very accepted practices. We've gotten big on highboys and other things, commercial fellows who come in and will spray an acre for you in ten minutes and be on his way for a real reasonable cost. So this sucker control has been a real innovation to the tobacco grower. It's been . . . saved him many, many dollars and many, many hours of hard work. One of the more recent things that have come down the pike, so to speak, that has been a help to the tobacco farmer is the method of preparation for market. We've gone basically from hand-tying to baling tobacco and I think as time goes on, it'll be less and less and less and even today, you know, you don't see many hand-tied baskets of tobacco on the market. So this has been one of the great labor savers. It takes us about three hundred man-hours to grow and market an acre of tobacco, and by . . . and about half of that is the market preparation. About a hundred and fifty hours of it is in . . . in market preparation. And if you can save fifty percent of that time by baling over hand-tying, and many people have done that, time studies at . . . at the have demonstrated you can save up to forty to fifty percent of your labor. Just look at the . . . the cost saving involved, you see. So this would help the farmer and those two things, as I recall . . . the sucker control and the market preparation has been two real . . . real labor-saving innovations in the last twenty or twenty-five years.

KLEE: What about the . . . did you-all ever do any work with some of the new mechanization kinds of things? The strippers and . . . I think a few people put out harvesters and . . .

WELLS: Yeah. Several years ago, there was kind of a trend to try to flue-cure burley tobacco. Now, you know, the difference between flue-cured and burley . . . burley is a stalk-cut, air-cured tobacco, and flue-cured you take all the leaves off the stalk and put it in a . . . in a barn or a container and dry it out literally in about a week's time. We did some work for one of the chewing tobacco companies a few years ago on a project where we brought in a . . . a field harvester. It came from , and we had a chewing tobacco project and we stripped all the leaves off the stalk with this field harvester. It was called a once-over harvester. You just take all the leaves off and leave all the stalks stand. You took those leaves and put them in a . . . a . . .

KLEE: Did this out in the field?

WELLS: Out in the field. Put it in a . . . in a container and put this container into a portable curing shed which was . . . looked just about like a tractor trailer and had a furnace apparatus all built in and we cured out the chewing tobacco like that, just like they would in the flue-cured. And was very successful. Now we did some burley tobacco at the same time, but I never felt like, and I'm sure the industry never felt like that the burley tobacco cured flue-cure style was still burley tobacco. One of the things that burley tobacco does to a cigarette, it gives it taste and aroma and so forth. And it has its own characteristics. And when you remove it from the normal process of stalk air-cured position to a . . . a flue-cured, you don't have burley tobacco anymore. It's just something different. Don't even look like . . . well, it still looks like tobacco, but it just doesn't look like normal burley tobacco.

KLEE: Uh-huh Yeah. The . . . the strippers . . . the mechanical strippers, did they catch on around here or . . .

WELLS: Oh, we . . . we had a young fellow that lives over in that developed one of those strippers, fellow by the name of Ring. He had what he called the ring stripper. Mr. Jones over in Maysville has a stripper. There's a number of them. At the tobacco festival two years ago, we must have had eight or ten tobacco stripping people who were there with booth . . . demonstrating their product. The tobacco festival this year, we only two. So . . . you know, the . . . the idea of mechanization is good with tobacco. And we need to see mechanization, but we just haven't gotten to the place where mechanization fits in with our present marketing system. We still market tobacco by grades. Now if we would ever get to the place that we would market tobacco in one grade, in unoriented positions . . . in other words you just run it through a stripper and put it in to the bale box and bale it up and put it on the floor, then tobacco strippers will really move. Until that time comes, there's gonna be few of them, I'd say, accepted overall. Now, there's some good ones and some better ones, and I would probably say some poor ones that are on the market, but basically, they're all one-grade strippers. Now some . . . some of the stripper people, the inventors or developers would probably argue with me, say well we can strip it in one, two, or three grades, however you want it. Well that's true, they can, but when you start doing that, then you reduce your efficiency down to where you could probably strip it off by hand and put it in a bale box just as effectively, so . . . I don't look at strippers as being a great innovation like the sucker control or the baling process, but if you ever get to the place that we just market one grade and don't pay any attention to quality, then we might . . . they might really take hold.

KLEE: Talking about the grades, in your work with tobacco in this area, have you seen farmers reducing the number of grades they strip it in?

WELLS: Oh yeah. Course I don't remember the times that some of these older fellows that you talked to or will talk to, that . . . that [inaudible] they used to strip it in five and six and eight grades. And then they'd size each of those and . . . I don't remember that too much. But I can remember very definitely going from four or five grades that we had down to one grade. We got some farmers today that're only stripping one grade. And you can strip some tobacco in one grade. It all depends on the crop, the quality of the crop and what it looks like. Sometimes two-grade stripping falls very nicely. It depends on the . . . on the year and on the tobacco itself. Sometimes you can take off the trash leaves and one or two of the lug leaves and everything else just naturally falls together. But this . . . you have to determine this with each crop. You have to bring your tobacco in out of the barn and put in on the stripping bench and . . . and go through and look at what you've got and strip accordingly. I would say most of the people today are stripping in two or three grades. And less and less three grades, more and more two grades, and you see one-grade stripping coming on. Now one-grade stripping doesn't mean that it's poor quality tobacco. It just means that on the market, it's . . . it's graded differently. It's price-supported at a different level, but still can be excellent tobacco and you see a lot of M grades, which they do put an M on it selling just as high, and sometimes higher, than other grades, depending on the needs of that particular company.

KLEE: Sure. I was . . . one question I wanna ask is people in southern , and I don't know if this is true or not, but do they feel like they're kind of a stepchild? This is a tobacco growing area, but as far as the state legislature and I think some of the politicians, tobacco's not high on their list. In fact, maybe not even supportive of tobacco.

