Soil survivor: the state's oldest family business is a 261-year-old farm facing the challenges confronting 21st century agriculture.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Feature

At the wheel of his old pickup, John Whitley jostles along the farm road winding past weathered sheds and shops that shelter machinery and through fields of tall corn. He nods at a patch where the stalks are stunted and yellowed. "Years ago, used to be an old tenant house there. Now won't nothing much at all grow on it." Where the corn gives way to peanut fields, he shuts off the engine, opens the door and steps out.

Under the sky's gray dome, it is a drizzly morning. Thirty years ago, the state wanted a bypass through here to connect with U.S. 17 on the other side of Williamston. Whitley opposed it, one of the rare times he has ever raised a fuss. "We're private people, not interested in politics," he says, walking back to the truck with wet peanut plants swishing around his ankles. "You sort of get used to being a loner if you're a farmer, sitting on a tractor all day."

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He might have more reason to feel apart than most. His farm is the oldest family business in North Carolina--and the nation's 10th-oldest--according to Philadelphia-based Family Business magazine. Here in Eastern North Carolina, the past and future of a family, as well as the state's $7.4 billion agriculture industry, are intertwined, written in faint patterns in gray soil and heavy lines in the face of a man named Whitley. Or Wheatley, if you prefer the spelling on the grant from King George II that gave this land to his grand-daddy eight times removed in 1742.

John Whitley is 76. The average Tar Heel farmer at last count was 55.2 years old, up from 50.9 in 1964. Whitley has two sons. Neither farms. One lives in Florida. The other lives in the old homeplace and commutes to a job in town. The family's demographics reflect rural North Carolina's. "If you look at who wants to work the farms, there are very few young people," says Dewitt Hardee, the state Agriculture Department's director of policy and analysis. "They work in a public setting because you just can't afford for two generations of a family to live on most farms."

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Some factors--weather, weeds and the uncertainties of price--haven't changed much since Samuel Wheatley broke his sod. But where favor with a faraway monarch once might have determined a planter's fortune, John Whitley's is in the invisible hand of free-market economics. He often works alone--he planted 400 acres of soybean by himself last season. He favors...