Plant to Prosper

Photo: My grandfather Guy Lovelace holding my Uncle Bill. Seated is my Uncle Bobbly and my mother. My grandmother Virginia Lovelace is seated in the rocking chair.

It’s planting time here in Midtown Memphis. My farm measures about 9 feet by 3 feet, and last weekend Alex, Olivia and I filled it with zinnia and sunflower seeds.

Anytime I work in the dirt, I think about my maternal grandparents, Guy and Virginia Lovelace. Back in the early 1940s, they won awards for their work on their Haywood County farm through The Commercial Appeal’s Plant to Prosper program.

In 1944, they won in the tenant division for Haywood County, Tenn., as “the farm family making the best record in following a live-at-home program, diversified farming, soil conservation and farm and home improvement.”

The Plant to Prosper program grew out of one of the hardest periods in American farm history. The Commercial Appeal launched the campaign in 1933, during the Great Depression, and later promoted it with partners including the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The program encouraged landowners, tenant farmers and sharecroppers to improve farming methods, increase farm profits, grow more of their own food and conserve soil. It also rewarded farm families who diversified beyond cotton and followed what the program called a “live-at-home” plan. The campaign continued for decades and did not end until 1965, when The Commercial Appeal concluded that Plant to Prosper and the related Live at Home program had “served the purpose for which they were started.”

A description of the Plant to Prosper program from a 1944 brochure.

Cotton had long dominated Southern agriculture. As families moved into rural communities like those in Haywood County, many farmers planted cotton as their primary, and sometimes nearly exclusive, crop. After the Civil War, landowners who had more acreage than their families could work often brought in tenant farmers or sharecroppers to live on and cultivate the land.

When the agricultural economy collapsed in the early 1930s, tenant farmers suffered along with everyone else, and often suffered more. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed in 1933, tried to raise crop prices by reducing production. The program paid landowners to leave part of their land unplanted or to reduce livestock. In theory, tenants and sharecroppers should have received part of those payments. In practice, many landowners kept the money and left the families who worked their land with little or nothing.

Plant to Prosper offered a different message. Instead of tying a farm family’s future to cotton alone, the program encouraged families to raise vegetables, keep livestock, improve their homes, protect their soil and create multiple sources of income. It rewarded practical self-sufficiency.

This photo of my mother’s family appeared on page 4 in the Nov. 24, 1946 issue of The Commercial Appeal.

As part of their prize, the program invited them to a luncheon at the Claridge and a dinner at The Peabody Hotel in Memphis. My mother, the little girl in the photo, remembers that meal because it was the first time she was ever served a grapefruit with a cherry in the middle.

When I was a kid growing up in the newly developed Parkway Village neighborhood of Memphis in the 1960s, my grandfather would pick me up and take me downtown to feed the squirrels in Court Square Park on Main Street or to walk through the lobby of The Peabody. So I know he didn’t need much convincing to attend an award ceremony in Memphis back in 1944.

“As a County Winner in the Plant to Prosper Contest, you are somebody in your community. The very fact that you won proves that you are a leader — that you want to ‘go places’ as a farmer…” —Walter Durham, director of the Plant to Prosper Bureau, 1946

According to one article, my grandparents had recently purchased their farm from my grandfather’s brother, Homer Lovelace. The farm included 51.4 acres.

Durham, Walter. “P. to P. Prize.” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Nov. 24, 1946.

One article written at the time said of my grandfather, “he diversified his crops so well that he had 14 different cash income sources. The family of four spent $150 for food while producing over $650 worth of food consumed on the farm. The Lovelace brothers are members of the Farm Bureau and their wives are Home Demonstration Club members.”

Also in 1944, the Farm Security Administration awarded my grandparents two stars for producing 135 eggs per hen during a 12-month period.

My grandfather really did have a green thumb. To this day, when I crack open a cantaloupe or watermelon and catch that first smell, or when I taste a fresh tomato, I think about my grandparents’ house, their farm and all the good things they grew there.

Eventually, they raised five children on that farm. In later years, my grandfather also worked as a carpenter, and my grandmother tried her hand at being a beautician before spending many years as a teacher’s aide in Brownsville, Tenn. But they always grew fresh vegetables, and they often sold or gave away the surplus.

Hopefully, a little of that rubbed off on me.

I don’t expect my 9-by-3-foot Midtown farm to win any awards from The Commercial Appeal. But if all goes well, we’ll have a bumper crop of zinnias this year.