Rooted: The Tibbitts Farming Company's Journey Across Generations (Pt. 1)

Part 1 of 4

This special episode series features Colusa County rice farmers George and Carson Tibbitts discussing the multi-generational history of their family farm, and how Carson is now taking on more responsibilities as a junior partner while learning from his father's decades of farming experience.

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The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of the University of California. The material and information presented here is for general purposes only. The "University of California" name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product, or service.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_06: 0:00

I wanted to be a farmer. I like solitude. Big introvert. Farming lifestyle suits me. I'll be alone all day and that's just fine. Or with Carson. And my dogs. Happy with my dogs.

SPEAKER_04: 0:15

Hello and welcome to Thoughts on Rice, a podcast hosted by the University of California Cooperative Extension Rice Advisors. I'm one of your hosts, Sarah Marchionish, and I'm a rice farm advisor for Colusa and Yolo counties.

SPEAKER_01: 0:30

I'm Whitney Brimda-Forest. I'm the Cooperative Extension Rice Advisor for Sutter, Yuba, Placer, and Sacramento counties.

SPEAKER_03: 0:37

My name is Luis Espino. I'm the Rice Farming Systems Advisor for Butte and Glen counties. I'm Michelle I'm a farm advisor in the Delta region. I work on all sorts of field crops, grains and forages, but one of those is rice. And the counties that I cover are San Joaquin, Sacramento, Yolo, Solano, and Contra Costa counties.

SPEAKER_04: 1:02

Together, the UCCE Rice Farm Advisors seek to provide relevant topical research-backed information relating to California rice production. I'm fortunate enough to sit down today with George and Carson Tibbetts of Tibbetts Farming Company. George, Carson, thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_06: 1:21

It's a pleasure to be here, Sarah. I'm looking forward to talking about the history of our farm because it goes way back.

SPEAKER_05: 1:28

I'm also happy to join. This is Carson Tibbetts and also happy to share my experiences working for the family.

SPEAKER_04: 1:38

Thank you guys so much. So, George, you've kind of already alluded to it, but I'd love to get deeper into it. Can you tell me the story and history of your farm and how it came to be? It

SPEAKER_06: 1:48

goes back to about 1929 or 1930. My grandparents, George and Vilma Lodi, my mom's parents, bought the farm from a guy named Jack Dalton, I believe. It was either 1929 or 1930. My grandfather and his brother went partners in it for a while, and they had to borrow a lot of money. I think they bought it for something like$50 an acre or something, but they That was huge. That was a lot of money back then. This farm is 1,292 acres. Eventually, my grandfather bought his brother out, and I think they had a tough time in the 1930s. The economy was bad with the Depression. Eventually, particularly with World War II came about, that changed everything. It changed the economy. The war, frankly, was good for the economy. It was good for the agricultural economy, and the farm eventually became successful and still own the family today. I grew up in Woodland. My dad was not a farmer. My mom was not a farmer. So it was leased out while I was growing up to Jim Erdman. And my memories of coming up to the farm or coming up on Sundays to have dinner with grandma and grandpa. And then Jim Erdman was always here. He was a young man then. And he would take me out right around the farm and do things. And And that's where I caught the farming bug. I love spending time with Jim. He was a mentor for me through my whole life, particularly on farming issues. And I learned a lot about farming rice from him. My mom had a brother. He grew up working on the farm, but he died in 1967. And it was very hard on my grandparents to lose their son. My grandparents were friends with Jim Erdman's parents, Fritz Erdman. The story I heard it was Fritz told my grandfather, hey, I've got this kid. I need to get him working somewhere. Why don't you put him to work farming your grounds? So he did. So Jim, he was only in his early 20s at the time when he started farming this place. And my grandparents were retired. And so at this point, 70s is when I remember coming up here and spending time with Jim on a Sunday, on an occasional Sunday. He was a tenant on this farm. until he died about, it was 10 or 12 years ago now. I started farming in 1993. And Jim, despite of not being in his best interest, helped me to get started. I had a job at the California Farm Bureau at that time. I'd been to grad school studying agronomy, plant science, and economics. So Jim always knew I wanted to be a farmer. And when I finally was ready to do that, it wasn't until I was 35 years old because I had no resources. You need capital to get going in farming. So finally took the plunge in when I was 35 and crucial to our being able to do that was my wife, Nancy. She was working at the University of California, Davis in the internship and career center. Frankly, that's the only way we got a loan to farm was the fact that she was working for UC Davis and I was working for the California Farm Bureau. So for the first two years, while I was farming a couple of rice fields here on the farm and a safflower field, I remember. I still had a job in Sacramento, so I was going back and forth and paying Jim to do a lot of the work, but I was taking all the risk. The first year that I farmed, it was 1993, and it was, looking back, it was one of the best years we ever had farming rice. That was the year Japan had a shortage of rice, and so the price went up. We had this big market for a country that eats a lot lot of rice. The price went up. And also, we had great yields. I think I got 100 sacks in all our fields that year. And in the 90s, that was harder to do. That's a little more routine now. In this area, 100 sacks is not unusual at all in this area. The soil is in the microclimates we have around here. But one of the main reasons we had such good yields, we had some new herbicides that year. We had this material called Londax. Have you heard of Londax, Sarah?

