Rooted: The Tibbitts Farming Company's Journey Across Generations (Pt. 3)

Part 3 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_04: 0:00

We have a responsibility to aid in the research where we can.

SPEAKER_03: 0:10

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: 0:25

I'm Whitney from the forest. I'm the Cooperative Extension Rice Advisor for Sutter, Yuba, Placer, and Sacramento counties.

SPEAKER_01: 0:32

My name is Luis Espino. I'm the rice farming systems advisor for Butte and Glen counties.

SPEAKER_02: 0:40

I'm

SPEAKER_01: 0:40

Michelle

SPEAKER_02: 0:40

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_03: 0:57

Together, the UCCE Rice Farm Advisors seek to provide relevant topical research-packed information relating to California rice production. Thanks for joining us for part three of the Tibbets Farming Company story. Part two talked about George and Nancy Tibbets' early farming experiences, as well as some of the ways that they incorporate crop rotation into the farming operation. George and Carson also detailed how the 2022 drought in California really affected their farming operation and kind of drove their direction for the future. This episode will talk a bit about the day in the life of Carson and George Tibbet some of the research projects that they collaborate with UC on, as well as their view on the future of rice farming in California. As always, we'd really like to thank George and Carson Tibbetts for taking the time to sit down with us, as this episode could not have been made without their participation and knowledge. Without further ado, here's the episode.

UNKNOWN: 2:07

Music

SPEAKER_03: 2:17

Now I want you to think about the 2025 season. Can you walk me through what a regular day looks like? Let's get Carson's day on his hip boots. Let's get that perspective.

SPEAKER_04: 2:29

We'll just start today. I got here early because we have four fields of different time water. Two fields now have, we just sprayed propanil on one and regimen on the other. So we had to drain the fields before that and did a reflood on it. My My morning is water management. Going into boxes, opening, kind of cursing at myself for my last night's decisions. If one check, one portion of the field is deeper than I'd like. That usually takes a few hours. And then after that, I have other responsibilities in my alfalfa. We are currently irrigating it using pipe. And we are just doing maintenance and cleaning up our tractors. This time of year is a lot more easy, though, than planting, obviously. I do not need to work 12-hour days, seven days a week during the summer, and I'm very fortunate for that.

SPEAKER_03: 3:29

I'm glad you mentioned that, Carson. This podcast, we actually took a hiatus during planting because it was just too much on top of too much to try and put out an episode and do planting season.

SPEAKER_04: 3:41

I can only imagine, given that you were in poverty Extension Farm Advisor, and you are quite busy.

SPEAKER_03: 3:50

Well, you know, we like to say that it's a privilege to work with the farmers, and luckily, for the most part, we aren't as economically relying upon the crop at the end of the season.

SPEAKER_04: 4:03

That's fair.

SPEAKER_03: 4:05

And so, one thing I wanted to ask you, what are the varieties that you've planted this year?

SPEAKER_04: 4:10

This is going to be somewhat controversial, given the... Uh-oh, I

SPEAKER_03: 4:18

think I know

SPEAKER_04: 4:19

what you're going to say. level during harvest. By harvesting it early, above 20%, you will not see these quality problems for the most part. Obviously, there's other constraints given heat during fill, during the seed fill, cause quality problems. But we have 50% of our acres in 211 and 50% of our acres in 209, and we're going to just hope for the best that we manage to get the 211 before it drops below So

SPEAKER_03: 5:20

one thing I wanted to just kind of bring up, because it's something that your dad has a history of doing, and that is collaboration with University of California Cooperative Extension and University of California Davis in terms of research trials. And so we've been fortunate enough to partner with you guys on a couple of different projects. And so I wanted to kind of bring them up and ask for your perspective on them. And so the first one I want to touch on is the is the hedgerows and rice project. And I think we're on our second year of that. Is that right?

SPEAKER_04: 5:55

We are on our second year. The project is helmed by Whitney Brim de Forest. And we're happy to work with Cooperative Extension. We like the research that comes out of it. We like to kind of be the first in the know what's new and what's exciting. And given my dad's work as a grad student, It just feels the need to give back. He was that pesky student in his day, so we have a responsibility to aid in the research where we can. The hedgerow, for instance, actually does not impact us at all because it is out of our way completely. It is about 100 feet south of our rice field, and it's not very large. It does not dent in the way of driving and we don't even worry too much about spraying. We will pay attention to where the wind is blowing and avoid that. But as far as we can tell, we have not done any damage to the hedgerows. We also do have an experiment, or Bruce Lindquist has an experiment with us with rice varieties and nitrogen trial. It's probably about an acre and a half or two acres. You were out there working a lot harder than I was that day. It's always very interesting. I'm glad to be able to see all the different varieties and how they're growing every day. I'm a little more careful with that water check and water management because I don't want Bruce to be upset with me. But anyways, we're always happy to work with Cooperative Extension.

