By Aaron Gould Sheinin
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Meanwhile, in Tifton, University of Georgia researchers are working to develop new varieties of lettuce and kale that could help the state’s farmers meet growing national demand for crops devastated by drought in California.

While movies, cars and technology have benefited from much of the economic hoopla in recent years, farming remains Georgia’s oldest and biggest industry, with a $70 billion impact. State agricultural leaders say this year might be be the biggest yet. And they believe Georgia could be on the cusp of even greater growth, fueled by sweat and dirt and a willingness to experiment and change.

“If there’s a product that can be grown in this part of the country and the consumer wants it, I think we can find a grower to try it,” said Zippy Duvall, the president of the Georgia Farm Bureau.

There are fewer farms in Georgia than there were a generation ago, yet the value of agricultural products sold in the state shot up to $9.25 billion in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. What Georgians grow and how they grow it has changed dramatically as well, whether it’s a precipitous drop in cattle and pigs or equally significant spikes in poultry. What’s being harvested from the state’s famous red dirt, too, is different: Corn is down and tobacco has plummeted, while cotton remains steady despite increasingly difficult economics.

The most explosive growth in the state, perhaps, has come from blueberries. Blueberries blew past peaches as the state’s top fruit in 2008 and kept on going. As recently as 2007 there were 4,800 acres of blueberries planted in Georgia, but by 2014 the little blue fruit occupied more than 16,600 acres, an increase of more than 245 percent in seven years.

Rusty Bell has seen the industry explode. He’s been farming blueberries for 30 years in the Pierce County town of Bristol, between Jesup and Waycross.

Back then, Bell said, “You could put the handful of us in a small room.”

Bell said blueberries’ growth in Georgia was fueled, in part, by tobacco’s demise.

“People were looking for different things,” Bell said. “Other commodities were not paying as much per acre. The blueberries, they’re a little bit higher value crop.”

But a bigger impetus likely came from the Michigan Blueberry Growers, a farmers cooperative that in the 1980s was looking for a state with milder winters that could bring blueberries to market earlier in the year.

“They helped Georgia get started back then. We’ve grown. We had 96 million pounds last year,” Bell said.

Still, he said, blueberries aren’t for those looking for an easy buck.

“It looks real attractive on paper,” he said. “Until they get knee-deep into it and then they see the work.”

State Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, however, thinks UGA deserves credit for blueberries’ success, too.

There may not be “more of a perfect laboratory example of the impact of the land grant university,” Black said.

UGA professor Scott Nesmith, who works at the College of Agriculture facility in Griffin, is a plant breeder who 25 years ago began working on blueberry varieties that would work in the state. His work was then shared with university extension agents who shared it with farmers.

“They took plant varieties, began to improve them and then you get the exponential growth,” Black said.

While many, like the Coleys, will doggedly stay true to their farming traditions, more change is likely coming to Georgia agriculture. The drought that has gripped much of California for the past 18 months and devastated crops shows no sign of easing. Already, major food distributors are looking for farmers elsewhere to fill in the gaps.

It’s a delicate subject for many whose living is greatly at the mercy of the weather.

“Georgia farmers are very faithful people,” the Farm Bureau’s Duvall said. “Agriculture is a big family, and we don’t want any part of our family to suffer. But in that process, to keep agriculture stable, I’m sure there are some markets in the areas that are not able to grow in California that are asking Georgians to grow it.”

Spruill, the state ag marketing chief, said the drought out west is “going to open a lot of doors and we don’t even know what they are.”

Recently, he said, a multibillion-dollar supplier to grocery chains met with state officials to discuss how the western drought has created a strawberry shortage. The supplier, Spruill said, complained: “‘We don’t have enough strawberries. We can’t buy enough strawberries to fill our demands.’”

In 2012, according to the USDA, only 140 acres of strawberries were planted in Georgia, compared with nearly 41,000 acres in California. Getting Georgia farmers to suddenly plant more strawberries to meet the demand is not as simple as it might sound.

“We grow some beautiful strawberries in Georgia,” Spruill said. “They’re wonderful. But there is this tiny window to do it because of seasonality. Can we develop a plant that will mature later, produce longer?”

