Michael Brinkley
Brinkley Farms
Creedmoor, NC
www.brinkleyfarms.com

 

I used to gauge if I wanted to plant a new product, if Daddy shook his head and said, “What in the hell is this?” then I knew it was going to do pretty good. – Michael Brinkley

Mildred and Abram Brinkley established Brinkley Farms as a tobacco farm in 1941. In 1973 their son William and his wife Dianne took over the basic operation of the farm. William and Dianne were traditional tobacco farmers who have now transitioned to an extensive vegetable production with the help of son Michael and his wife Jennifer.  As a child, Michael and his sister would earn their school money by seeding fields and selling the vegetables they grew on the side. They would keep whatever profits they earned for new clothes and school supplies. Michael calls this making money “truck-style.”  Michael and Jennifer have a 450-member CSA, which Jennifer organizes, and they sell at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market year-round.  Michael’s father is still active on the farm and sells Brinkley Farms product at the Durham Farmers’ Market.  They each keep the proceeds they earn at their respective Market.

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Michael Brinkley – Creedmoor, NC
Date: July 19, 2011
Location: Home of Michael Brinkley – Creedmoor, NC
Interviewer & Photographer: Kate Medley

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Kate Medley:  This is Kate Medley interviewing Michael Brinkley at his home in Creedmoor, North Carolina on the 19th of July 2011. I’ll get you to start by introducing yourself and telling us who you are and what you do.

Michael Brinkley: I am Michael Brinkley. I’m a third generation farmer out of Creedmoor, North Carolina. We’re vegetable farmers, formerly a tobacco farm. We’ve been selling at the Carrboro Market for 10, going on 11 years now. And that’s our life is farming. I was born and raised here on the farm. My great-granddaddy lived right down the road and my great-great-granddaddy lived right down the road. We’ve stayed local to the area for the past 150—160 years.

I’m just drawing blanks. But farming is our life; that’s what we’ve always done. We’ve farmed tobacco. We’ve always farmed vegetables on the side. When the tobacco business started going downhill and we really didn't see no future in that we transferred from tobacco to vegetables and it’s been a good transition for us. And I never did have a problem raising tobacco but I feel a lot better now raising healthy vegetables and foods for people versus tobacco. I’m not talking bad about the tobacco industry at all ‘cause it was good to us for a lot of years. But I’m happy to be doing what we’re doing now—for sure.

Was it your grandfather who started this farm?

My great-granddaddy they were all American subsistence farmers, so they raised food for their selves to live off of. And my granddaddy got married in 1941 and the farm where we’re on now come up for sale about that same time and him and my grandma bought this place and grew it into a pretty large farm for that time in history.
So they’ve always farmed, but he kind of broke off on his own in 1941 and built it up into a pretty large tobacco farm, vegetable farm, always had livestock and that type of stuff, so—.

Do you know more about his tobacco business, who he was selling to and—?

[My grandfather] sold on the Durham Tobacco Market, one of the biggest tobacco markets in the world at the time, and that’s where he sold—all our tobacco was sold, at auction at some of the old warehouses in Durham, some of which they’ve tore down most of them.

Do you have a sense of what that was like, the process of taking your tobacco to market? Did he ever tell you much about that?

Yeah; and I mean I caught the later end of it which was kind of the same style but just one in Durham, but they would harvest tobacco. Early on they would harvest tobacco this time of the year from July, August, September—they would harvest the tobacco. And back then once they got done harvesting they’d put it in a pack house and put it up. And then once they got done harvesting they’d start taking tobacco out of the pack house, grading it into separate grades, and they made these picture perfect beautiful bundles they loaded on trucks, carried it to Durham, unloaded it in the warehouse floor and then—. That’s one thing I kind of hate my kids won't ever get to see the auctioneers. You’d have lines of buyers and auctioneers and then the farmers following behind walking through the warehouse and it was just a—the auctioneer was almost singing his auction buying tobacco. And you had all the buyers hollering and it was almost like a circus event—well affair. I mean it was you know a lot of people there, everybody having a good time, especially if prices were good.

And it was just a happy time for everybody. Everybody in Durham, all the businesses geared up for tobacco selling time because they—it was money. Car dealerships put on sales; clothes—the farmers would bring their wives and kids to town to buy clothes because they had money to buy clothes. And it was just a festive event.

And in the later years it wasn’t quite as festive. Back then I mean farmers would dress up in three-piece suits to go to town to sell their tobacco. When I come along we would clean up but not necessarily put on our Sunday best to go, but it was still just hearing the auctioneer chanting and it—I mean it’s something that gets in your blood and you get used to hearing it and I kind of hate my kids won't will be able to hear that but they will learn about it for sure.

Growing up here in Creedmoor on this farm, what are some of your early memories of being out in the fields?

I’ve always been outside in the fields. I rode with daddy in the truck in the car seat riding around the fields looking at crops, the same way my kids have done. By the time I was five years-old he had me driving trucks around the fields just you know getting an early start. When I was six, seven years old I would drive tractors through the field when we was priming tobacco. My job was—the kids, I couldn’t do much else, but I could sit on the tractor and drive the tractor for everybody else to harvest the tobacco and put it in the trailers behind. And it was a simple job; I was sitting on the tractor and everybody could watch me to make sure I was okay.

