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Family Savors The Sweet Life

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By TOM JACKSON The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 20, 2007

DADE CITY - The road that passes by the Croft family farm is much like many others in Pasco County, composed of dirt and rock and months overdue for a grooming by John Gallagher's busy road crews.

It's a dusty washboard stretching north from Enterprise Road, three miles southeast of the historic county courthouse, passing rectangles of private enterprise featuring a place to purchase "contented puppies" and, nearby, hopeful Florida peach trees, beneath which busy hens and roosters in rust-flavored hues scratch out their livelihoods; meanwhile, regal peacocks observe with measured disinterest.

Escorting the dusty ribbon toward God-knows-where, tangles of wild vines embrace sagging wire fences; overhead, the canopies of hardwood trees give cover to cardinals, mockingbirds and nuthatches knocking out code on sturdy branches and tangles of wild vines. Folded in the shaded greenery, cows with heavy eyelids rest motionless except for the occasional flick of an ear and the hypnotic grinding of their cud.

Which is to say, the strip, in spite of its melodious name - Duck Lake Canal Road - is indistinguishable from dozens of similar unpaved thoroughfares that are both bane and opportunity to Pasco County's longtime traffic plan.

But turn left just past the clutch of mailboxes, when you see the black sign announcing in white block letters, "Croft Family Farm and Produce," at the end of a slow crawl that, nonetheless, promises to loosen your dental work, and you will discover the road for what it is: a time machine.

Darwin and Franklin Croft, brothers, grew up here. A cousin, Harold Croft, was reared nearby. Each spent his youth seeing after working-farm chores appropriate to their ages, all the while cultivating a deep and abiding affection for the charms of living close to the land.

"We didn't have much money," Darwin says, "but we never went hungry."

Each took separate paths off their fathers' farms: Franklin, now 64, into heavy machinery, then accounting for Withlacoochee Electric Cooperative, retiring as plant auditor; Darwin, 67, into meat department management for Kwik Chek/Winn-Dixie in Dade City for 20 years, ending in 1985; and Harold, 66, into lawn maintenance and irrigation installation in Bradenton.

Now each has drifted back to the family homestead, reviving the farm, along with farming methods that would have been familiar to their fathers, Henry Drew and Wade Hampton Croft, the latter named for one of two Civil War generals (J.E.B. Stuart was the other) with whom the old farmers' grandfather rode.

Boutique Agriculture

It's true that history, tradition and constancy are important to these sons of the South's sense of self. As lads who came of age before the turbulent 1960s, who were brought up among those who heard eyewitness accounts of the "War of Northern Aggression," Darwin, Franklin and Harold had finished high school before they realized "damnYankee" is two words. That sort of upbringing has a lasting effect on a fellow.

But as they pursue the art of boutique agriculture, resurrecting Croft Farms' 300 acres of fallow fields one modest patch at a time, these gentlemen cultivators have rediscovered not simply the truth of calluses well-earned, but the economic genius of achievement by hand.

Their latest adventure in hand-to-crop farming has involved the growing, harvesting and processing of about an eighth of an acre of sugar cane - a couple of hybrid strains developed at the University of Florida for climes more prone to freezing than in the cane belt, that region of the state below Clewiston and Belle Glade, off the south shore of Lake Okeechobee.

Today's farming Crofts are growing sugar cane because their daddies grew sugar cane, and they are tickled to report that, at an age when everything seems to be smaller, dimmer, duller and less sweet, the 2007 Croft Cane exceeds everything Henry Drew and Wade Hampton ever raised from that ancient, dark, east Pasco soil.

Wielding their hand-harvesters - stubby, wooden-handled knives with broad stainless-steel blades resembling oversized painters' wall scrapers - bought from a flea market vendor who had no idea what they were, the trio felled about half of two rows of cane one recent morning. Each low-arcing swing cleanly dropped another 13-foot stalk, setting the knife to singing in metallic soprano.

As usual, the harvest attracted volunteers, among them Ron Ferguson, a classic field hand of few words who doubles as an unofficial adopted brother, and "Just Plain" Bill Biemer, a restorer of sports cars and a sun-follower who, along with his Dade City-native wife, splits time between east Pasco and New Mexico.

The exercise reminds Harold of his UF college days and Thanksgiving break, and no more getting inside the front door before his mother would put a cane knife in his hand and send him into the field to join the others in hacking, stripping and loading the autumn's sugar cane harvest.

"After a while, I got smart," Harold says. "I stopped coming home at Thanksgiving."

Now he volunteers, driving up from Bradenton with his wife, Kay, every chance he gets, happy to become reacquainted with the young man who mistakenly thought he had better things to do.

Old Ways Work Best

The next morning finds them stationed around the Croft family cane mill, an oxidizing antique from the middle 1800s that, oiled and attached to the rear end cannibalized from an early 20th century Chevrolet truck, extracts juice from the cane. Except that the tractor has replaced a mule as the source of power, the contraption operates exactly as it did, with brutal efficiency.

Three solid iron drums, one the size of a gallon paint can, the other two slightly smaller, stood on end and arranged, if observed from above, like the iconic Mickey Mouse silhouette, turn in a motion that draws the cane through the center, flattening stalks 2 inches in diameter to corrugated-paper depth.

Dirty green juice spills from the mill spout, through a filter of burlap draped over a coarse screen, down a PVC gutter to another strainer - a double layer of felt over a fine screen - into a 100-gallon cast iron kettle (circa 1845) set into a concrete block cooker.

Sort of a plain, squat barbecue with a firebox in the back right (to take advantage of the Northern Hemisphere's Coriolis effect) flanked by a simple chimney, the cooker is surrounded by an aluminum-roofed gazebo with roll-down sides to block the wind and control the juice's boil.

Bud Klein, a neighbor who has come to observe, offers a cautionary suggestion: "Watch carefully. When they're done, you won't ever see this again."

Darwin loads the firebox with locally gathered lighter, or heart of pine, the resin-rich "fatwood" that retailers market for $12 or more per pound. But opportunity costs are irrelevant when a plume of black smoke feathers through overhanging oak branches and into the sky, inviting a fly-by inspection by one government agency or another, and announcing to neighbors that syrup-making has begun.

Soon, the juice attains a rolling boil, bringing impurities to the surface, trapped in foam. Skimmed off and dumped in a bucket, this noxious byproduct will, left to itself, separate inside two weeks' time, the bottom layer becoming crystal clear rum - "200 proof," Harold boasts. But the Crofts are more determined to obtain homegrown syrup, liquid sugar the color of strong tea anxious for hot buttered biscuits, pancakes or waffles.

The trio is not unaware of the implications suggested by their successful harvest and processing of sugar cane in West Central Florida.

In a world recoiling from its hydrocarbon addiction and dismayed by corn's shortcomings as an alternative energy source, the ability to grow mass quantities of sugar cane - which as its name implies, is able to skip the energy-sucking step of being converted into sugar (corn's major drawback) - in areas once considered risky boosts the prospects for affordable domestic ethanol.

That's neither here nor there for the Croft fellows, Franklin, Darwin and Harold. For them, it's all about recapturing what almost got away, and cultivating a manner of living that inspires patience, teamwork, ingenuity, resourcefulness and an appreciation for neighborliness. These characteristics distinguished most everyone the Crofts came upon when they were young; take a frame-loosening drive down Duck Lake Canal Road and you'll find them new and thriving all over again.

The fresh cane syrup is just a sweet, sweet bonus.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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