Spruill believes scientists at UGA and other researchers can develop a strawberry plant more attuned to Georgia’s soil and climate. But that could take years.

UGA horticulture professor Tim Coolong doesn’t know about strawberries, but at the university’s Tifton campus he’s testing different varieties of lettuce and kale, as direct result of the California drought, hoping to find some that work in Georgia.

“Lettuce is grown almost exclusively on the West Coast, so all the breeding and varieties have been selected for there,” Coolong said. “It’s not as as easy as saying, ‘We have water, let’s grow it.’ ”

He and his research team planted 50 types of lettuce last year.

“Some did OK, but a lot did very poorly because they’re bred for the Central Valley (of California),” Coolong said. “We still have some work to do.”

But finding a lettuce variety that thrives in Georgia is just the first challenge. Most crops aren’t interchangeable for farmers.

A peanut farmer, for example, would have to invest thousands, if not millions, of dollars to switch to lettuce. Most of his tractors and other equipment wouldn’t work for ground crops such as lettuce. It’s different equipment, different technology, different fertilizers.

Black, the state agriculture commissioner, whose job it is to keep Georgia’s giant agriculture industry healthy and growing, said he is certain Georgia farmers will find a way to meet consumer demand.

“Agriculture is not what we do until we can find something else better to do,” Black said. “It’s what we must do. It’s what we’re meant to do.”

On Georgia’s western edge, Johnathan Burns manages 100,000 immature chickens in Carroll County, with one eye on his flock and one on the gauges that show whether his birds have enough ventilation, food and water, and that they’re not too hot, the poor things.

Georgia is the nation’s largest chicken producer, and Burns is part of the industry’s unique integrated system. About twice a year, Burns receives shipment of day-old hatchlings and raises them for 21 to 23 weeks in the eight chicken houses scattered on his family’s property near Roopville.

Once his birds reach the theoretical avian age of consent, they’re shipped to another farm where they mate and lay eggs. Those eggs are taken to another farm to hatch, and then those baby birds are taken to another farm to grow into adulthood. Once fully grown, those chickens end up on American grills and plates.

The chickens Burns raises, however, are not bred to be sold in stores or at restaurants.

“We’re trying to grow these chickens like they are in nature,” he said. “You want them tall and lean.”

His birds have tougher, stringier meat and, after reproducing, could end up being sold to a soup company or pet food manufacturer.

The birds that end up at the broiler farms are different. They are bred to grow bigger and heavier, with bigger breasts that consumers demand.

Burns’ chickens are housed with room to roam, wallow in the dirt, make friends.

“They can run around,” Burns said. “These guys don’t want to watch TV and go to football games. They want to eat and drink and sleep. That’s all they do.”

Burns runs his farm alone. But he does have help that his father didn’t have when he started the farm. There are dials to control the temperature in different parts of each chicken house. Sensors that make sure there’s not too much ammonia in the air, that the ventilation is appropriate and so on.

“I bought all these high-tech things,” Burns said. “It’s like having a computer run the chicken house.”

Each house is also always on lockdown out of fear of avian flu, which has led to the killing of more than 48 million chickens and turkeys across the Midwest and Western United States. Major poultry producers have instructed farmers to bar outsiders from chicken houses, to make sure wild birds cannot get into those houses and to watch for symptoms of infection.

“It’s all the farmers at risk,” Burns said. “We’re the ones going to get truly hammered if it was to hit this area and we were to have to shut down a while.”

Cotton remains Georgia’s second-most-valuable commodity, after poultry, according to the USDA. But that doesn’t necessarily mean cotton farmers are making money.

Chuck Coley, a third-generation farmer who took over the family’s Vienna operation in 1978, figures he has $200 to $250 invested in each acre of land before the first sprout emerges from the dirt. From the cost of seed, the mortgage, payments on equipment and labor, the farmer is in the red from the get-go. Now, with cotton prices fluctuating at around 65 cents a pound, finding the positive is difficult.

“It’s all about yield,” Coley said. “The price of cotton now is less than it was in ‘78. The price of cotton now is below the cost of production.”

