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M: In other words, you have to show him. It's not as bad now as it used to be,
it's just hard to get them away. They'd have a variety of corn. They would
say, "My grandfather had it, and my pa had it, this is the best, it'll keep."
Things like that. Instead of farmers raising seed, now mostly somebody else
is specializing in raising and they're buying them back.
K: In the last twenty years, what was the most important crop in Alachua County?
M: I don't know, you would have to ask Andrews, the county agent up here about
that. Corn has the biggest acreage increase here lately, they've grown soybeans.
K: What were they growing here when you started school here at the university?
M: Corn and peanuts.
K: But not many peanuts anymore?
M: No, chufas and watermelons. There are still watermelons around, but most
farmers have cattle. Farming has been on the decline since the 1930s, when
everybody went broke. They started a little vegetable growing around La Crosse,
with small crops of cucumbers, beans and later, potatoes. A:few years ago, I
used to check carloads of fertilizer for potato- seedlings; there was a terminal
at La Crosse and another at Hague.
K: I have something I wanted to ask you. Hog claims. What can you tell me about
hog claims? What is that and how does it work?
M: Over in Taylor County, that was a problem. A man didn't mind if you were
living in the woods, to kill a hog or two to survive with your family, but he
damn sure didn't want you stealing and hauling them off, selling them. In this
state you had a mark and brand law. I never did it. It wasn't passed until, I
think, around '49 or '48, somewhere along there. Because I helped the farmers,
I'd send off the marks and brands, and Mr. Scott here was with the milk inspection
of the Department of Agriculture. He handled the mark and brands recording. He
was probably the first teacher at the University of Florida, when he came way back
yonder. He was seventy-something, too, when he retired several years back.
I used to come down to the Seagle Building to get some of them straight. They
wouldn't have them overlapping, you know, in territories. It's all kind of
combinations, and I'd treat hogs for cholera, swine plague, immunize them,
as they say. I'd go over the whole swamp, we'd be in jeeps, sometimes we'd
ride horses, going out to the marshes. We call them wood hogs, range hogs,
probably the right definition. They were profitable, in other words, more
profitable than the cow, if you had a good range, and while you pay for the
horse, you can pay for the horse and the saddle with hogs, and some of them
were bred up, or what you would call bred up, it wasn't strictly. Most of them
were called piney wood rulers or old razorback. Some of them had long noses,
but they were mixed up, and it made a fair hog.
There was one year there I immunized over forty-eight thousand, and I betcha
I'd been on every forty acres in Taylor County. Every man had a marked brand,
and they had a claim. All right, if you had a hog on this territory with a
marked brand and you had a claim, you could have hogs on it. But you weren't