I was 20 years old when Harold Briggs signed that report. I was in Cookeville that year finishing my certificate program in agricultural production at Tennessee Tech, working weekends at a dried pepper processing facility over in Sparta to cover costs. I heard about the assessment in a letter from my mother. I didn't give it much thought at the time because it said what everyone on the farm already assumed, that the hillside was difficult ground that wouldn't produce a commercial crop. I finished the certificate program in 1976.
I went to Nashville for two years to work at a food-grade spice processing plant out near Antioch in the quality control department, which was the closest thing to what I had studied that I could find in the city. In those two years, I learned something that no manual in my certificate program had taught me with that kind of clarity. The price of cayenne pepper in the Nashville market did not depend only on volume or pod size. It depended on origin. Cayenne from the hill country of Middle Tennessee sold at a price premium over cayenne from flatland operations in Georgia or Arkansas.
And the buyers at the produce terminal explained it with one word, flavor. And that flavor, according to the plant technicians who had spent years working with growers from different regions, came from a specific combination of soil, elevation, and the temperature swing between day and night that was hard to replicate in lower ground or in more uniform soil. Putnam County was in that zone. Caldwell Ridge Farm was in that zone. The rocky hillside of the South Slope was exactly in that zone.
I came back in 1978 at age 24 with money saved from two years at the plant and an idea I hadn't told anyone yet. The hillside ran about a quarter mile long with a drop of roughly 130 ft from the bottom to the crest with an average slope of around 18°, reaching 25° in the steepest sections. The substrate was what the assessment described: limestone bedrock at the surface with 8 to 16 inches of compacted soil above it and no visible organic horizon at the most exposed points. The orientation was southeast, which meant it received direct sun from about 9 in the morning through sunset and that the limestone absorbed heat for 8 or 9 continuous hours each day. That was exactly what Harold Briggs had recorded as a problem.
That was exactly what I had spent a year calculating as an advantage. The thermal mass effect of limestone on a south-facing slope was a concept I had found in a technical bulletin from the University of Tennessee agricultural experiment station about pepper production in upland zones that a researcher had lent me when I was working at the Antioch plant. Limestone absorbs solar heat with an efficiency that deep loam soil does not have and releases it slowly through the night, raising the air temperature in the immediate micro zone along the hillside between 2 and 4°F compared to open field air at the same elevation. Two to four degrees in a zone where the late frost of April was the primary risk the assessment had cited as its reason for declaring the land unsuitable was the difference between losing a crop and keeping it.
The cayenne variety I had in mind was not a commercial hybrid from a seed catalog. It was a regional open-pollinated variety that older Putnam County growers called Tennessee Mountain Cayenne, which the production records of the county showed as historically cultivated at higher elevation than standard cayenne from flatland operations with a cold tolerance that commercial varieties from warmer regions did not have. Generations of hill-country growers had selected it for those conditions over decades. That variety did not exist in any commercial seed catalog. It lived in the seed tins of the growers who still used it and at the seed exchange at the Putnam County Farm Bureau in the fall. I knew where to find it because I had looked before I came back home.
I spent a month doing calculations at the kitchen table after supper with Harold Briggs's assessment beside me as a reference for what I had to answer point by point. I calculated the cost of the Tennessee Mountain Cayenne transplants from a grower over in White County who had been recommended by an extension contact. I calculated the planting density for rocky soil based on the spacing recommendations in the UT experiment station bulletin which was lower than standard density but which compensated in fruit quality under the elevation and thin soil conditions. I calculated the cost of preparing the hillside which in limestone ground could not be done with equipment but only with hand tools and which was the highest labor cost in the project. I calculated the projected income using the price differential I had observed at the Antioch plant.
Tennessee Hill Country cayenne sold between 30 and 40% above the USDA reference price for standard cayenne that season. I wrote it all in a notebook with two scenarios, conservative and optimistic. Both arrived at the same result. The investment recovered in the second production year, and from the third year forward, the net income per equivalent acre of hillside exceeded the net from the bottomland corn operation.
That evening, sitting at the kitchen table with my mother with the radio low in the background and the quiet of the ridge outside, I explained the whole plan. I explained the thermal mass effect of the limestone and why the southeast orientation of the hillside was an advantage rather than a risk. I explained the price differential for Hill Country and why that differential was structural rather than temporary. I explained that Tennessee Mountain Cayenne was exactly the variety that premium buyers in Nashville were looking for and could not find in consistent volume because no one was growing it at commercial scale. I explained the numbers, both scenarios, the margins.
My mother listened without interrupting for 40 minutes. When I finished, she picked up her coffee cup, looked at it for a moment, and asked me one question: "And the assessment?" I answered, "The assessment says the hillside is unsuitable for annual crops requiring mechanization. Cayenne pepper does not require mechanization in the sense the assessment describes. Technically, it does not cover what I am proposing."
My mother thought about that for a moment. Then she put her hand on my shoulder the way my daddy used to when something came out right with the same pressure in the same place and said, "Start before somebody else reads it that way."
I went to see Harold Briggs at the extension office in Cookeville on a Tuesday in May of 1979. I brought my notebook, the UT Experiment Station bulletin, and the original assessment Harold had signed himself. Harold was 48 years old, 14 years as county extension agent, and the kind of quiet authority that comes from time in a post in a small county. Everyone knew him, and everyone knew he signed the papers. That became a kind of responsibility over the outcome of everything that did or did not happen on the land.
He listened with the patience of someone who has heard something before and knows how it ends. He looked through my notebook, looked at the bulletin, looked at his own assessment, then said, "Ruth Ellen, the UT bulletin is experimental station research under controlled conditions, not commercial production in real field conditions. The thermal mass effect you're describing works under specific densities of surface rock and slope orientations that are not documented for the Caldwell Ridge hillside. The late frost risk at that elevation is real and on record. One bad year can cost you the entire investment and leave you with a bare hillside and no capital to try again."
"My recommendation is that you keep the bottomland in the crops that have worked and not risk investment in a surface that the technical assessment declares unsuitable." I told him I appreciated the recommendation and would take it under consideration.
I went home, looked at my calculations one more time, called the researcher at the UT Agricultural Experiment Station, whose name appeared on the bulletin, and asked him three specific questions about the applicability of the thermal effect in limestone soil in the Putnam County uplands. The researcher answered all three questions in detail and told me the data in the bulletin applied directly to the elevation and orientation I described. I bought the transplants in White County. 340 Tennessee Mountain Cayenne transplants arrived in the back of a borrowed pickup on a Wednesday morning in August of 1979 at 7:30 a.m. in growing containers with plants between 12 and 18 inches depending on the tray, roots well contained, and the foliage still fresh from the early morning drive. I unloaded them with my cousin Paty, who had been living on the farm since she had been widowed that spring, and who had decided without anyone asking her that if I was going up the hill, she was going up, too.