KENNARD: Harvest time signals change in the seasons  

I was out in the country earlier this week enjoying the “cooler” weather, driving with my windows down and the radio turned up when I found myself in the middle of a small dust storm — well sort of.

A corn harvester was working through a section of field corn and had made a turn just as Neil Diamond and I happened along.

I realized it must be harvest season — again, sort of.

Harvest season really depends on what’s growing at any given time around here. The wheat harvest is all pretty much done by now. Soybean fields are still looking pretty green and won’t start coming in until October; cotton and peanuts, too.

Tobacco, which has a rich history in North Carolina, began its harvest in July and will last through September depending on the weather.

Speaking of tobacco, when I was compiling the “Our History” column this week I found a fun little story about the once very lucrative tobacco crop. You can find it on page 3A today.

It seems that in 1922 — that’s 100 years ago — a kid from Washington D.C., heard about North Carolina and the money being made in tobacco. He put on his walking shoes and headed south with enough money to rent three acres of farmland. A few months later, he harvested his crop and made a small fortune; at least enough that the 19-year-old farmer didn’t have to walk all the way back to D.C.

Years ago when our family of six was just a family of four and I was just a baby journalist, we rented a little white cinder block house in the middle of a corn field in central Washington. The man we rented from used the building as housing for migrant labor — which I supposed we were since we lived there less than a year until we could find a home with few bugs and dependable plumbing.

Despite what my wife called primitive living, I enjoyed the place for its simplicity, the smell of rain as it fell on the dirt roads, the sound of distant farm equipment working the fields, even mowing the grass in the small yard that was shaded from the hot summer sun by tall poplar trees.

More than once during our stay, we’d wake to the roar of aerial applicators (crop dusters) seemingly dive bombing our little home in the country.

The kids would watch as they’d circle around, then come in fast, diving under the powerlines and letting loose with the pesticide spray or fertilizer or whatever it was the corn needed.

Just inches above the field crop, those pilots flew in fast toward our little white shack, then pulled up just in time to miss the tallest branches of the poplars that stood like centuries around our home.

Over the years, I’ve wondered just what kind of lasting health effects we might have from whatever spray may have drifted over home. But now that my two youngest are fully grown and living full lives, I can only surmise that it must have been good for both us and the sweet corn.

Nowadays, on my drive in to work, I’ll occasionally get stuck behind a tractor or some other piece of farm equipment. But I’ve found it doesn’t bother me so much; it gives me time to look out over the fields and appreciate the annual change in season from an agricultural point of view.

David Kennard is the executive editor of the Robesonian. Contact him at dkennard@robesonian.com.