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Tim Sloop was 13 when he started
working for Frank Patterson Farms, and his second cousin, Greg Hartsell, was 12
when he joined him a year later.
They worked in the afternoons, on
Saturdays and during the summers, learning the business of vegetable farming
from Patterson himself. It was hard work, but Sloop and Hartsell enjoyed it.
The cousins, who lived within two
miles of Patterson, came from a family of farmers. Sloop’s uncle, who is
Hartsell’s grandfather, was a dairy farmer and raised small grain, as did
Sloop’s grandfather, Hartsell’s great-grandfather, before him, or something
like that. “It gets confusing when you’ve got cousins like this,” Sloop
says.
After graduating from South Rowan
High School in 1981, he continued to work on the farm. “Ienjoy being outside,
just out in the fresh air,” he says, “and not in a stifling environment like
you’d be in a closed-up situation.”
Hartsell graduated from South two
years later and went to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he
studied computer science and math education before dropping out two semesters
shy of graduation. He got a job at Plastics Manufacturing in Harrisburg.
“My department was in the center
of the plant,” he says, “and there wasn’t a window in the place. It about
drove me crazy.”
He ended up quitting and, not sure
what to do next, Hartsell went back to Patterson Farms, planning to only stay
until he found something else. It wasn’t long after that, however, that
Patterson asked if they’d be interested in leasing the farm after he retired.
“He wanted to keep the farm going,”
Sloop says. “That was his main goal.”
Though Patterson had three
daughters, their husbands worked in different fields, so he looked to the young
men who had grown up helping him to keep the farm his father, James, had started
in 1921 in operation.
Sloop and Hartsell are now in their
fifth year as partners in Frank Patterson Farms.
“We incorporated when we started,”
Hartsell says. “It’s Frank Patterson Farms Inc.”
The partnership has worked out well.
Sloop, who just turned 37, and
Hartsell, 35, say they even think alike. Sometimes, one of them will make a
suggestion, Sloop says, “and the other one will say, ‘I was thinking the
same thing.’ Our wives say it’s uncanny.”
Patterson lives on the farm and
drops by regularly to see how things are going or to offer a helping hand. Sloop
and Hartsell say they both look up to him.
He has been like a teacher, Sloop
says. “We were around him as much as we were anyone for the last 15 years,”
he says.
The cousins lease a total of 250
acres from Patterson and other property owners. Though they raise squash,
cucumbers, cantaloupes, sweet corn, okra, watermelons and peppers, tomatoes are
by far their biggest crop.
“Probably our biggest buyer right
now is the Harris-Teeter stores,” Hartsell says. “We deliver directly to the
stores three times a week.”
Frank Patterson Farms supplies
tomatoes to 16 to 18 stores in Salisbury, Mooresville, Monroe and Charlotte
areas. Frank Patterson tomatoes can also be bought at Johnson’s Superette in
China Grove or directly from Sloop and Hartsell at the farm on Patterson Road.
Though they grow five different
varieties, Hartsell says their main one is Mountain Fresh.
They and their one full-time
employee, Nathan Wells, start sowing seeds in the greenhouses in mid-February.“We
grow vegetable plants to sell, too,” Hartsell says. “That’s a pretty good
early spring means of income for us.”
Around mid-April, they begin setting
the tomato plants out. They ride on a setter on the back of a tractor and place
the plants by hand.
Hartsell says they start out
planting 10 acres for the early market, then stagger planting about three acres
at a time to keep tomatoes coming in through frost. As the plants grow, they
have to be pruned, staked and sprayed about every seven days.
The biggest problem they have to
worry about now is spider mites, according to Hartsell. They get on the foliage
and will eventually kill the plant or damage the tomatoes. “You have to have a
magnifying glass to see them,” he says.
It might be something different two
years from now,Sloop says. “A lot of these things migrate from Florida,” he
says.
Though the spray kills most of the
weeds, Hartsell says it misses some of the morning glories and briars. This
means they usually have to go through the fields at least once with a hoe.
“It is very labor-intensive,”
Sloop says. “It’s not something you can put out and forget about and then
harvest.”
The seven migrant workers hired by
the farm start picking tomatoes in early June and continue through the first
frost, which usually happens around the last of October or the first of
November. One wholesale customer, who grows tomatoes in Pennsylvania, buys them
from Sloop and Hartsell until his come in.
The migrant workers, who live on the
farm, ride a tobacco harvester to pick the tomatoes and pack them in boxes,
stacking them for someone to pick up at the end of each row. After that, the
tomatoes are carried to a grading shed, where they are emptied into an automatic
grader and sorted by size.
Part-time employees, including
retirees and high school students, pick out the culls and sort them by color,
ranging from “breakers,” green tomatoes with the orange just breaking out,
Sloop explains, to ripe red. Then they’re packed into boxes and stacked for
delivery.
It takes about 11 people to grade
and pack the tomatoes, according to Hartsell.
Sometimes, he says, the greener
tomatoes are put in the cooler and allowed to ripen naturally before being
delivered.
“On a good day, in this place, we’ll
pack 400, 500 boxes,” Sloop says. They have packed as many as 1,000 to 1,500
boxes on peak days.
This has been a better than average
year for the farm. “The prices have been a little bit better than average,”
Hartsell says.
The weather has been dry, but he
says it hasn’t affected them that much because they irrigate. “You don’t
get the coverage you get with natural rain,” he says. “It’s not quite as
good, but we do all right.”
They’ve been lucky this year, they
say, not to have had any hail, which breaks the plants and leaves holes in the
tomatoes. Hail is a tomato farmer’s nightmare, Sloop says.
Sloop and Hartsell work Monday
through Saturday from 6 or 6:30 in the morning to 5:30 or 6 at night. This time
of year, the harvest is slowing down enough to where they can start leaving a
little earlier on Saturdays. By next Saturday, when dove hunting season comes
in, they say they definitely want to get away early.
The hard work in the summer eases
off in the winter months, when Sloop and Hartsell hope to take a couple of weeks
off at Christmas and then a couple of days a week before they have to start
sowing the seeds. This is the first year they were both able to take a vacation
in the summer.
For Hartsell and Sloop, who still
live within a few miles of Frank Patterson Farms, farming means their families
always have fresh vegetables to eat.
Tomatoes are a part of every evening
meal at the Sloop house. Tim and his wife, Mary, have two daughters,
Elizabeth,10, and Sarah, 5.
Hartsell says his wife, Kelly, doesn’t
like tomatoes, but the family, which includes 7-year-old Madison, eats the other
vegetables.
As for whether tomatoes are fruits
or vegetables, Hartsell says, “We’re not going there.”
Sloop says:“My daughter asks that
question every day.”
As far as he’s concerned, Hartsell
concludes, “we’re in vegetable produce.”
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