What was the job; you were priming tobacco?

Priming tobacco; that’s the harvesting of tobacco. You go through the field, a very backbreaking job, bent over. The ground loves bottom priming and everybody talks about it—anybody that knows tobacco they go to talking about ground priming(s). Everybody grabs a bag ‘cause you’re bent over with your nose to the ground for hours on top of hours pulling off the ripe leaves of tobacco, the yellow leaves and you pull off usually three or four leaves at the time—off each stalk, just stalk after stalk after stalk. You would harvest the tobacco with your hand; wrap your hand around the stalk and harvest three or four leaves, put them under your arm, and then once you got an armload maybe 10, 12, 15 stalks you’d pick that up and walk across the rows of tobacco and drop it in a trailer and go back and do it again. And usually the way we were later on, four or five hours a day was spent doing that.
We were small to mid-scale; we’d prime a barn of tobacco a day and it—usually four or five hours we’d have a barn harvested, so six people bent over through a field like that for that length of time, but it either made a man out of you or killed you—one or the other. [Laughs]

And aside from tobacco, did your grandfather or father grow any other crops?

We always had some cows years ago, always had pigs for the sale. They didn't sell a lot early on but they did what I like to call bootleg sausage. If they had a little extra pig or more than they intended on they’d sell to some neighbors and stuff like that. We’ve always had some grain crops just ‘cause they fit into the crop rotation, some corn for livestock feed, wheat, soybeans because they made a good rotation. So and then we’ve also always had a big garden. My grandma was an avid gardener. She hardly ever bought tomatoes from a store. All her tomatoes or green beans, all that stuff, corn—was put up. She had two or three deep freezers that was full of vegetables. The only thing she bought was staple items, bread and seasonings and all but she had—all her vegetables she put up.

And I’m sure they probably sold some produce years ago. I’ve heard them talk about doing some sweet potatoes a time or two and stuff like that. But some of my earlier years I was still in elementary school when we would plant usually just maybe a big planting of sweet corn. And me and my sisters would harvest it; we was fairly young and that would be our school money. We’d go to Durham; mom would carry us to Durham and we’d sit on the side of the road in the back of a truck selling sweet corn and the money we made we’d split it and go buy our school clothes, shoes, books, and that type of stuff. And at that time I really didn't understand it and it wasn’t they couldn’t afford to buy stuff but they was just teaching us a lesson, a very valuable lesson on we had to work for $1.00.

And then it kind of—we done sweet corn, we done some peas and butter beans and stuff like that and it kind of fell off. Tobacco took up all of our time. And then I reckon in the late ‘90s when my sister started college, just to kind of help her through school, we got back in the vegetable production and kind of picked tobacco up a little bit. And that’s when tobacco was kind of headed down and we didn't see much future there and we seen a lot of future in buying the local thing was coming on and it just kind of blew out of anything we could have ever imagined.

When we got back into pretty big time with corn, the staple Southern items—corn, peas, butter beans, greens, and sweet potatoes and we’ve grew into—we still do all those crops on a larger scale than we ever imagined and have also thrown in a lot of crops that I didn't even know what they were two or three years ago.

How long have you been taking your vegetables to Carrboro?

I believe this is our eleventh year at the Carrboro Market. We started in Durham I think a year or two before and just kind of trying—Durham was a very new market so they were accepting—I hate to say it like that—but pretty much anybody. And we definitely had a lot to learn the first year of the Market. You know we was used to planting one crop of something and carrying it and selling it and then we were done. And we had no idea about succession planting and keeping crops coming all year long. And that was a very steep learning curve for us trying to keep something year-round—well season-long.

And it took us several years to kind of figure out what was going on and what to do but we was probably in our second or third year of good vegetable production when we went to Carrboro. And definitely being in Carrboro you learn from some of the best. That’s probably one of the most competitive markets it is as far as the grade of farmers there. It’s you’re selling against the best when you’re selling at Carrboro.

When I first met you this past Saturday at the Carrboro Farmers Market it was tomato day. Give us a sense of what varieties of tomatoes you had that day and give us a sense of what you brought to Market.

Tomatoes we had for tomato day, we started—we had just a basic what I call a commercial slicing tomato. That’s the simplest we had. Then we had like some Butter Boy red tomatoes and then we get into our heirlooms. We had some Roma tomatoes, good salsa tomatoes and Yellow Roma(s) which have been a pretty big hit this year. It just adds some color. Probably one of our bigger sellers was the Pineapple tomato. It’s a good sweet, mild-flavored tomato; Green Zebra(s), Cherokee Purple(s), which that’s kind of a standard at the Carrboro Market, Cherokee Green(s) which is kind of a new one that’s coming out; Rose tomatoes, kind of like the flower, a rose, is a real full-flavored tomato. That’s been a big hit for us this year. And then we have our Cherry tomatoes, our Sun Sugars and Red Cherries and that pretty much covered it for our tomatoes on tomato day.

