ISSUE 46, BEST OF 2021, Part 2: Eulogy for a Faithful Farmer
Eugene Manning Farmer (1922-2021)
Posted on November 4, 2021
Today I must honor one of the guardians of American agricultural heritage, Manning Farmer, who left us this morning at age 99 in Landrum South Carolina. He was a cultivator and a seed saver. He singlehandedly preserved Cocke's Prolific Dent Corn, maintaining its genetic integrity from the late the 1940s until his last 2021 harvest.
What was important about this corn?--it was the first prolific settler white dent corn, created by agricultural experimentalist Gen. John Hartwell Cocke of Bremo, Virginia in the 1820s-30s. Crossing a white rareripe flint corn with a white horsetooth, Cocke created a corn the set two or more ears per stalk consistently while growing to great height and providing extraordinary amounts of fodder. The corn was grown in Virginia until the 1880s as a standard field and meal variety. Then the Experimental Stations discovered it and publicized its extraordinary taste and agronomic qualities. It became a widely cultivated national corn variety at the turn of the twentieth century and was offered by seed companies until World War II. Then seed stopped being offered. Mannnig's uncle had secured a supply from Hastings Seed in Georgia in the early 1930s. After World War II, Manning Farmer started growing it, because he admired his uncle and the corn. By the late 1980s no other grower remained.
Seed savers had believed the variety lost, and reckoned it the most important extinct settler dent corn, An effort to locate any surviving strain took place beginning in 2011. In November 2017 Manning Farmer's friend Clarence Gibbs brought seedswoman Angie Lavezzo and I to Manning Farmer's House outside of Landrum. Manning and his son Darrell showed us pristine white ears of Cocke's Prolific Seed Corn. Its rediscovery led to widespread dispersal of the seed, so in 2021 it was grown from Maine to Arizona. Greg Johnsman of Marsh Hen Mill in South Carolina has made it part of his grain offerings. Colonial Milling in upstate South Carolina offers it periodically as well.
Manning Farmer was 96 when he made his Cocke's Prolific Corn Seed public. His love of his crops and his conviction in his own judgment as a grower kept him in the field to the end of his life, despite needing dialysis treatments. He was aided by friends and a large, loving family. I remember driving onto his property for the first time--it was a classic old believer's set up: a scuppernong arbor, a trellis of turkey craw beans, a sweet potato patch full of golden nugget sweet potatoes, rows of cowpeas (red rippers I believe). Next to the field was his workshed containing a corn mill and equipment for his avocation as a wheelwright. Growing and making were his passions and they filled his life from his boyhood to his nineties.
In his final years recognition for his work came. Articles appeared in magazines and newspapers. The S. C. Legislature honored him. His Cocke's Prolific Corn was grown at Monticello and at Bremo Plantation, ancestral home of the Cocke family. But his great satisfaction lay in the love of his family, the respect of his neighbors, and the flourishing of his fields.
His work is done. His memory is honored. The crops he championed will live on.
His glory and peace are truly earned.