2015 Yr in Review Ag/Farming Features
Farmer Jim Lawson displays some freshly dug peanuts.
Rice
Labor Day Weekend brings the return of the Southern 500 to the Darlington Raceway, and visitors and locals are invited to explore a relatively unknown facet of our area’s agricultural heritage. On Saturday, Sep. 5, one Darlington County church will host a festival celebrating South Carolina’s favorite starch: rice.
The New Vision Community Development Corporation kicked off their third annual Community Rice Festival, an all-day event featuring water slides and bouncers for the kids, a car and bike show, live entertainment, and more than 50 delicious rice dishes to tempt the palate.
Festival organizer Carolyn Hannah says that many folks, even Darlington County locals, enjoy the versatile crop without understanding our area’s rich heritage of rice cultivation. To that end, the festival sets up a museum chock full of historical information, reminding folks that during the Colonial Period, South Carolina was the largest producer of rice in America.
Peanuts
A black and white photo hanging on the office wall at Lawson Farms shows a smiling Laurie Lawson and his mother Betty standing in a field surrounded by huge tobacco plants, some with leaves stretching as high as Laurie’s ball cap. Although tobacco hasn’t grown here since 2010, this fertile 3,500 acre spread still yields bumper crops of verdant turf grass, sorghum, soybeans, corn, and winter wheat, and, in recent years, has about 300 to 400 acres dedicated to South Carolina’s latest cash crop: peanuts.Jim and William Lawson are fourth generation farmers, tending their family’s historic Century Farm in an area west of Darlington and east of Lamar. Technically it has a Hartsville address, but Jim describes it as “the middle of nowhere,” a beautiful swath of country where farm fields abound and colorfully painted beehives are stacked in open lots. It’s perfect country for farming, and the Lawson peanut fields are right now producing an impressive crop. The Lawsons say a lot has changed since their great grandfather began farming in 1834, but the risks and rewards associated with peanuts present unique challenges.
“Most of our land in this area is nice sandy, loamy land. That’s good for peanuts because they just don’t grow well in wetter land. They tend to rot since they’re a root crop,” Jim says.
With a growing season from early May to mid September, peanuts are exposed to baking summer heat and soaking rain, and these weather extremes can make harvesting tricky. Peanuts need drier weather early in their growing cycle, then require lots of water when the pods begin to mature, but Mother Nature keeps her own schedule.
Coffee
Staff writer Samantha Lyles shared the story off her sister’s coffee farm Lisa and Leo’s Organic Coffee, grown in the fertile highlands of North Sumatra, Indonesia in a story in September featuring nephew Wade Lyles. Wade trained on complex Diedrich gas-powered roasting machines in Omaha, and learned techniques around the world from Djakarta to Australia to Singapore. He was interviewed and photographed roasting beans in the backyard of his grandma’s Darlington home, his habits and standards remain those of a professional. Wade keeps close watch on a small single batch roaster as the hopper full of beans gradually darkens from light green to copper to chocolate brown. In the quest for a perfect medium roast he must look and listen carefully, watching for the right color and waiting to hear a peculiar sound.
“It’ll crack twice if you wait long enough, but I like to drop mine after first crack because that’s when all the gases come out and flavor everything, and there’s just enough oil inside and out, ” he explains.
When coffee beans crack during roasting, it sounds a bit like clucking your tongue in the back of your mouth. Timing here is crucial, like listening to popcorn kernels bursting and waiting for the sounds to slow. Wait too long after the initial round of cracking and you end up with slick, burned beans that have already expelled much of their coffee oils.
“That’s what they do with French roast…It tastes burnt, like water with coffee oil in it,” Wade says. “But medium roast is awesome.” He literally knows the coffee business from the ground up, and he hopes to share that expertise with folks here at home. Using fresh green beans from Lisa and Leo’s Organic, Wade roasts and sells under his own brand: Merantau Coffee.
“I’m selling it at farmer’s markets right now, and I hope to hook up with some local coffee shops and restaurants who want something different,” says Wade.
Sweet Potatoes
Just off Hwy 401 outside Darlington, farmer Bobby Arnold is hitting his fall harvest stride as another crop of award-winning sweet potatoes comes in from the fields.
“It gets pretty busy this time of year,” he says, noting that with customers placing orders and the busy agricultural fair and festival circuit, there is some pressure for his 30 acres of sweet potato fields to produce the high-quality root vegetables that earned Arnold Farms a sterling reputation.
Darlington County farmer Bobby Arnold with some of his award-winning sweet potatoes.
Photo by Samantha Lyles
Mother Nature, however, is being a bit difficult. Harvest time is usually late September and early October, but getting the last of the mature sweet potatoes out of the ground has been complicated by massive rains in recent weeks. As a root crop, sweet potatoes can go bad or rot in excessively wet soil.
“You have to worry about all that water they’re standing in because they’ll sour,” Bobby says.
And losing any sweet potatoes would be a shame, because these particular ‘taters are known far and wide for their beautiful flavor. Much of Arnold Farms’ crop is the Covington variety, with plants sporting large, arrowhead-shaped leaves and pink flowers. The sweet potato it yields features smooth rosy skin and bright orange flesh, making it highly desirable for use in everything from pies to fries.
Yield in a good year is about 300 bushels per acre, though that varies by field and by variety. Sweet potatoes do well in the Pee Dee’s sandy soil, which Arnold calls “tobacco land” even though he quit growing tobacco more than fifteen years ago.
“We used to grow about 200 acres of tobacco… but I saw the writing on the wall that it was time to get out of it,” he says.
In fact, Bobby doesn’t grow any row crops now, but leases out much of his 480-acre spread for other farmers to do so. Arnold Farms uses only certified seed, and agents from Clemson University Extension routinely inspect the sweet potatoes for quality, health, and insect activity. Bobby says they’re mostly on the lookout for potato weevils, which have devastated crops in other states.
Each year, Arnold saves good, if small, sweet potatoes to use next season as seeds. These little ones are set down in five-foot beds sometime in March, weather permitting. They require irrigation and tending early in the growing cycle and hotter, drier weather as they mature.
