My grandfather Rushing probably turned over in his grave this week. The reason for his unrest would have been the occasion of me paying $5 for a little over 2 pounds of raw peanuts. I think that I got ripped off, but I wanted them any way. I love boiled peanuts--1/2 cup of salt, 1 gallon of water, and three hours later and I was in business. I've already eaten them all.
My “Pa” Rushing was a farmer in south Alabama back in the early and mid 1900’s. He grew crops like cotton, corn, sugar cane, and peanuts in the days before the US Department of Agriculture got into the business of telling a farmer what crops they could plant on THEIR FAMILY’S LAND and how much of each crop they could plant on THEIR FAMILY”S LAND.
“Pa” did things the old fashioned way, by his wits and hard work. To clear his fields and pastures, he cut the timber by hand, pulled the stumps out of the ground with a mule team, and hauled the logs to the sawmill on a wagon to get the lumber to build the house I visited every weekend and for several weeks during the summer each year. He didn’t get a tractor until the early 1940’s—it was mule-power before horsepower back then in our little part of south Alabama. If you have never had the opportunity to spend any time on a working farm, you have no idea what an wonderful experience it is--particularly when you are eight years old.
Now back to my five dollars worth of peanuts…let me tell you about the peanut…
The peanut is a legume- like a pea or bean that grows together with its brothers and sisters inside a “pod.” The weirdest thing is that peanuts start out as blooms on stems of the plant above ground, but after they bloom the peanut plant sticks the developing peanuts into the ground around its base. You have to dig the peanuts out of the ground when you harvest them.
A famous African American named George Washington Carver did a bunch of research on peanuts in the early 1900’s and almost single handedly converted the south from a cotton economy living and dieing under the siege of the Cotton Bowl Weevil to a multi-crop farm economy after the dust bowl years of the mid 1930’s.
Today, if I wanted to grow peanuts, I would plow my field and harvest my crop with my $156,000, five-hundred horsepower John Deere 9620 tractor. Here’s a photo:
My next car will be a tractor
Imagine driving that baby down to the grocery store to pick up few things for dinner...
In addition to the 26 speed transmission and eight-wheel drive, it has the the Greenstar Ag Management System that is basically a Global Positioning System autopilot. All you have to do is drive your tractor around the perimeter of the field you wish to plow, manually drive the first few rows, and the tractor takes over and finishes the rest of the job with you spending your time just hanging out watching the latest Star Wars movie on your in cab DVD player.
No wonder my peanuts cost five dollars…
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