Just A Poor, Dumb Dirt Farmer

Colonel Gregory is the fifth generation to farm the rich dirt of Virginia. Truth be told, he's a lot smarter than he makes out to be.

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The Colonel -- that's Colonel S. Stone Gregory, Jr., owner of Gregory General Farms -- feels something close to loathing for the close to loathing for the Internal Revenue agents who visit periodically after he's been written up in a newspaper or magazine. That's why he'll only say that Gregory General Farms sells a "nice seven figures" annually. He insists that the lessons he has to offer don't come from how much he sells, but rather from how he seels. "I've got no staff," he says. "There's just me, Stone Gregory, a poor, dumb dirt farmer."

Truth is, Colonel Gregory is neither poor not dumb. The Colonel and his two brothers do own a lot of dirt in Java in Virginia's Pittsylvania County, 125 miles west of Richmond, Va. But the Colonel doesn't so much farm it as he does promote its natural bounty, bit by bit, piece by piece, and drop by drop.

There's Gregory's White Hickory Smoke Bits, Incense Cedar Bits, Sassafras Root Bits, Combination Manure-Mulch-Compost-Peat, Creosoted Posts and Poles, and Virgin Spring Water. There's the Gregory General Store and, just down the road, Gregory's Hog Hotel, where some 1,200 Yorkshire hogs fatten for market while producing Gregory's Virgin Hog Crap, billed as Nature's Perfect Plant Food. "With the proper romancin' and merchandisin'," the Colonel says, "you can sell anything."

The Colonel just isn't the hard-scrabbling clod-busting dirt farmer he makes himself out to be. He's more an idea man, a born promoter with a dirtfarming background. It's a background that drives him to get the most out of what's available. He finds markets in industry directories and telephone books; he writes his own sales brochures, designs his own ads, and types his own letters. He pays his bills by return mail, goes to bed at nine, and sleeps very soundly.

The Colonel will argue all day that any business can be run his way. If it's not, it should be, especially when interest rates are going up and money's right and every little bit counts.

"All you need is a little common sense and ingenuity and internal ability," he says. "If you want to find a good idea, get out there and talk to people and listen. I never met a man I couldn't learn something from. Pretty soon you'll spot a need and then you keep thinking until you find a way to fill it. Maybe it's a crude operation, but I want to keep things simple."

Outwardly, everything about the Colonel is simple. "A smart man doesn't put everything in the showroom window," he says. "He also keeps the warehouse full."

He wears baggy corduroy trousers, a brown, short-sleeved work shirt, and a khaki hat darkened with sweat around the brim. He's 63 years old and rises six feet six inches off the floorboards in an impressively straight line, looking slightly faded, but dependable and sturdy.

His office is a small rectangular room attached to the Gregory General Store. The store was opened by his father in 1900 and has changed very little. It's a shuffling, friendly collection of freshly painted white claphoard with a long shade roof across the front and narrow double doors. Just inside the door is a handmade wooden counter with Ball jars on it filled with seed: Heart of Gold Cantaloupe, 95? an ounce; or Seven Top Turnip, 60? an ounce. Another big seller is Big Duke Chewing Tobacco, and there are Wolverine work boots and meats and groceries. A sign says, "Everything for everybody."

The Colonel works at a small, gray, metal desk. There's a typewriter on the desk, but the phone, an old, black finger-dialer, is hidden in the second drawer. The walls of his office are papered with hundreds of yellowing business cards, and stacked near the window are 400 new telephone directories.

Outside his office, the early corn is already four inches high. Gregory farmland ripples slowly toward the horizon in every direction. The Colonel's two sons, "the hardest-working two young men in Virginia," John and Stone III, are in fields nearby tilling and fertilizing. His brothers, Jim and Lewis, are working with their boys planting tobacco a mile or so away.

Lewis Gregory, the Colonel's great-great-great-grandfather, first planted family roots here in 1840. "He came from Scotland," the Colonel says. "We think he was about to be hanged for stealing horses or mules -- anyway he was stealing something." All Lewis had with him, the story goes, was an oak barrel holding his worldly possessions. But there must have been a little extra sandwiched between the pots and pans, because Lewis soon bought 200 acres of fertile Virginia farmland and began the endless round of tilling, planting, harvesting, and adding a few more acres every now and then that has occupied six generations of Gregorys.

According to Gregory custom, the Colonel was given responsibility early. He pulled his first commercial tobacco crop when he was only 12. The original receipt -- for $48.80 -- from Planters Warehouse in Danville, Va., dated January 27, 1930, hangs on his office wall. That was his first encounter with the tough economics of farming. "Even then it didn't seem like much money for all the work," the Colonel recalls, "particularly when I had to take out the $25 I owed for fertilizer. What's more, I couldn't help worrying about what would happen to me if my crop failed after I'd spent the money for fertilizer." He says this experience taught him to avoid products whose sale price he couldn't control and "never to put all my eggs in one basket."

It was during World War II that the Colonel spotted the need that would later launch him into business. He was 24 years old, a freshly minted colonel in the US. Army's armored artillery serving in the North African invasion force. In November of 1942, he was talking with two Egyptian Army officers over dinner at Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. The Egyptian officers were reminiscing about vists to the United States. They told the Colonel that one of the experiences they had never been able to duplicate was the gastronomical delight of a Virginia ham. How was the unique flavor achieved? they asked. The Colonel explained that the hams were cured in the smoke of smoldering white hickory. "It's the smoking, not the heating," he said, "that's the secret."

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