SPEAKER_04: 6:11

Yeah, I've heard of Londax. I think we don't use it so much anymore.

SPEAKER_06: 6:14

Well, for a couple of years, it worked great. So we had clean fields, we had high yields, and we had a great price. And looking back on my 30 plus years of farming now, there's not too many years I can say everything went right. And when I look at the luck in my life, that's one of the luckiest things to happen to me was that our first year, I always want to say our, because Nancy was crucial to this working out, that the first year we farmed rice was a good year we made money and I've been through many years where we didn't make money and I don't know if I would have been able to withstand a bad year the first year because didn't have much capital behind it was all borrowed money so we were off to a good start I learned not too many years later that it's not always so easy but in general this farm has been good to our family I'm 67 years old now and And I am pleased to have a son that's interested in farming. I have two sons. He has an older brother, George, that never had any real interest in agriculture. And I was fine. But Carson did. I often tell people, I don't know if I've ever said this to Carson or not, but I think what sparked Carson's interest in agriculture was his FFA in high school. He was really into FFA. He was president in his senior year. And he was excited about ag. He was excited about the opportunity. He saw this as an opportunity. So he went to Cal Poly, but I'll let him tell his story. But I'm pleased to be slowly handing things off. I give him more and more responsibility every year. He's doing most of the water management now on the rice. Except he seems to want weekends off now. That's annoying. But I'm really glad to have it. So that was a long answer to get started.

SPEAKER_04: 8:13

Thank you, George, for giving us that quick briefer on the history. I find it really fascinating at the rich ties you have to this land. And you've already done my job here. We're going to segue back to Carson and have him explain a little bit about his experiences and what brought him back here. And most importantly, he's going to get to defend himself against some of the claims you made. So, Carson, yeah, let's hear a little bit about your background and really what led you you to move back and start to take

SPEAKER_05: 8:42

over the farm? and one lamb. I very much enjoyed that, and I used to joke with my dad about having livestock on the farm one day, but my dad would always tell me that our land would be wasted on livestock. And he's right, and I also, as my dad mentioned, don't really like working weekends, so livestock would make that much more hard to avoid. Stripping to college, I studied agricultural and Louis Obispo. I loved my program, but we did not cover much rice. My area of focus during those years were more in orchards and row crops, but no, not much rice. I think maybe like two or three lectures, rice was mentioned briefly. But I don't regret that at all because all my rice experience is coming through my dad. and also the people that we are surrounded by, including Kim Gallagher, Cooperative Extension, and our PCA, Todd Miller, who is willing to take me out with him to give me a little bit of his experience as well. During my summers at Cal Poly, I did my internships. Two years I spent with Cooperative Extension, working one year under Luis Espino and the other under Whitney Brindaforest, so I was able able to spend a lot of time at the experiment station and also in rice fields doing foliar applications, fungicides for Louise, and also looking for army worms. And then after that, I met Timothy Blank, who recruited me on to do a summer of work under the California Crop Improvement Association, looking at sunflowers during the earlier part of the summer, and then right at the end, making sure that the fields met the requirements for a certified seed. Once I graduated Cal Poly, I went to work for Kim Gallagher on Erdman Farms. So, Kim Gallagher being Jim Erdman's daughter. So, I got to have my own mentor of an Erdman, which was very fun. I was able to work in their orchards and also start my water management and rice through the ordinance. Now, for the past five years, I've been working for the family farm, kind of as a partner, but really as an employee. So, yes, I do like my weekends because I'm more of an employee.

SPEAKER_06: 11:55

You're a junior partner.

SPEAKER_05: 11:58

Yes, a junior partner is a good way to put it. This year, my dad has allowed me to helm a rice field, making the decisions, but primarily making giving me the sense of responsibility over it. We as partners are paying for that out of the Tibbets Farming Company, but it allows me to get a real sense of what goes into managing a rice field from start to finish.