WELLS: Oh that's true. We do . . . we do have that problem, John. Yeah, it feels . . . you get the feeling down here that the state legislators sometimes, and particularly our legislators who go to , don't look at as a tobacco-producing state and not paying attention to the needs of the farmers. But there's a lot of tobacco history here and the burley tobacco, by the way, that we now grow in all of our burley-producing states, originated right here in Brown County Ohio . . . and course that's another story and a long time ago, but the people that grow tobacco in Ohio basically are the same people that grow tobacco on the other side of the Ohio, south side of the Ohio River. If you'd talk to all of these people, most of them are one or two generations removed from coming from Mason, Fleming, Bracken, Robertson, Pendleton or some of . . . over here. But they do feel like, you know, that our legislators kind of don't consider our product that we grow down here. And unfortunately we have a state . . . a Senator, Howard Metzenbaum, who very much is against the tobacco farmer in that he wants to eliminate the program and course, you know, votes won't be the only thing that will change that. You take . . . we've got eleven thousand farm families that produce tobacco. That's probably twenty-two thousand votes in the state, where has ten million people. You know, there's no way . . .

KLEE: [inaudible]

WELLS: We don't have much clout. But we're gaining attention because the program that I'm working in now, after having worked thirty years with Ohio State University and University of Kentucky in the extension service, I did retire from those positions and I've been working the last two and a half years with Ohio Farm Bureau and R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company on a program we call our "Pride in Tobacco Program" and through that program, we are trying to get tobacco farmers involved and are trying to get people who are not familiar with tobacco problems to acquaint them with that and the whole program. And we've gotten more attention the last two years, because if I must say so with attention to the tobacco farmer through legislature, through these pride programs, it's turning around. We have about a fifty-five million dollar income down here from tobacco. Now that's small compared to where you have maybe a hundred and nineteen or a hundred and twenty counties in that grow tobacco. And we've got, in , about twenty-three counties that grow tobacco . . . some . . . and you can narrow that down and say we've got about eight or ten that really depend on it. So we're small from that standpoint, but even though we're small, it's still an awfully important item here in the southern part of the state. But we do feel like that . . . I'm sure the growers feel that the legislators overlook him because it's an inconsequential thing.

KLEE: What do you think the . . . I know, you know, the tobacco program is threatened a little bit and so forth, but where do you think the tobacco farmer is going? What . . . what's he . . . are we going to bigger farms or . . . what . . . what's gonna happen for him?

WELLS: Well, I think time is gonna take care of a lot of this. As . . . as people get older, they're gonna work less, naturally, and as you get older, tobacco is not easy. I mean, it's a lot of . . . three hundred man-hours per acre, now a lot of older people can do a number of things. They can do . . . if you would go to all the tobacco stripping rooms in the wintertime in this area and you'll find a lot of women and a lot of older people stripping tobacco. But when it comes to housing time, that's a young man's job, you see. It's hard, it's brutal, it's hard and heavy, and as a result of that, it's . . . the natural process of the farmer as he gets older, he does less and less of that type of work. He either rents it out or leases it out, or maybe sells the farm and moves to town. And I . . . I see down the road a few years coming, that these tobacco farms are gonna get bigger. If we would happen to lose our present price support program, and I think we will eventually. I don't think there's any question about it that within the next, I don't know, three to five years, we'll probably be faced with the possibility of no price support program. Now that doesn't mean, John, that we won't grow tobacco. They're gonna be lots of tobacco grown regardless, and maybe even more tobacco grown if there's program. But if that happens, then you'll find perhaps . . . and I'm just guessing, that you'll find a lot of contract farming. That's where the farmer will contract with the domestic tobacco company, will bypass the warehousers. The farmer will grow for a particular company, perhaps big acreage, and if that happens, then the little grower doesn't have a chance, you see. This half acre we talked about?

KLEE: Which is really the bulk of the program.

WELLS: The bulk of the program, well where would you go with a half acre of tobacco if . . . if the companies want the contract farm and they're talking hundred thousand pounds, or five hundred thousand pounds? You know, it's kind of like a program several years ago that we had at the research farm when we were doing . . . researching grapes. You know, a hundred and fifty years ago, back prior to and maybe during the Civil War time, this was a grape-growing area.

KLEE: Sure was.

WELLS: And it . . . it left here because of diseases and so forth, but we tried to revitalize that market with some of our research and we talked with a big wine producer, Meier's Winery in Silverton, . Said would you be interested in growing . . . or buying grapes here in southern ? Oh yeah, we're interested. Well, I said, now these farmers could grow, you know, an acre or two of grapes along with their tobacco and so forth, and oh, they said, we're not interested in that. He said, now what would we do with a ton of grapes? Here on the weekend, that would a kind of a weekend project. Said, here comes a farmer into the winery with a pick-up truck load with a ton of grapes on it. Now what would we do with a ton of grapes. And he said, now if we had a thousand tons of grapes, or fifty tons of grapes, or a hundred tons of grapes, then we can talk to you. He said we are not interested in talking to the small producer. We want the fifty-acre, hundred-acre grower, where you'd use a grape picker and mechanized, the whole bit. Well, I think the same thing would come in the tobacco after awhile. The small grower would gradually quit and it . . . it would finally wind up in the hands of those people who really like to grow tobacco, who want to mechanize as much as possible and get as large as possible. We've seen the same thing in grains. You know, you've got big tractors and big combines and that can only be done on big acreage. And I think some of the things in tobacco will go that direction.

KLEE: Thanks a lot for talking to me.

[End Tape #1, Side #2]

[End of Interview]