2006 Rural Partners Forum
Remarks by Grant Godwin
Thank you for the invitation to speak to you this morning. I travel a lot in the Northeast, and it’s a pleasure to be speaking before folks that perhaps better appreciate the semantics of a Southern tongue. And for all of you mothers out there that constantly worry whether your children listen to you or not, this morning I walked through the door, and I saw the open stage up here, you know, versus covered tables, and I just automatically picked my pants legs up to make certain I had matching socks on. My mom crossed the pond some years ago, but I know there was a smile on her face this morning when she saw me do that. I’m going to talk about our heritage, and I’m going to talk about our future because the two are tied together.
In the summer of 1865, my great grandfather walked home from the Civil War to a farm that barely existed and to an economy that didn’t. There was no government. There were no banks. There were no foundations. Churches existed in spirit only. I don’t know where his great grandfather was at the time, but there was no Billy Ray Hall. Wiley Pope took his cross cut saw, organized the local farmers, and began cutting pine timber and pitch and resin, floating it down the Cape Fear River and selling it to the shipyards in Wilmington. They rebuilt their farms and they rebuilt their regional economy. Sixty five years later, my dad survived the Great Depression using the same saws cutting juniper poles and selling them to the REA to run power lines across the South. As a kid in Spivey’s Corner in the 1950s, I observed farmhands with little formal education that could judge soil conditions by feel and by taste, read the evening sky for the weather, and make very complex adjustments to farm equipment on the fly for changing conditions or could fabricate equipment from scratch without drawings.
Today, the tools have changed, but the basic skills and work ethics have not. Our heritage is our future. Advanced materials and advanced manufacturing sound like sophisticated terms, but their basic meaning is simple: the use of the most advanced tools and materials available to fabricate products that create sustainable, competitive advantage. In the 1860s and 1930s it was crude soils and pine trees. Today, it’s virtual design software, high precision computerized cutting tools and advanced reinforced plastics and metals. In a perfect mode, advanced manufacturing involves engineers working on a global basis around the clock to engineer and analyze optimal designs and specifications and transmit those to the factory floor.
Advanced manufacturing is not the repetition of simple tasks that we taught in the factories prior to the ‘90s. It requires skilled workers that have the flexibility to utilize a broad range of tools in any given day and, most importantly, have the cognitive skills to read, understand and execute complex computerized drawings and instructions. Billy Ray mentioned in his remarks about employees changing jobs six or eight times in a year. Today’s manufacturing environment demands that people change jobs six and eight times a day and have the skills to float between those without failure and without pause.
Those cognitive skills were within the capacity of the farm worker of some years ago, but somehow, with education and the rote environment of the factory, we all too often robbed people of their independent thinking. As a result, too many of the young workers of today expect the computer to provide them the answer and execute the task without them understanding the input or the output. Neither is acceptable. As we go forward, we must re-teach the capacity for analysis and action, along with the critical base skills of reading, math and science. And we must eradicate the notion that anyone is owed anything just for showing up, for our global competitors are hungry for success. And success begins with productivity. If there are businesses looking to locate in your area, if you don’t talk to them about anything else, talk to them about the productivity of your workers, more so than their respective skill levels.
In terms of materials, textiles and agriculture are redefined. Industrial fabrics from natural fibers are in increasing demand. The shirt factories are gone, but advanced, complex textile fabrics made in Salisbury and Rutherfordton, combined with resins from the Research Triangle Park, are the raw materials for products that have a number of advantages over conventional materials. And they have become the material of choice in every market they’ve penetrated. These products include everything from sports equipment to leisure marine, to a range of products for construction, to automobile, truck and aircraft components. Nearly all of these sectors are termed high growth at rates well beyond GDP, and most have operations and/or suppliers in communities across North Carolina as well as our neighboring states.
In the case of Martin Marietta in Sparta, we are fabricating truck bodies that are 30 percent lighter in weight, 40 percent more thermally efficient and don’t rust. We are reducing the cost of transportation. We are improving the bottom line to companies that utilize the materials, and we are improving service to the consumers. We are working on a delivery van that will be 50 percent more fuel efficient and discharge far fewer harmful emissions. We are delivering ballistic and blast panels to protect our troops and critical infrastructure abroad and at home, and we are working on highly advanced, structural components for the next generation of Navy vessels.
All of that is being built and will be built in Sparta. We are working with the Northwest North Carolina Advanced Materials Cluster to create spin-off effects for other employers and create jobs in the northwest region of the state. In collaboration with N. C. State, Western Carolina and the community colleges at Wilkes, Western Piedmont and Lenoir, we are working with the Navy to introduce fabrication of aircraft replacement parts for the Rotorcraft Center of Excellence at Cherry Point – a public/private/education consortium that will create job and small business development across the state.
We North Carolinians have built our economy three times over from scratch, and as dire as our economic environment now seems, we have a higher base from which to work, and we will rebuild our economy again. Tools and materials and the ability to use them are a major part of our heritage and will be integral to our future. We will build a strong, new economy based on the brain and muscle power, the creativity and the dogged persistence of North Carolinians. Whether we’ve been here for seven generations or seven days, every community in this state has an opportunity to participate in that. At Martin Marietta, we are pleased to be one small part of the future of this state.
