Rooted: The Tibbitts Farming Company's Journey Across Generations (Pt. 2)

Part 2 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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Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

It's a lot of work to take a field out of rice. It's a lot of work to put it back in.

SPEAKER_04: 0:07

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_00: 0:21

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

SPEAKER_03: 0:28

My name is Luis Espino. I'm the Rice Farming Systems Advisor for Butte and Glene Counties. I'm Michelle Leinfelder-Miles. 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: 0:53

Together, the UCCE Rice Farm Advisors seek to provide relevant topical research-backed information This is part two. of the Tibbets Farming Company's history, as told by George and Carson Tibbets. The first part of our talk together really focused on each of their individual impetuses for joining the farming culture. Carson talked about how his interest in agriculture was really revved up during his high school FFA experience, and George went into detail about how even as a child he knew he wanted to be a becoming a farmer took him a little bit longer than he'd anticipated. Today we're going to go a little bit further into some of those challenges and discuss a little bit more about how the Tibbetts Farming Company was revitalized and became a functioning farming organization in the mid-90s. As always, we'd really like to thank George and Carson Tibbetts for taking the time to share their story with us because it's a pretty good one.

UNKNOWN: 2:13

Music

SPEAKER_04: 2:29

So with that, I think we're going to move into probably more of the technical part of the conversation, talking about the farming practices that you implement with your operation. Because, and I'm going to give a bit of a spoiler here, there are some practices that you all do that aren't terribly common in rice farming systems. And so with that, let's talk a little bit about crop rotation, because that's not something you often see in the Sacramento Valley rice fields. Let's let Carson take a test. stab at that.

SPEAKER_01: 3:00

All right. Well, a lot of my information is going to be coming from my dad, just because that's where I got all my experience from. But crop rotation, we're very fortunate to be able to rotate our crops from rice. And that's mostly because of our soil. A lot of growers in the Sacramento Valley have much heavier clay soils than we do. We do have a lot of clay, but we have enough sand and silts in our soils to allow us to grow very successful tomatoes, safflower, sunflower, vine seed. We do not have much limitation in what we can grow. We would probably struggle growing anything orchard related because we have a high water table. But regarding crop rotation itself, we do not have a hard struggle besides the first year following rice. Because having rice paddies, ground gets soaked to the point where crops will struggle. So you have to do transition crop like safflower or sunflower to absorb up some of that water. But yeah, we don't have as much challenge as other people would. We're very fortunate to do that. It allows us to give a break in the weed aspects. And just because five or six years of rice has a lot of water grass, that gets annoying after a while.

SPEAKER_02: 4:29

Crop rotation is an integral component of integrated pest management, IPM, right? So we practice IPM. We try and rotate our herbicide chemistries. We try and rotate our crops because we can. And Carson's right. A lot of the rice soils in the Sacramento Valley are too heavy, really, to grow anything else. It's just adobe. But our soils are on the lighter end of that spectrum. And particularly regarding tomatoes, particularly with the advent of drip irrigation and transplanting. Tomatoes have become a very viable crop on this farm. We don't farm the tomatoes ourselves. We rent out. We always have one or two or sometimes even three fields of tomatoes rented out. But in the 90s, our neighbors, the Poundstone family, they tried growing tomatoes on this farm several times and their own property, but they were direct seeding and sprinkling it. And it never did that well. I mean, tomato seeds are little tiny things. And to get a good seed bed for little tomato seeds and seedlings on heavy rice soil is a challenge. But they were doing it and they will keep doing it. And then irrigating was– you couldn't furrow irrigate it because our fields are, for the most part, too flat. So, they would sprinkler irrigate. I mean, that worked. But that's not ideal either. So when drip irrigation became the norm in tomatoes and transplanting the seedlings instead of trying to get a direct seed going, that put us right in the ballgame with other tomato areas. Even though our soil is not the beautiful sandy loam like it is down in Davis, they can get a really good tomato crop here now with the way they farm it now. For a while, when we were rotating, I would leave a field and rice on a couple of years and then take it out, put it in row crops for two, three, four years and then back in and rice. It's a lot of work to take a field out of rice. It's a lot of work to put it back in. I've stretched out that rotation. I have two fields. We have four fields of rice this year. Two of them have been in rice for six or seven years, I think. Whatever benefits we had early on in those fields of crop rotation is gone. We're fighting the wheat We're finding the water grass. But our other two fields, they were just brought into rice last year. And you get a little honeymoon because the weed pressure is down because rice is an aquatic crop. So it's dominated by aquatic weeds. And then you go into row crops and you're dealing with terrestrial weeds. So you break up that cycle by growing rice and then taking it on rice. It works for a while, but it doesn't work forever. So at some point Those two fields I mentioned that have been in rice for a while, we'll have to take them out. But I also look at the markets, and I don't know what we put those fields into right now. We were relying on sunflowers as a transition crop from rice to row crops because we could make money on sunflowers. But we couldn't even get a contract this year. A lot of sunflower acres have disappeared. I hope it's not forever. I hope it comes back. California has a very good reputation for producing high-quality sunflower planting seed for our exporter around the world and we were proud and privileged to be a part of that so this year I've got a field that we're growing safflower in instead of instead of sunflowers although that would not that was not following rice that was following following tomatoes. Our tomato tenant felt the field needed a break, so we were going to take it out of tomatoes for a while. Safflower is not a lucrative crop, let's just say, but hopefully we'll make a little money on

