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Show who managed co hold on had to stare rethinking the way they did business, and fast. That 's when a small group of area farmers put their heads and their money together and formed the Indian Indi-an Springs Farmers Coop. Drawing on their family connections in Chicago, the group pooled together and bought two 10-wheelers, each of which could hold up to 900 watermelons. Loading the trucks with their crops, the farmers would rake run after run up to the city, where they usually usu-ally would sell out within a day. "One would be going, the other would be coming back," Burkett says. In the meantime, as prices continued to sag in the 1980s, Burkett also took a job with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, one of the nation's oldest civil rights and land assistance organizations, which had helped the Indian Springs Co-op write its charter char-ter and bylaws. That's about the time he started to be known in farming circles for his decision to stay home, to stick it out, to make it work. While he started working on distribution deals through the co-op at home, he also hit the road, teaching teach-ing and talking with other developing co-ops in the federation, working his way across Alabama, Alaba-ma, Georgia, and South Carolina, then coast to coast. With the other farmers in the federation, fed-eration, he went abroad to the Philippines, spent 10 weeks in Europe, and began an annual series of trips to Africa. He lectured on everything from raising rais-ing honey to credit unions and export-readiness export-readiness issues. He brought home new irrigation techniques, new market information. infor-mation. He worked his way across Israel, Egypt, Libya, Senegal, Gambia, South Africa, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. Every time he came home, he helped build the distribution and wholesale deals that helped members of the co-op, who now number 44, to keep their farms alive. He also helped raise the money to build a state-of-the-art processing center, where members can store, clean, and box their produce designed to handle $1 million a year in business volume. With his family (They're my work force," he smiles.), he continued to harvest all his crops com, butter beans, turnips, spinach, crowder peas, among others by hand and to drive them to neighboring cities such as Jackson and New Orleans, where he has expanded the co-op's business. On one such a drive his family met with tragedy. In a track that he had purchased only a day before, Burkett s brother, James, skidded off the road in Irish Bayou, La., and was killed. The accident once again made Burkett question everything his trips abroad, the future of the farm. But in the end, it only brought him closer to the land where he was bom, where he had spent all of his life. And though things have changed in Petal new homes, shops, and fast-food restaurants mushrooming over former farmland he says there's nowhere he'd rather be. "It's the best living in the world," he says. "If I have not one dollar in my pocket, I have a bed to stay in and food to eat, and that's it." "My responsibility is to improve the land... and hand it to the next generation better than when it was handed to me." Times are never really easy for farmers like Burkett. "In the last census that I know of, there were only 18,000 small African-American farms left," says Keith Richards, executive director of the Southern Sustainable Sustain-able Agriculture Working Group in Elkins, Ark. "At the rum of the century, there were over 1 million." Faced with such steady declines, some kind of collectivizing col-lectivizing is almost always a necessary measure, Richards says. "Just being a small family farm, ir takes some kind of innovation and some kind of edge to make it all through this time when most of them have gone out of business," he says. It takes a particular kind of leadership co make a coop co-op work, says George Penick, director of the Foundation for the Mid South in Jackson, Miss. "With a lot of farmers, farm-ers, big and small, the mentality is you just keep planting," plant-ing," he says. "I think Ben has a very good sense of innovation, inno-vation, and he's sort of a mentor for African-American farmers and that's very important." But for all the praise that federation colleagues and fellow farmers are quick to pile upon Burkett, he says his drive to keep the farm alive runs far deeper than good business sense. "It means an awful lot to me," he says. "Sometimes when I'm on my farm, I think that I'm the fourth generation on the same piece of land. It supported me and sent me through college, and now it's sending my daughter and my nephew through college." Burkett s daughter, Damella, following in her father's footsteps, is now a sophomore studying agriculture at Alcorn Stare. "When I was at Alcorn where they teach you all that stuff from books, I'd come back and talk to my daddy about it," he laughs. "So now my daughter comes back talking to me about hydroponics and greenhouses." But whether Darnella and her cousins eventually will run the farm still is up in the air, Burkett says. "I'm ready to let them take over," he says. "It's good sandy-loam sandy-loam land. It'll grow anything on it, any kind of vegetable crop." After 28 years running the farm, his mind turns increasingly to his family's future generations. He hopes they will come to the same realization he did, that the Burkett Bur-kett farm is worth fighting to hold on to, the legacy worth preserving. "My responsibility is to improve the land and take care of it and hand it to the next generation better than when it was handed to me," he says. "So that's what I've been trying to do. In my heart, my land is something close to me. You've got to take care of it." Michael Depp is a uriter in Seu Orleans. American Profile Page 7 Fdow Iti ntta Myron Dougfcu nd Burtett rey on 2 1 rt-cenojry technology. |