During much of this newspaper’s life, Smithfield was the center of a prosperous agricultural community, and week after week, the pages of The Smithfield Times have reflected the importance of that industry. 

After writing last week’s column about the town’s agricultural roots, I became curious about the importance of agriculture to local news coverage before as well as during my time. That curiosity led to a quick and not-terribly-scientific survey of topics that have appeared in the paper over the years.

There are copies of the newspaper for all the years from 1928 forward, and all of those papers, up through 2018, are digitized and available for research on the Library of Virginia’s Virginia Chronicle website. That’s a 90-year period.

I drew up a list of 26 words or phrases that would most often be found in stories about local agriculture, and did a search in the Chronicle for them. Some of the words I used admittedly might refer to something other than agriculture. “Fertilizer,” for example, might refer to gardening material as well as farm use, and in recent years, it certainly has. Other phrases, such as “peanut crop,” “corn crop” and “peanut allotment,” exclusively refer to farming.

During the 90-year search period, the 26 words and phrases drew just under 22,000 “hits” in the Chronicle files. That’s an average of 253 per year or close to five for every weekly paper printed during those nine decades. That includes references found in advertising as well as news, which is totally understandable because of the importance farming played to advertisers as well as reporting.

A look back through the Chronicle files tells quite a bit about the evolution of agriculture during the paper’s life, and it’s been pretty dramatic.

A considerable amount of newspaper ink was devoted to agricultural advice, particularly during the paper’s early years. In 1928, for example, the paper, which had no editorial page, was nevertheless moved to offer editorial advice on such things as “livestock parasites,” declaring that they had “been tolerated too long and accepted too complacently.”

The same edition of the Times carried a feature from New Jersey titled “A well-arranged farm kitchen.”

Cotton was an important local crop during the 1920s. The paper ran stories about the difficulty of obtaining quality cotton seed, which was being inadvertently mixed at cotton gins, leading to mixed varieties in fields.

(The boll weevil destroyed cotton production regionally in the 1950s and the crop only returned in the 1980s after elimination of the destructive bug.)

Early 20th century farmers had come to realize the benefits of neutralizing acidic soil with lime, and The Smithfield Times reported in May 1928 that Smithfield Farmers, P.D. Gwaltney Jr. & Co. and others were selling “high grade burnt agricultural lime” manufactured by Battery Park Fish & Oyster Co.

The end of World War II ushered in an agricultural revolution as manufacturers shifted their factories from wartime needs to needs of farmers.

A March 1946 Times reported that in Dendron, “The tractors are humming out here in the county this spring weather.

By the time I returned to Smithfield in 1972, the revolution had produced self-propelled grain combines, multi-row peanut diggers, mobile peanut combines and drying systems that all but eliminated the labor-intensive handling of peanut crops.

We covered agriculture with a vengeance during those revolutionary times, in part probably because I have farm roots and was overly interested in what was happening on farms. If we had had speed dial, Extension Service agents would have been on it. We only had rotary dial, but those numbers were memorized, as were contacts at the Holland Experimental Station, where peanuts, corn and soybeans were studied with the goal of improved yields. 

Still, it was hard to keep up with the changes. During the 1970s and 80s, the number of farms decreased sharply while the size of farm operations increased. The same land was being farmed by ever fewer farmers. 

Farmers also became acutely knowledgeable of the science of agriculture. They had to in order to keep up, and the result has been dramatically higher yields per acre for all field crops. 

In recent years, the number of small, generally part-time farm operations has grown so that today, the number of farms labeled as such by the government is slowly increasing again.

Some things were consistent, however. Stories about too much rain, not enough rain and other crop hindrances appear in the paper throughout the 90-year period that we can observe. They likely always will.

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.