SPEAKER_04: 8:36

it. The thing I've always heard about safflower is you plant it and you get hopefully a neutral year. Hopefully you don't lose any money, but you're not going to make any. And so we've talked about crop rotation, but there's another thing I wanted to bring up that I think might be a little unfamiliar to some of our listeners, and that's the Leathers Method. That's pretty common in this area. George, do you want to take a first crack at describing the Leathers Method and why you use it? The

SPEAKER_02: 9:03

Leathers Method is named after Jim Leathers, who was a very well-known PCA. I think I may have met him, but this was decades ago. It's also known as Pinpoint Flood, although I think there's technically a small difference between the two, and I can't tell you what that difference is. The general gist of the Leather's Method is you aerial seed like normal, but after two to three days, depending on how warm it is, basically you want to get that seed committed to growing. If you drop the seed into the water and took the water right off, a lot of that seed will just stop growing and wait for the water. But if it's in the water for two to three days and then it becomes committed to growing. And at that point, you take the water off for a few days, and that tells the rice seedling something. When it's underwater, it wants to grow a shoot. It wants to grow a shoot to get above the water so it can get a breath of air. But when you take the water off, it changes into sending down a root instead. And that's very important. We're here on the west side of the Sacramento Valley, and I've been told that we're much windier on the west side than they are on the east side. I don't know if that's a fact or not because a lot of those guys on the east side, they don't use leathers. They don't use pinpoint flood. This spring was just as windy as any other spring and frankly, I just can't stand it because if that seedling is growing a little shoot without a root to anchor it and the wind comes up like it does virtually every day, it makes waves out there and the those little shoots act like sails, even if it's partially rooted. And then all those waves push all those little boats with sails into the corner and you don't have any seed on the field and it's all on your corner. And despite using Leather's method, we had that problem last year on a field. It was what we call new ground. It had been tomatoes the year before that. So it was like a garden soil. I mean, a typical rice field in the spring is you chisel the ground and work it up, but you're farming like golf ball size pieces of clay, right? The texture of the soil has changed just for having been under a flooded environment. The year following tomatoes, it's like a garden. And so the particles are very fine. And so any wind at all in a new field, those waves cover the seed with silt and they won't grow. They won't grow even if they're covered with a sixteenth of an inch of silt. So between either getting cover with fine particles of soil or having the actual seeds move, that's a problem in new ground. So with new ground in particular, we use the Leather's Method, but I routinely use it in every field. I mean, Jim Erdman taught me about the Leather's Method, so that's just like gospel to me. You think he told me, I believe. And Kim, following in her father's footsteps, she's been using the Leather's Method for her entire time farming, but this year she didn't. She kept the flood on and just Just fine. In fact, I drive by it every day and it looks beautiful. And I've done it before a few times, left the water on, but I didn't sleep very well at nights and just worrying about it. And I think I did it three times and two times it was great. And then one time I remember thinking, I should have drained it. We use the Leather's Method because we think we're windier here than other areas.

SPEAKER_04: 12:42

And so one of the benefits I've heard touted about the Leather's Method is if If you have tadpole shrimp, it's a way to get rid of the shrimp in that early stage of when you put the water on, the eggs of the shrimp are able to germinate, for lack of a better word, and the little shrimp will start to swim. But when you pull the water off, the little shrimp will die before they can affect the rice seedling. Have you guys had any, I mean, with using the Leather's Method, you're not going to see any shrimp, but is that a concern at all? I'm going to pass that to Carson.

SPEAKER_01: 13:11

It's not really a concern because we use the Leather's Method. Being out in the rice fields, I've seen tadpole shrimp rarely. I imagine that is because we use the leather method. I imagine if we had a flood the whole time, we would have a much larger problem and another thing to consider how to manage. Then we'd have to

SPEAKER_02: 13:30

spray pesticides. We can find shrimp in our fields, but we really have to look for them. And midge, too. It's the same thing. Growers talk about midge as an issue, but I remember having midge issues. I remember Steve Scaracci in a field with me in one of my early years, and it was a really cold spring And he drained the field, but the rice wasn't growing. And he's looking around and seeing all the midge egg casing. He goes, hey, you got a midge problem. That field ended up, it warmed up and it finally started growing. But draining a field is a potential solution both for tadpole shrimp and for midge.