SPEAKER_03: 7:38

We appreciate that. I think a note on the variety by nitrogen trial, I think that's so interesting just to drive by and look at it because, I mean, I've been in rice for a little bit, but you see one field and you see another field and they're separated by roads or ditches. And so they don't look that different. But when you see the different varieties all next to each other, you can really tell the differences between the varieties and how much of a variation there is in what we've got growing here.

SPEAKER_04: 8:06

Absolutely. I especially like looking at those. I think there's a sweet rice variety just because I don't really get to see a lot of sweet rice, but it just, there's such a strong That's more robust. Would you agree? Robust for the sweet rice? I've been meaning to walk out in the field and look at it more closely, but just driving from the road, it's night and day difference between our typical medium grain varieties.

SPEAKER_03: 8:33

One question I had for you, George, we talked about what Carson's day looks like. Can you tell me from start to finish what a typical day in your hip boots looks like?

SPEAKER_04: 8:43

Well, at planting time, I fill in on tractors. I mean, For my entire career, I was one of the tractor drivers. But with Carson here, and his sister has come to help us for the past two seasons. So I'm not on a tractor every day, except for aqua application. I do that. But I don't know. Planting time is hell. You know, non-rice growers, farmers of other crops besides rice, claim that rice growing is easy and we don't work very hard. That's the joke about rice farmers. You probably... Four by four,

SPEAKER_03: 9:16

yeah. Four by four is an old joke that Gordon Wiley told me about eight years ago. It's the reason that all the rice farmers have the four by four Ford pickups is because they only work four months out of the year.

SPEAKER_04: 9:28

Well, those four months are hard. April and May are hard. I think Carson would even agree with that. It's a challenge. And I'm starting to see that I don't have the stamina for it at all that I used to. So I'm grateful to have a son coming up to turn more onto him and grateful that His sister has come back to help us because it's a dedicated person sitting on a tractor for three or four weeks is like gold. In the past, it was just Martine and me. Martine is my foreman for 20 plus years. It was just him and me and then whoever we could get, but we were always shorthanded. And I live with that because if I tried to not be shorthanded, I would need to be overstaffed for the rest of the year. And the money is just not there to keep somebody around you around. So we live with it. But with the past two years in particular with Carson and his sister Alex and me as needed bases on the tractor and Martine on the as needed bases on the tractor, it's freed up Martine to do all the little things we used to let go. cutting corners so the last two years have gone better from that standpoint as far as getting things done and I've always hated in past years I'm driving a tractor and then stopping and running to change the water and then going back to get on the tractor I haven't had to do that in the last few years because I haven't do that last year it was a pain yeah anyway so April and May are kind of hell now we are in we're spraying herbicides now so involved dropping and adding water, but I can have Carson do that. So I am spending more time in the offices doing paperwork. This morning, I stayed home. I actually worked out in the morning because I knew I was going to be up here all weekend. I wouldn't have any time to exercise. So I exercise in the morning, did all the dishes from last night. So my wife would be happy when she gets home tonight and then ran some errands. So I didn't get up here till 1030 or 11. Now that's unusual, but every day is different. But I love accounting. I love bookkeeping. In a different life, I could have been a CPA. I love spreadsheets.

SPEAKER_03: 11:48

There's the ag econ talking.

SPEAKER_04: 11:50

Yeah. I was just making a spreadsheet about our alfalfa yesterday and putting all the data into it just to keep track. And I want to do one about our awkward fertilizer use. So that's the kind of thing I do. I don't know. I have two guys working for me. And in my mind, they can take care of all the outside. stuff right now. And I only do the stuff I want to do. So that's where I'm at in my career. My wife will tell you that she jokingly will say I'm semi-repired. And there's some truth to that. I'm not as hands-on with everything as I used to be. But that's okay. I have Carson and Martine paying them both. And I'm going to have them do the things I don't want to do and I'll do the things I want to do. That's how I look at it.