No matter the price, he said, he’s going to plant cotton.

“It’s just a way of life,” Coley said. “You’ve got to keep farming every year. And, hopefully, at 65 cents a pound, you make a good yield, you can cover expenses and make the land payments and the equipment payments and go to the next year and maybe have a run on the price.”

The Coleys, like most every farmer, know the numbers. Chuck Coley’s son Matt said a good yield is 1,500 pounds of cotton per acre. They need $900 to $1,000 an acre in gross revenue to break even.

“Anything under $850, you’re losing money,” Chuck Coley said. “A yield of 1,250 pounds is $813.”

For the Coleys, the economy of scale is key. More acres of cotton planted means more cotton harvested, which means more cotton sold. That $700,000 picker parked in the barn can handle it. Advances in farm technology makes it possible for cotton farmers to expand quickly.

“Where we used to run two-, four-, six-row equipment, we’re running eight- and 12-row equipment and covering 24 rows with a sprayer,” Matt Coley said. “As the equipment gets bigger and faster and you’re covering more ground in less time, the cost of that equipment is going up. You’ve got to add more acres to spread those costs out.”

The Coleys are better positioned than most to weather low prices or low yields. The family also owns its own cotton gin in Vienna, an operation that serves farmers across the entire region. During the fall harvest, the gin runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and provides a reliable source of income.

Finding a stable income stream can help a farmer counter the uncertainty of growing a crop each year. In the Turner County town of Ashburn, 75 miles south of Macon, Sheila Rice manages the farm started 35 years ago by her parents, Gerald and Joyce Calhoun. Their income is built upon 500 acres of butter beans, 500 acres of field peas, and a shelling and packing operation.

“That’s our main business and it has kept us going,” Rice said. “It’s a lot of long hours and hard work and faith. Faith is what keeps you going.”

Across the street from the bean and pea fields is the shelling house. Gerald Calhoun and a partner designed their one-of-a-kind stainless-steel sheller in the late 1980s and had it built by a local metalworker. The machine separates peas from pods and allows the Calhouns to pack hundreds of bags of pink eye peas and butter beans a day. Each bag is affixed with a tracking label that traces back to the exact time the peas were picked and from which field.

Those bags make their way to Food Lions, Harveys, Piggly Wigglys and Whole Foods across the region, Rice said.

But for more than a dozen years, the family has also sought to expand its income by becoming a tourist attraction. First came pick-your-own strawberries. Then a corn maze, wagon rides and pumpkin patches. Now, Calhoun Farms sports a bee house, learning center, party patio, gourmet cafe and market.

The Calhouns call it “agritainment,” but it’s better known as agritourism and it’s becoming a bigger and bigger deal in Georgia. The University of Georgia’s annual report of farm income and revenue shows that ag-based tourism was worth $78 million in 2008. In 2013, the most recent year available, destinations such as the Calhoun farm added more than $140 million to the state’s economy.

Jason Shaw and his family in Lakeland run one of a handful of farms in South Georgia making great strides with olive oil. Shaw’s Georgia Olive Oil is used in some of the South’s top restaurants, including Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta and Husk in Charleston, S.C. Terra Dolce Farms, based in Lyons, won a top award in 2014 at the New York International Olive Oil Competition.

“We don’t have a problem selling it,” said Shaw, who is also a Republican state lawmaker. “We have a production problem.”

The farm is averaging 3 tons to 4 tons of olives per acre, he said. Those numbers need to get to more like 5 tons to 10 tons. They’re also struggling to extract enough oil from the fruit they do grow.

Georgia’s place in the worldwide production of olive oil is tiny. The United States produces 2 percent of all olive oil sold worldwide, and Georgia contributes just 5 percent of the U.S. share.

Shaw’s family has farmed in Lakeland for generations. His cousin Kevin manages the corn, cotton, soybeans and other traditional crops. Olive oil, Shaw said, was a chance to enter a new market.

“It’s just like business,” he said. “Everybody is trying to diversify. Commodity prices were real high for a couple of years, and now cotton, you can’t even hardly pay your bills.”