Leading in their field: As farms decline, Nash County brothers work to grow family legacy

The assignment appeared simple enough. As part of a collection of articles on teen summer jobs, I would interview someone who worked in tobacco.

It seemed like the kind of thing I could have done with my eyes closed. Growing up on a tobacco farm in Franklin County, I lived this story. I never even had to apply for a summer job; one was simply assigned to me. Beginning at age 10, my career pathway started on a dirt and gravel driveway that ran behind my parents’ house. At the end of it were tobacco barns and summer work that waited for me every year until I went off to college.

But a few decades later, as I set out to pursue this article, I learned that I am not the only one who grew up and left the farm. Although I tried reaching out to high school agriculture teachers and a field crops agent, no one knew of any local teens working in tobacco for the summer. Finally, longtime Pitt County farmer Lawrence Davenport pointed me in the right direction. About an hour west of Greenville, I hit pay dirt near Nashville with Leggett Farms, owned by Brent and Sue Leggett. Together with their sons, they are working to grow their first-generation farming operation into a family legacy.

NASHVILLE — Back to school signals the end of sleeping in for a lot of teenagers, but that’s not the case for the Leggett brothers, who have been up and out the door by 6:30 a.m. most days since school got out in May.

Colin, 17, and Carter, 13, should get a little extra shut-eye once classes start next week at Rocky Mount’s Faith Christian School. Students don’t have to get up with the chickens. Farmers do.

“From May until August, they work full time,” Brent Leggett said of his sons, who have been helping out on the family farm since they were first-graders. “When they get out of school, this is the first place they come.

“We live together. We work together. It’s what we do. We’re a true family farm.”

While their classmates might spend part of their summers in workouts for football, baseball or soccer, the Leggett brothers have a different definition for “field conditioning.” Theirs involves driving a tractor, a skill both boys learned at age 9.

A generation ago in rural eastern North Carolina, student summer jobs in tobacco were as common as dirt. For teens whose parents didn’t grow crops, there were plenty of positions to be had on the farms of uncles and cousins, friends and neighbors. Jobs in tobacco helped many students pay for their school clothes, and districts sometimes delayed starting classes or temporarily shortened their school days until the harvest was done.

But that was then. Today, despite reports that the number of teens with summer jobs is at the highest level in 15 years, few are finding work on farms.

Longtime farmer Lawrence Davenport said that across Pitt County, from Ayden to Grimesland, Pactolus and Stokes, he doesn’t know of a single tobacco farm that employs teens.

“I’m sure there are some somewhere, but I don’t know them,” Davenport said. “It’s very rare.”

While two of his three children run the family’s agriculture operation today, his five grandchildren have never worked on a farm. Davenport, whose family stopped growing tobacco two years ago, has seen the decline over the last two decades.

“It’s a little different because it’s so much more mechanized now,” he said. “I didn’t have any local teenagers. They have to be over 16. You can work your own kids, but you can’t hire somebody 15 and put them on a tractor.”

Davenport started farm work before his teen years, something that he and Brent Leggett have in common. Leggett was 12 when a family friend hired him to drive a tractor in the field and take cured tobacco out of barns in the afternoons, piling it into burlap sheets to be tied up and taken to market.

“His dad would give us $5 a barn to take out tobacco,” Leggett, 49, recalled. “It didn’t matter how long it took us. But we could do it in 45 minutes, so we were making $7 or $8 an hour.

“I was in the age group when there were still a lot of kids working in it,” he said. “I think just with changing times, farm consolidation, less farmers, it’s not as common as it was. Just realizing you had to come an hour away (from Greenville) to find a family farm that has teenagers interested in going back to the farm, I think that right there’s a tell-tale sign that agriculture’s changing.”

Statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture tell a similar story, indicating that America has lost much in terms of farms in recent years. The 2022 Census of Agriculture reports 141,733 fewer farms than just five years earlier. The loss of farm acres from 2017 to 2022 was 20 million.

Meanwhile, the average age of farmers has increased to 58, up from 53 a decade earlier. According to the census, nearly 1.3 million farmers are age 65 or older, while the number of farmers younger than 35 stands around 300,000.

Tobacco farms have seen a steep decline over the last two decades. Following the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, which included the Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform, commonly referred to as the “Tobacco Buyout,” the number of tobacco farms has decreased by 95%, according to University of Kentucky Extension Professor Will Snell. The number of U.S. farms growing tobacco declined from 56,977 farms in 2002 to 2,987 in 2022.

“In the ‘80s you could take 50 to 75 acres of tobacco, and you could raise a family of four, send them to school. It was a really good living,” Leggett said. “Just the costs have gone up so much now. The price we’re seeing for the tobacco has gone up some but has not accelerated as fast. Economics, adversity, markets, whatever it is, some parents may not want their children to come back to the farm.”

It was different for Leggett, whose grandfather grew peanuts, corn and soybeans in Bertie County when Brent was a boy. While he did not grow up on a farm, Leggett studied crop technology and agribusiness at North Carolina State University. After graduation, he served as a manager for Dale Bone, who had a large farming operation in Nash County.

“He didn’t have any children,” Leggett recalled of his late boss. “After the tobacco buyout, he said, if you want to farm, go home and talk to your wife. If she’s OK with it, I’ll help you farm.”

Leggett and his wife, Sue, who runs the office, grew their farming business into a 3,000-acre operation that includes tobacco, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cotton, soybeans, watermelons and strawberries. Their two sons have been involved since before either of the boys can remember.

Sue has a picture of Colin at about 2 weeks old, already on the combine with his dad. By the time the boys were 6 or 7, they were coming to work with regularly with their father.

“We followed him around,” Colin recalled. “It’s not many jobs you get to work with your kids or take your kids to work.”

He and his younger brother learned to operate tractors, trucks, sprayers and combines by the time most kids learn to ride a two-wheel bike.

“I grew up with it kind of all my life,” Carter said.

Both sons are fluent in Spanish and often help translate instructions for workers. Since 2018, the two have run their own sweet corn business, planting up to five acres of the crop and selling it at farmers’ markets and the family’s strawberry stand.

“A good friend of mine, who’s kind of been a mentor to me, said if you don’t get their attention by the time they’re 15, when they turn 16 and get their driver’s license, they’ll never look back,” Leggett said. “If you get a car and start chasing girls and baseball, you get so busy with other things in life. The last thing you want to do is go back and work on a farm. It’s hard work. It’s a big commitment.”

Colin and Carter, who are paid for their labor, said their jobs on the farm are helping them to develop a good work ethic and are teaching them leadership and accountability. While their parents have told them they are free to choose other career paths, for now, both say they want to continue the family farm.

“I believe a farmer’s greatest gift is when their children come back and farm,” Leggett said. “We have to have children that are interested in farming to continue on the agriculture that this country needs.”

What that will look like for the next generation is uncertain. Leggett knows that encroaching development may cause his sons to have to move the farming operation.

“Look how much it’s changed just in the last 20 years,” he said. “I think by the time they’re my age, it will be changed that much more.”

Colin hopes that farming will provide a living for the generation after his and that his children will one day work to continue the family’s legacy.

“You can’t force them to,” he said. “If the opportunity’s there, I hope they take it. I hope that’s the path they’ll take.”