SPEAKER_04: 14:08

Well, actually, you mentioned something, and I kind of want to touch on that, about trying to avoid using the pesticides to treat tadpole shrimp. Because as I understand it, some of your fields are certified organic. Can you explain a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_02: 14:23

We have nine fields on our farm. One of them is organic. Not because I'm a big believer in it. I don't buy organic produce in the stores. I thought we could make some money doing it. The field was farmed, this is probably going back close to 20 years ago, T&P here in Arbuckle. They were farming it to alfalfa for us. field right here, which pointing out the window is an alfalfa again. And most of your listeners probably know to have a field become organic, you have to go through a three-year transition period. Doing that with alfalfa is very easy because you don't need to add fertilizer and you're mowing it several times a year, mowing the weeds. So, hey, we can transition this field to organic and get a premium for our crop. So, that's how it T&P had an alfalfa. I said, let's just make it organic. So after three years, it was organic. And then they played around with growing organic tomatoes. It never yielded that well, this field in tomato. It didn't yield that well in alfalfa. Turns out this field had basically a sodic issue, saline issue because of poor drainage over the years. This field or another one. So I go back to my brothers and sisters. I told them, we need to spend some money. The field next to it Even in rice, it was our poorest field because it was just high salt. We spent a lot of money to put in tile drain. It transformed. I'll tell you, it just transformed the fields. It was like a soil map before when this was alfalfa. You could see the really weak areas in the rice field next to it. Well, we've had both of these fields in tomatoes since then, and they've done great, whereas before they were doing. So my brothers and sisters agreed to make that investment. And they agreed basically because I asked them to, and they trusted me. So I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the leeway they've given me over the years. I'm not always right. I mean, I've made mistakes, but I just don't tell them.

SPEAKER_04: 16:28

So I wanted to touch on one more thing before we move on, but that's kind of a tricky topic, which is what happens in drought years? When your water sources get cut or your allocations might get dropped, is there a plan in action? And in this case, I'm kind of referring back to 2022 when we had those really bad drought after years of bad drought. Carson, I'm going to ask you to start. Well,

SPEAKER_01: 16:54

that was my second year in farming. first year was a harder year just transitioning to add in the second year my dad tells me this is the easiest it's going to get because we weren't farming we had a 10% allocation in water and we had tenants that had to use that water for their tomatoes so we were able to plant a field of sunflower and that's because sunflower have a tap root that can penetrate the soil very deep to siphon out as much water as they can so we don't have to irrigate them as much. We managed to irrigate it once.

SPEAKER_02: 17:38

The sunflower was in a field following rice, so the soil profile had been wetted and irrigated down deep. So the sunflowers could take advantage

SPEAKER_01: 17:47

of that water, and we didn't have to divert water. So when that happened, it kind of raised a concern. Is this going to be a norm? Is this something that we have to worry about a lot? Because we had never had this occur before. We in RD 108 and Reclamation District 108, we have very good water rights. We normally will get most of our water and in normal years we'll get all our water. In drought years, when the drought is not too severe, we will get still a decent amount of water, enough to farm most of our acres. So 2022 was the first year we really could not farm. It raises the question okay do we need a well and we after a lot of discussions opted not to because it is clearly becoming taboo in California to use groundwater as areas are sinking and farmers are having to mine deeper and deeper for their water. In our area, there's not as many wells because, again, we have very good water rights, but the amount of money it would cost to put in a well is too great. given the risk of potentially not even being able to use it one day due to regulations.

SPEAKER_04: 19:17

Thanks for kind of clarifying on that because I think the water situation in the West and in California is a lot different than what people who grow rice in other parts of the U.S. are used to. But, I mean, it's true that in 2022, like you mentioned, there were a lot of people who got 10% water allocation, 5% water allocation, 0% water allocation, and we saw the effect of that. We're still seeing the effect of that today.

SPEAKER_01: 19:45

That's true. A great point that my dad would jump in here and he would want me to jump in here and say it. We are absolutely still feeling the effects on the rice market because people are not. We had to sell rice at such a steep price. So in our export markets and our domestic markets, California rice has become a lot less appealing and we are actively still trying to win our markets and

SPEAKER_04: 20:16

Once those markets are lost, it's pretty hard to get them back. And we'll touch on this a little bit later, but there are cooperatives that are pretty devoted to trying to create those markets again. That's the end of the second installment of the Tibbetts Farming Company story. But once again, we'll have George and Carson back on to finish up the rest of the story soon. 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 Colusa Yolo, 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 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.