SPEAKER_04: 12:30

Thank you, Carson. That was a really, really interesting story as to how you ended up back here. And I really appreciate the full circle moment of the Erdman-Tibbets relationship continuing on into the next generation. That is just so cool to see. And I think that's one of the things we see in agriculture is a tight-knit community of people who, although, like you said earlier, George, they might technically be in competition, there was really a lot more collaboration involved and cooperating with your neighbors. With that, I think I also wanted to go back to something you touched on earlier, George, about your grad school experience. Can you talk a bit about who you worked with and some of the work you did with them?

SPEAKER_06: 13:10

I graduated in 1980 I spent a year working for the Baber family, Jack Baber, and I went to school. I was a fraternity brother in Alpha Gamma Rho with Jack's son, John. That was a great experience working for another rice farmer. That was one year from planting through harvest, and then I got my PCA license. But by then, it's the early 80s, and it was a horrible time for agriculture in the United States. The government was... I had what was called set-aside programs, and up to 35% of farm ground was just sitting fallow, and prices were bad, and it was not a good time to be going to your typical fertilizer company and asked to be taken on as a young PCA. There was just no jobs. So I spent a year working for this company that sprayed weeds along railroad right-of-way. all over the western United States. I'm riding on these trucks on the rail. We're going to the most rural places in the United States, miles from anywhere. It was pretty boring. It was pretty dull. I definitely didn't want to spend my life doing that. I remember giving Jim Hill a cold call with a letter. I think I wrote it from Tucumcari, New Mexico. He's sitting there in a hotel room one night. I'd like to come to grad school I thought my strategy was if I can't get a job now because of the ag economy maybe I can poise myself to be a more attractive candidate if I get a master's degree and so I wrote him a letter and said I'd like to apply to be a grad student would you take me on and he replied and he said yeah you need to go through some steps to take the GRE exam for example I remember had to do that and see how you shake out I I had good grades when I was an undergraduate at Davis, so that helped. So he took me on, I applied, I got in, and I spent the next several years working as his grad student and staff research associate. I spent a lot of time with farm advisor Steve Scardacci. I'm sure you've heard that name, Sarah, one of your predecessors there in Colusa, where he had this water management trial on Gordon Wiley's farm. And so that first summer before I started grad school classes i mean steve had me managing that place even though i didn't know much about managing water but steve was very insistent he knew what he wanted done and he and i was the guy he told what to do to make it happen that was basically my first experience growing rice was working for cooperative extension i didn't really i wasn't getting credits i wasn't technically a student yet but that after we i finished it that summer then i i went to grad school and Jim Hill, to this day, is a very close friend. Loved being his grad student. I loved being a grad student in general. I thought about going back for a PhD just because I really liked the academic life. I wore shorts all the time and rode my bike to campus. I loved computers. Computers were just coming along, personal computers. I loved computers. I loved research. I loved everything about it. The only problem was I was broke. Didn't need a lot, but didn't have a lot either. But anyway, it was a very happy time in my life. So, yeah, Jim Hill. I was his grad student, and that was through the mid-'80s. And then that was wrapping up, and I still didn't feel ready to, you know, I could tell the trust. Well, I have a master's degree in agronomy now, and I managed a rice field for one year. Still not ready to make a play to take over the farm. So I needed to get a job. I should tell you that I never actually finished my thesis for Jim Hill, which is a sore point with him to this day. I did all the classes and I did all my research and I gave my research data to other grad students he had working with him. And they were building a model at the time. And so my water depth, my water management data went into his model. But I remember feeling at the end, I don't like the way I did this research. If I knew then what I know now, I would do, I've done this completely differently. I lost kind of enthusiasm for it. But in the meantime, I was taking classes in ag econ at Davis. Kind of, I had this idea, I'll get a double master's in ag econ and agronomy. So I finished all the requirements except the thesis for agronomy, but I got the master's degree in ag econ.

SPEAKER_04: 18:07

So essentially a double master's.

SPEAKER_06: 18:09

Yeah, I could still publish my thesis. I still have all the data and I'm box and everything. I kind of had this dream. Bruce Lindquist is taking over for Jim Hill. I don't know if I ever said this to Bruce, but I said, you know, Carson's on the farm now. We could do that project right, and he could be your grad student, and vicariously, my pieces could get published through him.

