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By Kathleen Kearns, Staff Writer
Everett Cheek’s workday begins at 3 a.m. five days a week, 3:15 if he sleeps in a little. The 80-year-old farmer gets up and drives his old blue Chevy pickup truck three-quarters of a mile down Dairyland Road to the barns behind his brother Lewis’ house.
Those barns and open sheds, framed with old Duke Power utility poles and roofed with corrugated metal, shelter the approximately 90 Ayrshire cows and 85 heifers that live on the farm the brothers own jointly.
The cows have names like “Gump” and “Chocolate” spray-painted on their rumps. Long before it’s light most mornings, Everett milks the cows and feeds them and the heifers — “future cows” that don’t give milk because they haven’t had a calf yet.
Everett and Lewis, who is 77, have been working on this farm since they were 8 and 5, respectively. When they reached those ages, Lewis said, “Daddy told us we were old enough to crawl up under a cow and start milking.”
The brothers remember when there were nine dairies on Dairyland Road. Now there are two, theirs and Maple View Farms, which is owned and run by the Nutter family.
Concerned about encroaching development and unwilling to have their family farm become a subdivision, the Cheek brothers last month arranged an agricultural conservation easement on 83 of their 200 acres through Orange County’s Lands Legacy Program.
The three-year-old program preserves farmland and protects watersheds in the county, using funds that come in part from the federal Farm and Ranch Land Protection Program. In 1995, before the Lands Legacy Program was in place, the Nutter family set up an open-space preservation easement on 107 acres of their land at Maple View.
The Cheek easement nearby will help protect a portion of the Pickard’s Mountain Natural Area and Morgan Creek, which flows through the farm on its way to the University Lake public water supply. The brothers and their heirs will retain title to their land but will turn over non-agricultural development rights to the county. That means those 83 acres will remain open farmland, free of houses.
“In perpetuity,” Everett Cheek said, with some satisfaction.
The Cheek brothers’ Lemola Farm is named for their parents, Lemuel and Ola Permelia Cheek. It has been a dairy farm since 1925, and it has been in the family since long before that. How long they don’t exactly know, but their mother was a Lloyd, and they know that back in colonial times an English king — George III, Lewis says — granted a man named Thomas Lloyd a thousand acres hereabouts. Both brothers were born up the road in the old homeplace, and their great-grandfather is buried in one of the nearby fields.
The family started raising registered purebred Ayrshires in 1940, when Lemuel Cheek went down to Pinehurst and bought an Ayrshire bull from Leonard Tufts. It turned out the animal was too big to fit in the truck he’d brought, so he had to go back down with a trailer and pick it up.
From that first bull, the Cheeks built a herd of the pale brown and white cattle. They keep a closed herd, Lewis said. In the last 40 years, they have not brought in a single animal from elsewhere. They now use artificial insemination to impregnate their cows, and they raise calves to replace the cattle culled from the herd.
Ayrshires originated 250 years ago in Ayr, Scotland, Everett said. In 1957, he visited several herds near Glasgow. Since the late 1960s, the Cheeks have earned some of their income selling purebred stock at agricultural shows in Kentucky and Ohio.
Technically, Lewis said, theirs is a dairy farm. “But when animals need to be culled, they go into the food chain as hamburger.”
Maintaining the herd is a family undertaking. Everett’s son, Michael, is in charge of the younger animals and does the milking the mornings his father doesn’t. Lewis’s son, Kevin, takes care of the afternoon milking six days a week, Lewis said, “unless that golfing bug takes him away.”
Lewis, who is fond of his sleep, doesn’t get up at 3 a.m. unless he really has to. He fills in on milking, but growing grain to feed the cattle is his main job. In summer, he does all the hay cutting and runs the bale wagon. Everett does the raking, and Michael is “the number one baler.”
“Most dairy farms, the wives work outside the farm as well as on,” Everett said. His wife, Hazel, used to teach school. In fact, she came to the area from Northern Ireland more than 40 years ago on an exchange program to teach at the Carrboro Elementary School. Now she makes and sells handicrafts.
