VALDOSTA, Ga. (AP) – When Southern farmers faced backbreaking work from sunup to sundown, it was important to start the day with an energy-packed breakfast that often included ham and eggs.

The traditional hearty meal led to the first ham-and-egg show in 1916 at what is now Fort Valley State University. The shows spread throughout the rural South, highlighting proper meat-curing techniques in the days before refrigeration and the importance of high-quality livestock.

Even though they’ve run their course because of improved farm technology, the tradition is being kept alive in southern Georgia’s Lowndes County, which holds the 56th annual ham-and-egg show on Tuesday and Wednesday. Judges will select the best hams and eggs from area farms, and visitors can sample them.

Lowndes County Extension Director Mickey Fourakers said he expected about the same number of entries as last year, when 20 families brought 45 to 50 hams and 30 families entered 60 dozen eggs.

Georgia’s commercial hog industry has dwindled in the last 20 years, but there are still a few small producers like Douglas Battles, a perennial contender in the show.

Battles plans to enter five hams but won’t have any eggs because hawks and dogs have killed most of his chickens. Battles’ father cured hams, and a ham entered by his 7-year-old son, Jaquon, won the grand championship last year.

“It’s part of our heritage,” said Battles, who, along with his two brothers, grows about 1,000 acres of peanuts, cotton, soybeans and corn.

“As a child, I was living with my daddy and cooking ham, smelling ham, eating ham,” he said. “So as long as I’m living, I’m going to continue in the ham-and-egg show.”

In the old days, farmers butchered their hogs and cured the hams by rubbing them with a mixture of salt, sugar and potassium nitrate. The hams were then washed and hung in a smokehouse for about 30 days. The entire process of curing and smoking took 45 to 60 days, yielding meat that could be saved almost indefinitely without refrigeration as long as the temperature didn’t exceed 100 degrees.

“It is an art,” said Glenwood Hill, a retired Fort Valley State professor who has been judging the hams at the Valdosta show for 15 years. “This is part of history. We want to maintain it and pass it on to future generations.”

Hill said the purpose of the shows was to teach farmers and their families how to grow and prepare nutritious foods. Through the sale of prize-winning hams and eggs, the shows also provided cash when no other crops were available to help farmers purchase seeds, fertilizer and other supplies.

The shows spread from the Fort Valley Normal and Industrial School, as it was known at the time, across Georgia and on to other Southern states, Hill said.

But interest began to wane as the rural population moved off farms and into cities, and began buying ham and eggs at supermarkets. The industrial school, which became Fort Valley State College in 1939 and gained university status in 1996, held its last ham-and-eggs show in 1967.

The university plans to host its first show in 39 years in April, and organizers in three other Georgia counties may start offering them next year, Hill said.

Once the judging is complete, visitors can sample the hams and eggs, including some of the six hams entered by 72-year-old Sully Carter.

“It gives the younger generation a chance to see how the old folks have had to struggle,” Carter said. “It makes me feel good that I still know how to do it. They will learn, too, and carry it on.”

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MONROE, La. (AP) – Frigid temperatures and ice in northeastern Louisiana over the weekend didn’t damage crops and, in some instances, may have helped them, fruit farmers say.

Strawberry farmer Sal Petitto said the freeze killed the blooms that would have produced the earliest strawberries from his Monroe farm, but the plants weren’t harmed.

“It didn’t hurt us that bad,” Petitto said. “It just set us back two or three weeks.”

He expects his first strawberries to be ready at the beginning of April.

Louisiana’s largest peach producer said the freeze was beneficial for his crop.

“I really don’t think we had any damage,” said Joe Mitcham of Mitcham Farms in Ruston. “It probably helped us more than anything because it slowed the buds down and gave us more chill hours.”

Mitcham said the freeze might have taken “5 to 10 percent” of the earliest buds, “but we would have thinned those anyway,” he said.

AP-ES-02-21-06 0329EST