Leon Gibson

August 25, 1949

I was born on a farm and started out farming as a baby. I used to sit in the cotton field under a table. My mom would put a sheet over it. She carried me to the field when I was first born. I enjoyed most all of it, except cotton. I hated cotton. I didn’t mind chopping cotton or hoeing cotton or plowing it, but I hated to pick cotton. I guess the reason I was a farmer was because my mother and daddy were. Plus, I was raised there. That’s the only thing I knew until I got out of high school. We grew corn, cotton, pepper, hay, and soy beans. And we had cattle and hogs, too.

            As I got out of high school, I left the farm. When I came back to farming, I was just a part-time farmer. I helped my granddaddy some when I was ten or twelve years old. I helped him plant corn with a mule plow. He did all his farming with a mule plow until he retired. He never did drive a tractor in his life.

            Mechanical farming saved a lot of time and you could get more done in one day. One person could take care of more ground, but you invest more money. Because of tractors, things produce more than they did. But things also cost more, so I don’t know if things are better today than they used to be. My dad used to work for four dollars a day from daylight to dark milking cows for a neighbor. You make a lot more than that now, but you still spend more. Daddy would farm full-time, but certain times he worked off the farm. One time, when he was very young, he worked at a dairy, and, as he got older, he took a job working for the Highway Department building Interstate 59. He worked there for several months. He also worked for the ASCS office measuring land in the summer time. We didn’t realize we weren’t as well off as some people. I used to have to stay out of school to pick cotton. Other than that, I started doing the main part of plowing when I was twelve years old and that’s when my dad worked on the interstate and he turned the crops over to me. I would get the tractor and turn the cornfield and everything and put out all the fertilizer myself. I think this taught me a lot of responsibility.

            Back then we’d get up real early and always eat a big breakfast. I don’t mean corn flakes. I mean biscuits, bacon, eggs, sausage, and jelly. You need a big breakfast to work on during the day. The jobs were never the same. Sometimes you would chop the cotton or plow the fields or maybe even work the cattle. You would come in for dinner, eat, and then go back at it again and work until dark, and then come back in for supper. Then, you would go to sleep. On Saturdays I got off early to go on dates. We didn’t work on Sundays; we went to church.

            Being raised on a farm made me different than others because I realized food didn’t come out of the grocery store and a lot of people didn’t acknowledge that. On a farm you realized you raised the food and you were more dependent on it and the rain and temperature to simply live.