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If you’re in the right place at the right time during May, you might glimpse a motorcade cutting through mid-day traffic, followed by a green bus with a big papier-mache boll weevil on top. Nothing hints at Memphis’ agribusiness roots like that longtime foe of the cotton plant.

The city still holds a Cotton Carnival, although its name was changed in recent years to Carnival Memphis. The event began 78 years ago during the Great Depression as a way to promote the cotton trade.

No barge lands on the Mississippi River cobblestones to kick off Cotton Carnival as it once did, but a king and queen still hold court, along with secret societies such as the Order of the Boll Weevil. The most feared insect in the cotton world when Cotton Carnival was founded in 1931, the weevil is now a part of carnival folklore.

In Cordova a few cotton fields still sprout between the subdivisions, and what was once the trading floor of the Memphis Cotton Exchange Downtown is a museum. The exchange still exists, but its home is a virtual one on computer screens that are constantly updated.

The National Cotton Council of America is in Cordova, relocating recently after a long residency in Midtown near the Memphis Zoo.

The city’s agribusiness sector is a huge part of the Memphis economy – it just can’t be found in the old places anymore.

Field work

A lot of cotton is still grown and traded in and around Memphis – 10,918 acres in Shelby County alone, according to the 2007 Agriculture Census by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That compares to 24,389 acres of soybeans. Agriculture, cotton and otherwise, is big business – big 21st century business.

“The whole agribusiness is like standing on sand,” said Steve Bares, the president and executive director of the Memphis Bioworks Foundation. “You’ve got unbelievable technology change going on right now.”

The change runs from the cabs of tractors in the fields to the cotton industry’s history of rejecting and then embracing diversification, or growing more than one kind of crop. The change is an outgrowth of basic farming principles and an application of crops in ways farmers never imagined possible just 10 years ago.

“Memphis is trying to move toward a bio economy,” said Pete Moss, an agricultural consultant at Frazier Barnes & Associates LLC. “As such there seems to be more emphasis on the types of crops that can produce the types of chemicals and constituents geared toward bio-based types of products.”

“Bio” means, in its simplest definition, products made from plants. They may be made from the oil derived from the plants in some cases. With cotton, the bio movement seeks to expand beyond conventional uses, such as apparel and textiles.

“I think there’s a substantial amount of progress and advances that have been made in all types of oils, not just cottonseed or soybeans,” Moss said.

When Agricenter International was founded in the late 1970s, the state of agricultural research included some hydroponics – growing lettuce without soil – and other experiments on a relatively small scale. These days, Agricenter works with 20-30 different companies each year and boasts nearly 7,500 test plots on its swath of East Memphis land.

Memphis is moving toward a bio economy, according to agricultural experts in the region. That means grain, cotton and other crops are increasingly viewed in non-traditional ways and for non-traditional uses. They might be used to produce chemicals or biofuels. The research that is inventing those new uses is also changing the very nature of the seeds that farmers are planting. -- PHOTO BY LANCE MURPHEY

The Bioworks Foundation is known to most Memphians for its work in building medical technology businesses as part of the city’s medical center. But some of that work involves finding more medicinal uses for plants – biomass. And Bioworks is also working in the biofuels area.

Late last year, the foundation held an alternative crops conference. From the November gathering, it awarded Tennessee Department of Agriculture funding to 25 West Tennessee farmers to plant those alternative crops, devoting five acres each to crops such as sunflowers and switchgrass. The money comes with a contract to work with the Bioworks Foundation. It’s also an incentive for the farmers to take a risk. And farming has always been a risky business.

Diversity initiatives

The new technology offers a way to make some aspects less risky. But going bio means alternative crops aren’t stand-ins for cotton anymore, and that means more risk.

Memphis agribusiness has been declared diversified many times. And diversification has had different meanings. Some are concepts still being discussed today.

The topic of diversification came up in April 1891 when President Benjamin Harrison visited the city in the wake of yellow fever epidemics that nearly destroyed Memphis.

Harrison said he had known of the city from his boyhood when crops from his father’s farm in the Ohio Valley were sent by river to trade.

“In those times, these states were largely supplied with grain and forage from the Northwestern States,” Harrison said, according to a book that is a compilation of his speeches. “Here you were giving your attention to one or two great staple products, for which you found a large foreign market. … I rejoice that you are adding to diversified agriculture diversified manufacturing pursuits; that you are turning your thoughts to compressing and spinning cotton as well as raising it. … I know no reason why (cotton states) should export it as raw material, rather than as a manufactured product, holding in their midst the profits of this transformation of the raw material to the finished product.”

Local investors who formed Pioneer Cotton Mills did just that starting in 1882.

Pioneer had a plant in Fort Pickering, according to “Cotton Row to Beale Street,” the business history of the city written in 1980 by Robert A. Sigafoos. It had 5,000 spindles, 132 looms and 70 cards. The mill employed 125 people, most of them women. Children worked 55-60 hour work weeks along with adults in that and other mills that paid 8-10 cents an hour. Pioneer Cotton Mills was out of business by 1905.

