opinion
Each summer the sign at Sutton’s farm on Old York Road in Florence sprouts a wooden ear of corn, which means the crop is in, and the trade for Tom Sutton’s super sweet never stops.
Sutton’s may be the sweetest summer corn in Burlington. Maybe South Jersey.
“We’re at the height of corn season,” Sutton said, “so I’m up early, out in the field for an hour, maybe two. How much I pick depends on the day. Tuesdays are light, so I’m only gonna do one row.”
He picks each ear by hand and sells only what he’s picked that day, clean, crisp, sweet.
“What I grow is called Glacial, one of the super sweets,” he said. “Years ago sweet corn lost its flavor within a day, the sugar turning to starch pretty quick. This variety, it’ll stay sweet for 72 hours, if it’s refrigerated. I eat it without butter, salt or Old Bay. Been growing it, oh, eight, nine years now.”
It was 5:20 a.m. He stood in his barn next to a red tractor hitched to a wood crop cart. He’s a third generation farmer.
“Been doing this 50 years,” he said. “I like the work.”
Sutton’s barn sits on a gentle rise, from which there’s view of his hundred acres which has been in his family a hundred years.
“Got 75 acres tillable,” he said. “That’s enough.”
Tending the crop is him and a cousin, who comes each morning before work to help pick corn.
“I’m 69 and if it weren’t for him it’d be a struggle to keep up,” Sutton said. “There’s a lot to do on a farm, a lotta work, even in the off-season. Book work to catch up on. Fixing things. Making sure everything’s in order. But that’s what I like about it. There’s a lot of diversity in the jobs you do. It’s not the same thing 52 weeks a year.”
The big items are tilling and planting and fertilizing. There’s perpetual concern about whether the weather will be good or bad. Everything balances on hope. Farmers may be the most hope-filled, forward-looking people on earth.
“You don’t have time to worry,” he said. “In the fields, you’re not daydreaming. You’re thinking about what adjustments have to be made in every row. If things are running smooth, then there’s time to think.”
Before heading to the fields, he thought two long-ago memories. One makes him smile, the other doesn’t.
“Bought that John Deere (tractor) when I got out of high school in 1969,” he said, pointing to the massive green and yellow rig on the other side of the barn. “Dad said I ought to get one with a cab. I told him that I just spent all those years inside, in a classroom, when all I ever wanted to be was outside. A cab was like me being inside, so I didn’t get one. Now that I’m older, I can see Dad was right. Shoulda got the cab.
“This barn was rebuilt in ’98 after the fire,” he said. “Someone set my buildings on fire. Arson. The worst was losing my machine shop, my tools. It was part of a string of six (farm building arsons) that year. Someone just setting places on fire. They never caught the guy. All the state police said was they didn’t think mine was connected to the others.”
The barn is shadowy at dawn. It smells of wood and earth and oiled machines. Cats dart between tractors, wood tables and equipment. He stood next to a 1943 Farmall, the tractor he’d take into the fields. It belonged to his father, as did the hitched cart.
“Dad built this cart by hand in 1940,” he said. “It’s got springs so it gives a nice ride. Still sturdy.”
He patted it like an old friend.
“On a tractor, when I was young, it was my freedom, like getting time off. Riding around, high up, over the fields,” he said. “But now all that bouncing around, well, it stiffens me up, and when I go to get off, it’s like whoa. Not retiring, yet. Just take it year to year, see how I feel. Right now, I feel good.”
Right now he had work to do.
Fourteen minutes to sunrise. He donned a yellow raincoat coat, climbed up into his dad’s Farmall, and fired it up. Barn cats scattered as the engine revved, the rain cap on the stack clinked open and shut and open again.
He nosed the red machine into the morning half-light, towing the cart. He traveled a path on a gentle grade, a man in a peaked cap on a tractor, silhouetted against the orange and blue sky.
Mist hung over his fields like clouds of soft cotton. He descended into the croplands, into the bounty of another sweet summer harvest.
Columnist JD Mullane can be reached at 215-949-5745 or at jmullane@couriertimes.com.
The Link LonkAugust 23, 2020 at 04:00PM
https://ift.tt/3la3cYy
Mullane: In Florence, a farmer at the height of the South Jersey corn season - Bucks County Courier Times
https://ift.tt/3gguREe
Corn
No comments:
Post a Comment