SPEAKER_05: 18:33

I don't have time to be a grad

SPEAKER_06: 18:35

student. But anyway, that's not going to happen. So, I had a master's in ag econ, which made me attractive at the California Farm Bureau to be a staff person. And I was there for six or eight years, a long time, wearing a suit every day, traveling a lot, going back to Washington, D.C. I was actually kind of a lobbyist some of the time, not that often. Despite the Toastmasters, I never felt comfortable walking into a congressman's office and schmoozing and lobbying. It's not in my skill set. I wanted to be a farmer. I like solitude. Big introvert. Farming lifestyle suits me. I'll be alone all day. and that's just fine or with Carson and my dogs happy with my dogs but in retrospect working for the California Farm Bureau and all the wonderful people I worked with and wonderful people I met all over the country I learned a lot and I remember at the time the farm the federal farm programs were a huge part of farming and I didn't understand that at all part of my job at Farm Bureau was to be the expert on federal farm programs so on the ag econ side I took a class just on federal farm programs and learned all I could about farm programs. And that's really what made me a strong candidate to get chosen for the job at Farm Bureau. Like I said, I spent six or eight years there. And when I finally was ready to make a play to come into farming, they were supportive. They worked with me on, I was mostly full-time, but then let me go down a bit in order to handle the planting and the harvest. I did that for two years. It was such a hectic time. I remember I had two young kids, full-time job. Nancy had a full-time job and running the farm. So it was just, life was full. But I wouldn't trade it for anything. I just learned a lot. You know, it feels good to put a lot of work into something and have it pay off. So the Farm Bureau was one of the lucky things I feel grateful for now that I'm glad I got that job because I wasn't ready to be a farmer any time before that. Even if I didn't want to start farming, the farm was owned by a trust at this point. My grandparents had passed away many years before and they left the farm half to my mom and half to her brother's kids, basically. So it was run by a trust. The trust ran it like a business, like they should. I knew it would not fly if I went to the trust and say, hey, I want to start farming. I don't have any money. I don't have any experience. I should farm it because I'm his grandson. Well, there was one, two, there was three other grandsons and five other granddaughters. So even though I was the oldest of that bunch, there was nothing provided for any of the descendants to farm. In fact, I think my grandparents didn't want any of their kids or the grandkids to go into farming. They had lost their son to suicide. It was a huge blow to them. It kind of took the wind out of their sails. And farming had been a hard life for them, and I think they wanted a better life for their kids and grandkids. So they didn't really want any of the kids to go into farming, but I wanted to. And lucky for me, I was the only one of my grandparents' nine grandchildren. I was the only one that wanted to go into farming. So I didn't have to compete. How many times do you hear family battles of usually sons fighting over who's responsible, who gets this, who gets that? We didn't have that battles, but the trust was, leasing the farm out primarily to Jim Erdman every year. Jim was an exceptional farmer. He was doing a great job. He routinely got great yields. They had no incentive to consider changing horses in the middle of the stream and let me farm it. I was good friends with Jim. I think he never seemed averse to the idea to help me along and give me a hand up to being able to take over the farm one day. I'll always be grateful to him for that. Even though I didn't get to start farming until I was 35, I felt ready to do it. It's worked out well.

SPEAKER_04: 23:05

Well, it sounds like even though you feel you might have gotten started a little later, you got started at the right time.

SPEAKER_06: 23:11

Yes. The 80s were bad. That first year, 1993, I don't think we knew it when we planted the crop, but we knew it when we harvested the crop. Wow, Japan needs rice. And the price went up really high. And we made money. And I had been renting a house outside of Davis for like 10 years, my grad student years. And then I got married to Nancy. and we just kept living in that rental house, two kids and two dogs. I remember that fall, like during rice harvest, my first year farming, my landlady gives me an eviction notice. I think it was because of the dogs. She got tired of the dogs. I love that. If she didn't evict me, I'd probably still be living there because I loved that little house out in the country. But I'd made money farming that year. So I got evicted and she wanted me out by the month and I talked to her and she said, all right, you can have an extra month and they get the crop harvested they go look for a house the night this was 1993 and believe it or not even in davis it was a buyer's market and houses were just sitting and they're trying to find buyers for them and i had made enough money to have a down payment on a house and i'll tell you it was thirty thousand dollars i had thirty thousand dollars left over that was enough for a down payment on a house in Davis. And yet, that was not any brilliant strategy on my part that was being forced into going to find out. And yet, that's another one of the lucky circumstances in my life that I would not have bought a house at that time because I would have bought a tractor

SPEAKER_02: 24:52

or something.