Lewis’s wife, Evelyn, works as a substitute teacher to put groceries on the table.
“Except milk,” Everett said. “We drink our own milk.”
“We’ve been drinking it all our lives, since we were weaned,” Lewis said.
“We eat all the butter and milk and eggs we want,” Everett said, “and our cholesterol is within limits.”
“Probably because of all the work we do,” said Lewis.
The brothers have worked on the farm all their lives, but both have traveled and both pay close attention to current events. They’re knowledgeable and articulate about everything from good dairy herd management to Carolina sports to the recent photographs from the Martian surface. Everett has a degree in French from UNC, from which he graduated in 1946 along with Charlie “Choo-Choo” Justice and Andy Griffith.
There have been a lot of teachers in their family. Their mother taught at Orange Grove Academy before she got married. An aunt was a teacher, an uncle a principal. Everett and Lewis’s little sister Nancy, who lives on the home place, was a teacher as well. Their younger brother Larry, who was a sportswriter, lives in Florida.
Lewis graduated from Chapel Hill High School in 1943 at the age of 16.
“I was going to go to N.C. State to study agriculture, but there was a war on and my father needed help on the farm,” he said. “I was 18 when the war ended, and I decided I was learning as much at home as I would at State, so I stayed at home.”
When he was still in high school, Lewis raised a bull for a Future Farmers of America program. He took this bull, which was named “Tell Peggy Sonny Boy,” to the State Fair several times and slept next to him in the stall.
“I thought no one would bother me in here with this bull,” he said, laughing.
When the brothers joined their father in running the farm, it became known as L.R. Cheek and Sons. In 1971, when they incorporated, it became Lemola Farm. Their parents died within six months of each other in 1987.
Keeping a dairy farm going means lots of hard physical work for a small financial payoff. During the drought the summer before last, the hay didn’t grow well and things got especially tight on the farm. “We had to borrow money and bring in a tractor-trailer load of alfalfa from Wisconsin just to survive a dry year,” Lewis said.
Faced with the difficulty of making ends meet year after year, many a farmer considers selling out to a developer. But the Cheek brothers didn’t want to do that. They had heard of other farmers setting up conservation easements, and they watched closely as the federal government earmarked funds to preserve farmland.
“It’s so new you can’t find information on it in the tax forms,” Everett said. “Congress passed the Agricultural Act, which was probably part of a big budget act, and set aside money for the purpose of doing this. Orange County tends to be on the ball for trying to find money. They seem to have an ear cocked toward anything that has to do with money.”
Lewis added, “Some other counties sort of heehawed about it. I understand Orange County is the leader in the state doing this.”
Everett drove from his brother’s house up the road to the parcel of land where his house and the easement acres are. He walked with two of his dogs down a curving hillside sown in oats to the bottom land through which Morgan Creek flows.
“The county and the USDA have slightly different things they’re trying to do,” he said. “The USDA is concerned with farmland being eaten all up. The county is concerned about protecting watersheds.”
He pointed out two beaver dams on the tree-lined Morgan Creek and a pointed tree stump beside it. “The beavers always leave their mark. I sort of enjoy seeing what they do.”
Everett walked from the creek up a hill to his son Michael’s house, which was not far from his own. “There’s a beautiful view back here,” he said, indicating the open fields and hedgerows on rolling hills that lapped one behind the other.
As he walked along the gravel road back toward his own house, he pointed out another good spot for a view. “People drive out from town and park along the road,” he said. “At first I couldn’t figure out what they were doing, and then I realized they came out to see Mars or something like that. You can’t see that in the city. It’s too bright. And you do have wide vistas here.”
By the time Everett neared his house, the setting sun had turned the undersides of the clouds above it pink and made graceful black silhouettes of the surrounding trees. He and Hazel planted them, he said, the apple and peach trees, the pecans, the towering magnolia they received as a wedding gift more than 40 years ago.
He took a moment to enjoy the loveliness of his homestead in the waning of the day.
“You might be able to see,” he said, “why I didn’t want to turn over in my grave hearing footsteps up above.”
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