Forrest Beard of Mid-South Ag Equipment Inc. works on a fuse box inside the cab of an agricultural spray rig at the St. Francis County Farmer’s Association Co-op in Arkansas. Highly complex electronic systems in modern farm equipment frequently require highly technical repairs. Although traditional farming wisdom still applies in many cases, technological advances are evident, especially in tractors that are a far cry from the basic models of just 15 or 20 years ago. -- PHOTO BY LANCE MURPHEY

The northern industrialists who owned more successful and stable mills overlooked Memphis in favor of Atlanta.

“Whether Memphis could have attracted Northern mill owners is uncertain,” Sigafoos wrote. “The business power structure just did not make the same effort as their counterparts in Atlanta.”

An entry about Memphis in the 1919 Encyclopedia Americana reads:

“Memphis is located in the most rapidly developing agricultural section of the country. … It is the home of the first successful Farm Development Bureau, which is doing great work in bringing about diversification of crops. The Memphis territory is no longer a one-crop country. It now not only grows cotton successfully as before, but most all of the other crops that are grown anywhere in the temperate zone.”

The next generation

Farmers were having a tough time with the cotton market, boll weevils and of course the weather, causing them to shift to other crops, but they almost always returned to cotton.

It took an insider with deep roots in cotton to commit. Enter Ned Cook – the son of the first Cotton Carnival president, Everett Cook, and himself the 1951 king of Cotton Carnival.

Cook sought to take the family cotton business into grain in the early 1960s. His father was so opposed to the move that he refused to put any of his money into the venture. Ned Cook told an interviewer from Fortune magazine in 1977 that his father warned him, “You should stick to the things that you know about.” At the time, Cook admitted there was something to his father’s advice.

But when the elder Cook retired in 1967, the younger Cook put most of the family fortune into the grain trade.

The result was Cook Industries and several record-setting grain deals with the Soviet Union in the 1970s as Cold War geopolitical concerns coexisted fitfully with super power détente.

Agricenter International in East Memphis has nearly 7,500 test plots on its land and the research center works with 20-30 different companies a year. -- PHOTO BY BILL DRIES

Cook Industries became the third-largest grain dealer in the world. Despite the monumental sums involved – 37 million bushels of soybeans to the Soviet Union in 1972 and 23 million bushels of wheat to the Chinese government in 1975 (a deal subsequently cancelled by the Chinese) – Cook Industries had a relatively short and controversial life.

Cook, who died in 2001, sold most of the diversified commodity merchandising company in 1978 to Pillsbury. The next year, Cook was instrumental in using his influence to push for the construction and concept of Agricenter.

Fields of gold

Bares said the next step for Memphis agribusiness is beyond diversification.

“The historical basis in this community and the reason why it’s suffered for so long is you grow the product, you might do a little pre-production here, but virtually 95 percent of the product is shipped out of the area,” he told The Memphis News. “That leaves the farmer with basically a little tiny bit of money and not enough to make it. So, the only way you’re going to survive is if the farm can grow businesses where we can capture more of that value in the region.”

Gary Adams, chief economist for National Cotton Council of America, understands going with corn when the corn market is better and cotton is down. But the kind of diversification Bares talks about has to have a foundation.

“When you look at rural economies, we typically see a lot of infrastructure that’s been associated with the cotton production and distribution of cotton,” Adams said. “I think a question will be do we see that same type of infrastructure when we talk about diversifying into other commodities or other commodities expanding their role?”

Bares sees the infrastructure in the city’s chemical companies.

“We still have a significant asset base in the chemical business that can be redeployed for this purpose,” he said. “This community also has pipelines running through it. … Those are logistical advantages for fuels and other kinds of things.”

Moss also sees a move to chemical production from crops such as soybeans and corn.

“Agriculture and farmers don’t have near as much control as they’d like to think they do,” said John Bradley, vice president of Technical Sales Development for Floratine BioSciences Inc. of Collierville. Bradley was among those who helped spread no till cotton farming methods in the U.S. in the mid-1970s. Bradley says a “revolution” is under way in agribusiness that is grounded in traditional farming wisdom and “farmer judgement,” but technological advances are opening the way to uses for crops and yields scarcely imaginable just a few years ago. -- PHOTO BY LANCE MURPHEY

“Since the market is demanding those, not only from an environmental standpoint, but from a cost standpoint, it becomes increasingly important to try and gear the research toward production of those types of crops,” he said.

Several chemical companies are already major tenants at Agricenter International.

John Charles Wilson, a cotton grower turned president of Agricenter, said those and other agriculture-related businesses are doing well in the unprecedented national economic downturn.

That doesn’t mean they are without risks for farmers, particularly when it comes to corn, which is used to make ethanol.

“This is about the second or third time we’ve made this big move to push ethanol,” Wilson said warily. “Corn prices go up. The farmers start planting more of it and then all of a sudden oil prices come down and then you’ve got these companies that are out here being sold for 25 cents on the dollar now. We’ve got to get some stability in the bioindustry side.”

