Love At First Sight…With A Tractor?

ROB MILLS

PARMA, MISSOURI

The recent passing of former First Lady Rosalyn Carter may have jogged a few memories of how the Carter family of Plains, Georgia first came to prominence in the 1970’s.  

It was their success in the peanut farming realm of agriculture that financed Jimmy Carter’s Road to the Governor’s Mansion, then the White House in the 1970’s. 

Only five percent of U.S. farmers grow peanuts. But American farmers control 10% of the world’s peanut market, exporting approximately 225,000 metric tons a year. That production comes from utilizing only three percent of U.S. farmland, which provides higher than average crop yields than anywhere else globally.

One Missouri bootheel farmer joined the fraternity of peanut farmers several years ago and has stuck with it. 

Justin Littleton oversees Littleton Farm Enterprises of Parma, Missouri. Littleton and his brother Austin farm several thousand acres along Highway 153 on the way to Memphis in southeast Missouri. Littleton says his intro to the ag life wasn’t forced; it was love at first sight. “My Grandfather had a farm and I always enjoyed going there,” he told MAFG. “What I fell in love with were the tractors,” though he added today he has a love/hate relationship with the farm culture’s oldest powered machine. “I’ve come to look at them as a necessary evil,” he said.

He went on to add it’s not the tractor, it’s the business climate that creates and sells them to the farmer that’s the problem. “Costs across the board keep going up. You have less than a handful of companies that control the tractor market. If a company wants $100,00 for their product in 2023, in five years they’ll want $150,000. If these price hikes don’t stop, it will kill the little guy,” he concluded. 

After traveling a road that led through Sikeston (Mo) High School and Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, Littleton took the wisdom that a bachelor’s degree in Ag Business provides and started in own farm in 2014. He described the first year as “hard.” Having planted rice, corn, soybeans & cotton, Justin and his brother Austin decided to take a shot at growing nuts. In 2019, a group of Arkansas farmers created Delta Peanut LLC of Jonesboro. The Littleton brothers became shareholders in the infant company. Almost a decade after they opened the doors, DPLLC is holding its own.

“What we’ve found in peanuts is a consistent crop. The bootheel soil is sandy, not the greatest, but it’s perfect for growing peanuts. We don’t make the money some farmers make, but year in year out we’ve remained stable,” Littleton said. He added “the big guys can have a million dollars in the bank and survive a disastrous growing season. The small farmer has $100,000 in his account and is wiped out by one bad year. We’ve avoided that.”

When the Littleton’s started their operation, they received the help of a veteran bootheel farmer named Alan Below. Never legally formalized, Blue and the Littleton brothers were handshake partners, operating out of the same building, working together while farming different acreage. “We’d drive our tractors over each other’s fields, doing the business side of things under the same roof. Alan helped get me started. He’s been a real friend of mine,” Justin said.

The Sikeston farming community decades ago was known for its huge farms, high income farmers and fortunes made off the land. Today, Littleton says it’s different. “The kids of these major farmers didn’t want to carry on as their parents retired. Their land has either been sold to consolidators or managed by agencies who write the children a check twice a year. The money that outbids the small farmers in the land sales that follow eventually dictates who grows what. You do what the new owners say when you lease their land. How does the small guy have a fighting chance in a world like that?” He went on to say in a decade you’ll have one farmer to twenty agencies, a ratio that in his opinion doesn’t bode well for the future of independent operators.

Recent statistics from the USDA indicate there are 2 million farmers in the U.S. today, down ten percent just fifteen years ago. As Justin looks at the future of his farm, and the nation’s farms, he sees one issue that will define the future…cost. “Expenses are always going up. The price of corn is down over 30 % from last year. The price of a tractor or combine or labor will never go down, it will always go up. Unless some type of cost control can be reached within the ag industry, the small guys are going to go out of business.” He added that although there are those who believe the Federal Government needs to partner with the American farmer, that in cases like the administration of the Federal Crop Insurance Program, it’s evident no one in D.C is keeping tabs on the money being paid for questionable claims that are being filed. “If they can’t take the time to properly oversee an insurance program, how can they do anything helpful on a national scale,” he concluded.

Littleton recalled his days at Southeast Missouri State University, when his dealings with the Ag faculty there cemented his vision to become a farmer. “The people there were helpful, personable, down to earth. You could hold a conversation with them. It seems simple, but that is what needs to take place today…communication within the ag world.” 

Regardless of whether that ever happens, Justin, his wife Caroline and their three-year-old daughter Grace will be found on their family farm for the foreseeable future, if not a lifetime. And present at that farm will be a tractor, that machine that triggered his love of farming all those years ago. Even if it costs too much to have that thing around! ∆

ROB MILLS: MAFG Contributing Writer