WE FARM THE RIGHT OF WAYS

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Armed with this information, I went straight to the offices of a nearby steel company that owned a right-of-way just five minutes from my front doorstep. I talked for a few minutes with someone in the firm's Land Department and-with no trouble at all-arranged to lease 13 acres of right-of-way (with a good access road in and out and a gate to keep out vandals) for less than $8.00 per acre per year.

A 13-ACRE "PEA PATCH"

With no more gardening experience to draw on than what I had learned as a child, I decided (as all beginning gardeners do) to start big. My plan was to cultivate all 13 acres (with the aid of my brother's tractor) and have a garden that would yield plenty of vegetables for my family as well as my brother's.

In March, we began cutting, clearing, bush-hogging, pulling stumps, and turning and discing the land. By the end of the first day's planting, however, it was apparent that a single 1/2-acre plot was all that our two families could take care of, since Archie (my brother) and I both had full-time jobs to attend to. Even with " only" 1/2 acre under cultivation, though, we raised more cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, turnips, and other vegetables in our spare time than we could eat, can, freeze, sell, or give away!

THE DILEMMA

The next year found us in a dilemma: My brother's family decided to get out of the farming business and buy a small plot next to their home for gardening use ... which meant that Denise and I were left with 13-acres of good farming land and no tractor. Necessity being the father of invention, I ultimately decided to rent a tractor from a neighbor who lives near "my" right-of-way and prepare the 13-acre parcel for planting . . . even though I didn't yet know who was going to plant, maintain, or harvest the area.

As fate would have it, one Sunday in church (right after I'd plowed our vegetable patch) someone mentioned that he was trying (unsuccessfully) to find a place to garden. At that point, I knew I had the answer to my problem. With binder's twine, I marked off a couple of 20' X 50' plots and assigned them to families and individuals who needed a place to raise food. No money exchanged hands: Instead, I asked-and got?one third of what everyone raised. For my "33% commission", I provided the land and the first plowing. The families did their own planting, hoeing, and harvesting.

This "sharecropping" arrangement has proved to be a great success ... not just for me, but for everyone involved. Each year, I get more requests from new gardeners who want to grow crops on my leased land, and every season I see more and more families working together on their gardens. Farming knowledge gets traded back and forth with every chop of the hoe, and everyone always winds up with more food than he/she knows what to do with. (That includes me. Knowing how honest the folks who garden with me are, I'm sure I've always gotten more than a third of their harvests.)

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