SPEAKER_03: 12:34

Yeah, you've worked hard to get to this point. Is there anything that you guys are seeing in your fields or your neighbors? Any problems or concerns or just interesting things that you've seen this year? I

SPEAKER_04: 12:45

was talking to my PCA, Todd Miller, about this yesterday and Todd looks at a lot of rice and he thinks it's behind for where we should be by the number of calories a day. He thinks the heat units haven't been up to par. I agree with him. I would like my plants to look more robust right now, but I still using starter fertilizer for the most part because Bruce Lindquist and his research came up with and this is including research on our farm all their research I've loved working with Bruce over the years by the way for most years he has some trial there on the farm I'm always glad to cooperate with him and the university but anyway his research has shown that it's more efficient just to go all up front with aqua and that they're not showing any yield gain by going with starter. But I will say this, the rice looks better with starter fertilizer. Cut back on the aqua a little bit, put a little starter. My neighbor flies on a whole boatload of 16-20 fertilizer. So it's nitrogen and phosphorus. And my gosh, his field looked gorgeous early on. Just because you're getting fertilizer into that plant so much sooner. But I don't think Bruce results lie, I think the plant catches up and gets into that aqua, and the yield difference is not really apparent at the end of the season. You just need a certain amount of nitrogen, and for the most part, it needs it when it's growing, and not so much when it's a young plant.

SPEAKER_03: 14:27

Carson, anything you've seen? I

SPEAKER_04: 14:30

am not the only grower that's noticed this, but botany is on the rise, and that's actually treated with Clorox. I'm wondering if it's overwintering in the field somehow. Not burning, definitely. Yeah, we burned a field, and that field that we burned, we planted with seed treated with Clorox. I mean, that field was bad with broccoli last year. So we treated with Clorox this year. I didn't used to for several years. Early on, we were treating with Clorox, then we stopped because it's a seed-borne disease, and they were treating the registered seed with Clorox. I figured, all right, they should be killing the Well, with that, we've

SPEAKER_03: 15:27

kind of touched on this a little bit, but I did want to get your perspectives on how the rice industry has changed. changed, especially since you started farming, George? And then, Carson, what you've seen in the last five years that you've been doing this full-time?

SPEAKER_04: 15:46

It changed a lot in the 2008-2009 crisis. Back then, I'm just going to pick round numbers from the head. We were getting$6 or$7. We're getting a few bucks over the loan value, right? And then we had the 2008-2009 financial crisis, and the price of everything went up. The inputs were bought but also the crops we sold and it was a paradigm shift I haven't looked at a curve but if they showed the average selling price for rice over time was flat to slowly increase and all of a sudden 2008 2009 jumped up a lot it's just very different but our costs have gone up as well so it's not like all in our pockets so that's a big change I've noticed I'm grateful to be in an industry that's generally regarded by the public to be good for the environment, good to have in California. Yeah, we use a lot of water and rice, but there's a lot of benefits for the environment. The environment derives from having that water there. I mean, just the waterfowl habitat alone is incredible. We participated in a program with the Nature Conservancy last year to provide habitat for sandhill cranes. They gave us a nice check to manage our fields a little differently, and we had a lot of sandhill cranes last year. They were pleased, so I think they want us back this year. This year, we're going to try another program with the Nature Conservancy. They're going to pay us to flood up our safflower field and provide habitat for shorebirds. Now, that field is slated to go into tomatoes again next year, so I haven't told our tomato tenant yet, because I'm sure when we harvest the safflower, he's going to want to go in and work the ground and get his tomato beds ready. I haven't told him yet. Well, we're going to flood it for three weeks. I'm not looking forward to that conversation, but they're paying a very generous amount of money for us to do that. Kim Gallagher is going to do that, too. What else has changed in the rice industry? I don't think we're the enemy as far as the general public. They don't see us as somebody wasting water or using water. We, as a society, are getting a lot of bang for the buck, not only for growing rice, which is the most important food in the world, but California used to be wetland habitat in Northern California. You're to be tens or hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands. And we are mimicking. It's not a wild weather wetland habitat anymore, but we're mimicking that habitat. So kind of helping to take a step back towards the way it was. So I feel good about being involved in an industry that is doing that. I can't really speak to how the rice industry has changed over the five years, but I think one thing that you did not cover was you mentioned burning one field last year. It used to be a lot more common to burn a lot of rice acres and the sky would look a certain shade during the autumn year because of all the rice that was burned. It helps a lot with the fundus that overwintered but it also helps with getting rid of all the rice straw. Now we rely on water and time to break down the rice straw as much as we can and we had a field in 2-11 last year because It high yielded and I think the variety also has a lot of straw. So we're feeling the consequences of having so much straw in that field this year in terms of the nitrogen being bound to the soil or not bound to the straw. I'm understanding it's bound to the bacteria that are trying to digest that straw. Yes. There's a lot of streaking in the field, not as dark as we would like. And that's partly caused by the... That sandhill crane program, one of the constraints we had is we couldn't disk the field after harvest, and we couldn't flood it until December. And so it was very apparent this spring that in that field particular, that Carson's right, that had M211, there was a tremendous amount of straw. Even though we did get flooded for a couple months, there's so much straw, and you can see it in that field now. It's held back. We actually top dressed it today or tomorrow. I don't know if they food onto there and I'll get it top-dressed. I worry about top-dressing because it increases the chances of lodging. We rely on using a stripper header to get through our harvest in a timely fashion. If we have to put on our conventional headers, that slows us down by a factor of three. I don't know. Some guys use stripper headers, but most don't. I don't really understand why it hasn't caught on more because when the rice is standing, you can just go about three times as fast. I think it's the cat's meow.