To Wilson, that means government support – money to minimize some, but not all, risk.

“Our country’s got to make some decisions about where we really want to go,” he said. “Are we going to stay dependent on oil?”

There’s also a different time factor in West Tennessee. It’s longstanding conventional wisdom that Dr. John Bradley, a leading agriculture researcher, said has been reinforced by all of the science and technological advances that have followed.

“We’ve proven for years that corn in West Tennessee, your average yield, will drop about a bushel a day after May 1,” said Bradley, vice president of technical sales development at Floratine Biosciences Inc., which has its eastern distribution center in Collierville. “You know after May 1 you’re not going to make more corn than if it was planted April 15. … There’s those decisions. And then the weather controls it all, even though you’ve got irrigation. If you can’t plant it, you can’t irrigate it. It’s a very complex business. It’s not just hooking up to the planter and going to the field. It’s a huge choice.”

Cotton is still king in the Memphis area, but grain and corn and soybeans have always been a refuge for farmers when cotton prices are down. Johnny Cox cleans up rice hulls at Carlson Mills Inc., a rice mill in Proctor, Ark. The move to a bio economy would make alternatives to cotton more than a refuge, but a permanent presence in larger yields as more uses are found for the crops. -- PHOTO BY LANCE MURPHEY

Bradley has seen more than his share of “new” farming methods and strategies in the past 35 years. He is considered among the fathers of “no till” cotton farming, according to Delta Farm Press. No till is a method that leaves crop residue in fields after harvest and plants seeds in the unplowed soil beneath.

Bradley organized no till days in Milan, Tenn., in the mid-1970s, farming demonstrations at the Milan Experimental Station that not only spread the methods used in no till, but explained the science behind it.

Sometimes the new methods are old philosophies with new names such as precision agriculture.

“My grandfather knew where to put the manure – on the thin spots in the field, so to speak,” Bradley said as he cut to the basic definition. Nevertheless, he described research into the most efficient use of fertilizer these days as “revolutionary.”

With prices for fertilizer high last year and new technology available to make crop yields a science and a matter of statistics with a price tag, the precise meaning of precision agriculture today is probably a far cry from what previous generations ever could have conceived.

Changing rules

A tractor at the St. Francis County Farmer’s Association Co-op in eastern Arkansas was being repaired on a cloudy spring day earlier this month. There was no oil-stained tinkering with cylinders and valves. Inside the cab of the mammoth tractor, technician Forrest Beard had removed the plastic casing around an array of glowing display lights and circuits as he worked on the wiring.

“Tractor drivers are not just driving a tractor anymore,” Bradley said. “They have a lot of monitors, a lot of equipment to watch. We can monitor the amount of seed we put per foot on a row now. We can monitor the amount of any of the pesticides that you may put on the field, based on plant population. We have monitoring systems for insects across the field. … It’s a pretty high-tech industry.”

The high technology is demanded by the high price of new seeds that are bioengineered to resist certain pests or to increase yields, the high price of fertilizer and the continued move of farms to higher-acreage operations.

“We hate to see the family farm go,” Bradley lamented. “They have to pay the same price pretty much for seed and they want their seed placed accordingly. If they have spots in the field that won’t grow 200 bushels of corn, well, they’re not going to put as much seed there. It’s all about size and scale and efficiency and being very, very efficient with the production system that’s out there.”

“The whole agribusiness is like standing on sand,” Memphis Bioworks Foundation president Steve Bares said. “You’ve got unbelievable technology change going on right now.” -- PHOTO BY BILL DRIES

The technology is changing so rapidly at least for now, Bares said, that it’s essential to play to the region’s specific strengths.

“We grow a broad range of crops, which means a little bit here and a little bit there – a thousand acres of this or a thousand acres of that – you can do here,” he said. “For example, you can’t do that in Iowa. You either grow corn or soybeans or you’re not in the business. This area is used to that flexibility.”

Bradley agrees but also said flexibility can be a precarious lifestyle and business decision.

He recalled a conversation he had this month with a farmer contemplating a report on market trends, data inputs about his fields fed into his tractor cab and a recent swing in commodity prices.

The commodities trading is a complex art that involves not only what has already grown, but what is likely to grow and how much of it will be needed and when. Trading in “futures” has been around for awhile. Memphis cotton growers and factors believed futures trading artificially depressed the price of cotton, so when they established the Memphis Cotton Exchange in 1873, it was as a “spot” market that dealt with what had already been grown.

“Farmers used to say it’s a new ballgame every year,” Bradley said. “But a farmer told me the other day … ‘It’s a new ballgame every week.’”

The dilemma for the farmer is what happens after the planting is finished. What happens isn’t a consideration limited to the horizon seen from the tractor.

“Do you buy oil futures or corn futures? … Just one country’s politics will change things,” Bradley said. “It’s just a very, very complicated cycle. Agriculture and farmers don’t have near as much control as they’d like to think they do.”