SPEAKER_06: 24:53

Right? My poor wife, she wouldn't have supported it, but we bought a house and I'm still in that house today. I've I had a lot of lucky things happen. I had some unlucky things. We lost my wife 15 years ago, 16 years ago. We lost my sister a few years ago. She was murdered in Sacramento. And then my uncle's suicide. So we've had tragedy in the family too. But when I look at it all together, life is good still. We miss Nancy. We miss my sister, my uncle. He had four young kids. It was hard on them. The year I started farming, my mom died. So the trust dissolve. And so my cousins, my mom's brothers, four children, they now own half the farm. And they didn't even live in California anymore and they didn't want to be involved with the farm. So they wanted it sold. So my first year of farming, we as a family had to see if we could get a loan to buy out my cousins to keep farm in the family. Buying half the farm. That was huge. And I remember going to a lot of lenders. to get a loan to do it. And I only had this first year track record. It was tough. I remember feeling, after striking out a lot, feeling I was about to make something happen with an entity that was known then as the Farmers Home Administration. But then out of the blue, my dad's cousin was a real estate broker and he knew a wealthy farmer in Woodland, told him about what we wanted to do and all of the money. And so... I didn't know that. That was the Heidrich family. Really? Yeah. Fred Heidrich.

SPEAKER_05: 26:48

I did not know that.

SPEAKER_06: 26:49

Yeah. So, they loaned us the money to buy out my cousins. And that was a godsend. Like, I think I was going to get a loan. I think we were going to get a loan. But it was proving very difficult. But then it just magically appeared. And that was great. We stayed with him making payments for about five years. And then by then... We had a great track record and it was easy to refinance with a more conventional loan. And we just finished paying off that loan last year.

SPEAKER_04: 27:21

Congratulations.

SPEAKER_06: 27:22

30 years later. We have another loan now. We fixed up this house. This is the house my mom grew up in and my grandparents' house. And we had to tear it down to the studs about five years ago. Everything was shot, the wiring, the plumbing. If my grandparents were alive to see it, they would have been sad. I haven't said anything about my brothers and sisters yet. A real tribute to them, not only that they came together and we all agreed that we should fix up the house, right? It would be so easy to say, I don't want to spend my house, I just want the money. But going back, it took all of us, when we bought out my cousins, it took all of us to agree that we all wanted to take on that debt. None of them are involved in the farm, but they saw it as a good long-term investment, and it's another lucky thing. When I look back on the lucky things I've had is all my siblings have been on board keeping the farm together. So now we've been a partnership for 30 years, and we have meetings once or twice a year, and they always– The business part's fine, but then we always get in all these family discussions. There's no business meeting that it's all businesses. It took every one of my siblings to be on board to keep the farm intact. Again, the most common way farms dissolve is just because there's either no one to take it over or there's too many to take it over and it has to be sold off in pieces or even even if they want to keep it, sometimes over the years, inheritance taxes have played a big role in forcing farms to be split up just to pay taxes. But We didn't have to do that because we kept it in the family. So luck. I feel I'm here today because of luck. Being born into a farm family in California.

SPEAKER_04: 29:22

I mean, being born to a farm family in California, that's the luckiest thing in the world, right? But I really appreciate that foundation of information you've given. I think that it's a very common story in ag. It has a happy ending here because you've been able to keep the family farm in the family and the next generation is here. willing and able to take over. This concludes the first installment of our episodes focusing on Tibbetts family farming. But don't worry, we'll have George and Carson back on soon to finish up the rest of the story. For more information about this and our other resources, please feel free to check out our website, which is the UC Rice Agronomy website, and our blog, which is UC Rice Blog. We also have newsletters, one of which is Rice Brief, which covers clues Rice Notes, which covers Yuba Sutter, Rice Leaf, which covers Butte and Glen, and Field Notes, which covers rice in the Delta region of California. Thanks for listening to Thoughts on Rice, a University of California Cooperative Extension podcast from the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. You can find out more about this podcast on our website, thoughtsonrice.buzzsprout.com. We'd love to hear from you, whether it's from using our text link in the show notes, a survey submission in our feedback form, also in the show notes, or in a comment or rating on your podcast streaming service of choice. Let's have a good season folks. And remember, like the growers like to say, have a rice life. Mention of an agrochemical does not constitute a recommendation, merely the sharing of research findings. Always follow the label. The label is the law. Find out more at ipm.ucanr.edu. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of the University of California. The material and information presented here is for general purposes only. The University of California name in all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner, and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product, or service.