SPEAKER_03: 20:38

Yeah. And I did just want to elaborate for anybody who's not familiar. They stopped allowing burning of rice straw, which used to be the best, most efficient way to get rid of the straw that's left over after harvest several years ago. And actually, the rice industry, it was initially a total ban, but they lobbied to get an allowance for 25% of rice acreage allowed to be burned as a consequence of trying to fight back against the diseases that we see. If you have more questions about this, we actually talk about this quite a bit in the episode we did with Luis Espino about the rice disease survey. So feel free to go back to that and hear more detailed information about that.

SPEAKER_04: 21:18

Just a little addendum to that. So we can burn 25% of our acres, so which in essence, we have four fields in rice and we can burn one of our rice fields every fall. No guarantee though, you have to get the burn days to do that. It's kind of a race to get on the burn list and hopefully get it in. So I will tell you this, that without Any deviance every year, whatever field was burned is our best field. Except maybe if it was a new field, like it had been tomatoes the year before, new fields always do really well. But on older rice ground, almost like this. Always. We had problems with our field following tomatoes. I don't want to get into that. We had problems in our new field following tomatoes, and I think we had a problem with herbicide that carried over from the tomatoes. It held back that field. It was a disappointing yield for a new field. But anyway, this year our burn field looks better than all the other fields. I wish I missed burning. I love the small rice smoke.

SPEAKER_03: 22:27

Back when I was a kid and my dad farmed a lot more rice than he does now, they used to get matchboxes from the mills as like part of their collaborators gifts. But it was so funny the first time I saw that because I asked my dad, well, what, what, why are they giving you matchboxes? And I was about six at the time, but he said, because fire is what brings rice to life. I remember that. That was, it was so strange to me to hear that, but core memory there. I think I want to ask you both, What do you think the future of rice farming in the Sacramento Valley will look like?

SPEAKER_04: 23:00

I hope I'm doing this well into my 60s, but a lot of regulations come in the way. California has the slowest processing time in terms of pesticides, pesticides that are well established in other parts of the country. Who knows what restraints that we may have in the future? And the other factor is farming is struggling because not as many people want to get into it. Maybe mills will lose more and more farmers and have to shut down because they don't have enough rice to keep them going. There's a lot of worry for the future, but I'm going to keep going and I'm optimistic that I will be able to pass this on to my future children someday. My worries for Carson are, number one, for water. I think the climate is changing and Droughts and floods are going to be more pronounced in drought years. You can get crop insurance for that. That'll protect you for one year, but they're not going to keep bailing you out year after year if it drags on for several years. At least that's my understanding. So I worry about that for your future, Carson, because agriculture, farmers and ranchers are only 1% or 2% of the population. If the state of California decides that water needs to go somewhere else, then we lose that battle. I also worry about my right-hand man is Martine Ombres, been with me. almost since I started farming. And the thought of not having him involved with us, Carson, makes me shudder. Me too. Yeah. And he's maybe 10 years younger than me. So hopefully when I retire, you'll still have him maybe for a little while. But at some point, you need a right-hand man. And people, the younger generation isn't going into farming. It's hard work. And I wonder where you're going to Find that person that wants to work on a farm as opposed to have a cushy desk job somewhere. So good luck with that.

SPEAKER_03: 25:10

Yeah, it sounds like the challenges you two have outlined are regulations and the cost of regulations, access to skilled labor and manpower, and then also just being susceptible to the climate in general. And I think even, not even just rice, but we see that across the agriculture industry. And frankly, there's not a lot we can do about it. but I like Carson's method about staying optimistic towards the future.

SPEAKER_04: 25:37

What else can you do? Yeah. Depends on the day. Some days I'm more pessimistic than others. But we're going to keep plugging away.

SPEAKER_03: 26:04

This concludes this installment of the Tibbets Farming Company story. Just a note here, as I'm sure you noticed, this was obviously recorded sometime prior, as evidenced by the mention of top dressing and herbicide applications. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion to our grower series. And again, so many thanks to Carson and George Tibbetts for sitting down with me and sharing their stories. 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 Calusa 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 at 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 own And its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product, or service.