And then we had a lot of peppers Saturday—Bell peppers, Colored Bell peppers, Colored—we have a neat little Snack pepper, a little small Snack Pepper that a lot of people like—the kids like that they can eat, very few seeds in them, very sweet; lots of corn, shell beans, shell peas, field peas. We still had some onions we harvested back in the spring that’s keeping — storage onions, a lot of melons—cantaloupes, watermelons. We have three varieties of watermelons. Even have a yellow watermelon, which kind of made my daddy scratch his head a little bit. He said there wasn’t no such thing as—he said watermelon is supposed to be red. We have three or four varieties of cantaloupes, orange flesh cantaloupes that a lot of people seem to like real well.

And but tomatoes and corn and shell beans, that’s probably what we’re more known for at the Carrboro Market. That’s probably some of our bigger sellers. We got a long ways to go to compete with some of the more standard tomato growers, people that is known for tomatoes at the Market. It’s kind of cool to see the different colors and stuff that we got there now though.

I’m really struck by how much your farm has changed in your dad’s lifetime. Are there a lot of things that he sort of shakes his head at in wonderment?

I used to gauge if I wanted to plant a new product, if daddy shook his head and said what in the hell is this—then it was going to do pretty good. That’s kind of the way it was; if he said this will never work then I knew I had a hit.

But and he doesn’t say that much anymore. He just kind of goes along with it and is—both of us are beating our heads to books trying to come up with new stuff to do ‘cause you always got to try to find something, you always find something a little different to kind of keep yourself growing and looking. But yeah; it’s definitely changed a lot. You know we used to just be the staple, purple whole peas, corn type folks, and we’ve added new peas. One of our bigger sellers now are cream peas. We didn't even know what a cream pea was. We found them by accident. We were looking—people had been asking us for a pea and we couldn’t find them, couldn’t find them by name, and a guy said well I got these here. Let’s try these and see how they work for you. And that’s turned into one of our—we’re known for our cream peas and one of the best-flavored peas we’ve ever had. That’s kind of the way our farm works. We’ve learned a lot of stuff by accident and the School of Hard Knocks.

As far as Markets go what do you think the Carrboro Market does particularly well?

[The Carrboro Farmers’ Market does] everything well. It’s just such a well-run organization. Sarah [Blacklin] is probably the best Market Manager in the world—well in the United States. I mean she’s on top of all the—what’s coming out, what do we need to do to keep customers happy, to keep customers coming back, and I don’t know what they do particularly better than—they just do every—they micro-manage everything and try to keep the farmers wanting to do better and wanting to improve their sales and keep the customers coming and keep the customers happy. And that and it’s just a top group of farmers there, too.

I feel like if I can make myself look even close to what some of the other farmers there are doing then I’m on top of the world ‘cause it’s some very, very good people there.

Is there any one person that comes to mind as a regular that comes every week to your stand?

It’s a bunch of them. The first one that pops in my head is Miss Carla. She’s a lady; she’s always there bright and early, first thing every Saturday morning, and sweet lady. She loves watermelon season. That’s her favorite time of the year.

But we have a lot of—especially early in the morning a lot of our regular customers and I’m sad to say a lot of them I don’t even know by name but we know each other and carry on a conversation. One couple that sticks in my mind—and it sticks in mind ‘cause we just lost—his wife just passed away but they was there bright and early every Saturday morning and really enjoyed talking to people and was real enjoyable to talk to. And he still comes by and visits from time to time, but—Bill and Nancy. A lot of people know them; they were definitely regulars there. But it’s a lot of good friendships evolved there from our regular customers, people you get to learn about their lives and they know what’s going on in your life.

What’s your favorite thing about going to Market on Saturdays?

Nothing beats—I reckon the best part is coming home and looking at the money and hoping you made some money but the best part is getting there early, getting everything set up and then right before the rush of customers hit you might have a few customers, you turn around and look and you just got—everything looks good. You know everybody’s stand at the Market is big and full and everything is stacked beautifully. Everybody has got everything looking good and it’s hard to beat that feeling when you just turn around and look and not just my stand—everybody’s stand—everybody is talking and everybody is getting ready for the day, that’s probably my favorite thing about the Market.

Who is there at the Market that you particularly admire?

Some of the ones that’s been there so long—Alex and Betsy come to mind, Ken Dawson comes to mind, and I’m not just limiting it to them but they’ve been there so long and they do such an excellent job, always beautiful stands, top quality. And then they do such a good job they’re good mentors to other local farmers, you know getting people started and I really admire that in them.

And what other things do you want to tell us about either about your farm or your family or your history with the Carrboro Farmers Market?

I don’t know; it’s a great way of life. We take it for granted a lot of times. People will ride out to the farm and—man, it’s beautiful out here. And we just—we see it every day and we just take it for granted especially when it’s hot and dry and we need a rain or if it’s wet and we need it to dry out so we can get something done. But it’s a way of life that I couldn’t see doing anything else and I hope my kids have the option to do whatever they want to do but I hope they keep these memories—. You know I think they even realize now what they’ve got and how they’ve got it made compared to a lot of—. They might not get to go to a ballgame every day or do this and that every day but they’ve kind of got it made out here on the farm.

To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.