Right now, we're running two trucks. That requires two good men I can depend on. If they're capable of driving a truck over the road, then they are capable of coming back here in the summer when the tobacco is really busy and helping me with that. When the summer is over, they haul grain, then start back hauling fertilizer over the winter. Lewis has 14 full-time employees, some of whom have been with him since the start.
Wages are good, incentives and bonuses are available, and health and life insurance are provided.
He said he'd buy it and give me half, and we'd finance it together. The partners bought their first machine in 1980. It was providing an annual income that more than doubled the original investment cost. Lewis put his growing earnings to work, plowing them back into the farming that was proving so full of promise even if agriculture was then, as now, in a depression. Not much, perhaps, but better than the two bucks and change the local knitting mills were paying, and infinitely more rewarding.