OLF Hits LA Times

May 7, 2007

The story of the US Navy attempting to take on a small ban of farmers to take their family farms and portions of a National Wildlife Refuge has become a national story.

PIKE ROAD, N.C. — The Navy wants every last one of Gerald Allen’s 1,168 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat along the T.G. “Sonnyboy” Joyner Highway.

It wants all 1,000 acres of C.E. and Maurice Manning’s rich blacklands, farmland their great-grandfather first plowed and planted in the 1880s using a horse and a mule as collateral.

The Navy also wants the flat coastal land where Donald Stotesberry runs an air park that provides crop-spraying planes for local farmers. It wants his house and yard too.

The federal government seeks to seize this and much more, 30,000 acres in all, for a pilot training facility in rural eastern North Carolina — swallowing up family farms and threatening the tranquillity of the vast Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

In raucous protest, farmers recently drove their tractors and combines to a Navy-sponsored hearing on the proposed 8,000-foot runway, which would be used to train F/A-18 Super Hornet jet pilots to land on aircraft carriers.

“The Navy’s acting like a bully,” said Dennis Bowen, 47, who stands to lose 100 acres of farmland cleared by his grandfather half a century ago.

Joining the farmers in opposing the plan is an unlikely alliance that includes conservative property rights advocates, liberal environmentalists, the National Rifle Assn., the NAACP, hunters, bird-watchers and retired military veterans.

“We got everything from tree-huggers to gun nuts,” one farmer joked.

LA Times

With the added attention hopefully more pressure will be applied to the US Navy to look at the other potential sites and to leave Pocosin Lakes alone. There is more then just birds and a few farmers that stand to lose if the Navy gets it’s way. The entire area will suffer and be forever changed.

Allen, 64, who farms 2,300 acres, served four years as an Air Force jet crew chief. “It’s not about hating the military,” he said. “It’s about hating the politics — bringing noise and disruption down here because people in Virginia don’t want it up there.”

Dozens of farmers would go out of business under the plan, Allen said.

Ronnie Gibbs, who sells seed and fertilizer to farmers, said the economic effect of the runway would ripple through local communities that relied on farming.

“I’d pretty much be knocked out,” Gibbs said. “So would the grocery stores, supply houses, all the people who work for farmers…. It would ruin us all.”

We’ll continue to follow this story and we’re hopeful that the Navy will come to their senses soon.