Story and photos by Bruce Shultz EUNICE – This 30-acre field might look like a weed patch to some, but to Vernon Fuselier, it’s a work in progress to recreate a habitat that once covered southwest Louisiana.
“This is native Louisiana plants,” he said. “Nothing has been brought in from outside Louisiana.” Fuselier, a third-generation farmer, said he just assumed that the land in southern Louisiana had once been forest that was cleared for growing crops. He credits a neighbor, retired LSU-E botany Professor Malcolm Vidrine, with introducing him to the native plants. Vidrine said Fuselier took off with the concept. “He’s our best ambassador at this moment.” Vidrine recalls first that Fuselier was passing by his residence one day, and Fuselier stopped and asked about the tall plant growth in Vidrine’s yard. Vidrine explained he was growing native prairie plants, and Fuselier asked if the vegetation would make good quail habitat. At the time, Fuselier had a hunting preserve that he was trying to keep in a natural state for his upland bird hunting operation for pheasant and quail. Fuselier said he obtained seed from Vidrine and he planted it on a small patch of ground. “The more I planted, the more interested I became in it.” That was 15 years ago. Eventually, Fuselier closed his hunting operation. Because finding a dependable, close source for birds became more difficult. “I enjoyed it. I still get calls almost every day for hunts.” But after he closed the hunting business, Fuselier maintained the 30 acres of wild vegetation. Vidrine is pleased with what his neighbor has done. “It’s really shaped up well. It’s beautiful.” Fuselier said he enjoys having a small area with vintage growth. But he said he has benefitted from the project. “It’s led to a lot of different things on my farm. It really has been a blessing. The prairie led to reading about soil health and rotational grazing. It led to a lot of the changes we’ve done on the farm.” For one thing, he allows his cattle herd to graze on the native plants for a few days. “We do rotational grazing.” He said last year, his herd of commercial cattle grazed on the wild vegetation twice for no more than 3 days, and he’ll probably let them eat the grass up to 3 times this year. “We’ll block off area of an acre to an acre-and-a-half for a day. It depends on how much grass you have.” He said it takes a while for the cattle to start eating some of the vegetation. “These cows have never seen these plants.” The cattle won’t touch some plants. But even those plants have an indirect benefit by providing minerals to the soil. “They all serve a purpose. I think that diversity is important. You need that diversity. You need that mix. The more variety, the better off you are.” He has used the Natural Resource Conservation Service pollinator and grazing programs to help maintain his prairie. And the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has recognized his efforts last year by placing his preserve on the Louisiana Natural Areas Registry. Vidrine said the coastal prairie, dominated by tall grasses and 500-600 species of wildflowers, covered roughly 2.5 million acres of Louisiana. “It extended from Ville Platte to the freshwater marsh to the south, to the east to Breaux Bridge, then west to the Sabine River.” Prairies help build topsoil, Vidrine said, and the black soil found in the northern states is an indicator of the prairie’s ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. Vidrine is the secretary for the Cajun Prairie Habitat Preservation Society. Its website is http://www.cajunprairie.org. Agriculture, urbanization, and the petroleum industry all played a role in decreasing the expanse of prairie, he said. Now, just a few fragments of the original natural grasslands can be found, mostly along railroads. “It’s probably less than 50 acres,” Vidrine estimated. Some areas, like Fuselier’s preserve, have been reconstructed back to prairie. Vidrine said he helped reconstruct a 10-acre prairie in Eunice 31 years ago. Currently, the Duralde Prairie is being reconstructed north of Eunice. And Vidrine has a 1.5-acre reconstructed prairie at his home near Eunice. Vidrine has a website that The list of different native plants on Fuselier’s property is long. It includes, big bluestem, mountain mint, swamp flower, rattlesnake master, partridge pea, switchgrass, baptisia, blazing star, hibiscus, black-eyed Susan, beebalm and Eastern gamagrass. He also has a stand of Louisiana irises growing in a boggy area. He hasn’t replanted any of the plants since the first seeding 15 years ago. “Most of these plants are perennials,” he said. He tried wild seed of different plants grown in Oklahoma. “It did OK for 3 or 4 years, and then fizzled out.” Fuselier harvests some of the seed by hand, and he also hires a seed harvester from Gonzales. The tedious process of cleaning the chaff and stems from the seeds is done by hand, and Fuselier has invented a cleaner from an old Stir-all auger. Many of the seeds are as small as a pinhead, and he will sell them. But he can’t separate the seeds to sell just one species. All the seeds are mixed. He said people who call for seed usually want seed from just one plant. He said the best planting is done by scratching the soil with a disc, then he broadcasts the seed in December or January. He has used a homemade packer made from a series of old tires to cover the seed. Don’t expect the plants to flourish right away, he said. “The first year you don’t think it’s going to grow. It’s very slow to get established.” He said Professor Vidrine told him, “The first year it sleeps. The second year, it creeps and the third year, it leaps.” Fuselier burns the vegetation in late winter to encourage vigorous spring regrowth, and to control invasive species. “It may not kill it, but it sets it back." Vidrine said fire was a natural occurrence on the prairie. “Everything east of the Rocky Mountains was a natural fire ecosystem.” Vidrine said he burns his yard annually for the beneficial effects. Fuselier also spot sprays to control the invasive Chinese tallow trees but he uses no fertilizer or pesticides. “It’s just like a native prairie.” By September or October, he said, the plants reach 8-9 feet high. Fuselier has 64 head of cattle. Most are South Poll cattle, developed from Angus, Hereford, Senepol, and Barzona breeds. He said the small-framed South Poll don’t need as much to eat. He also has a few head of a Corriente-Longhorn cross, but he hasn’t been pleased with the results. He also tried Piney woods cattle but he was disappointed. “If you don’t want to make mistakes, don’t try anything new.” Fuselier uses a low-input approach on his cattle to minimize costs. “We feed little or no hay,” he said. “We use no antibiotics and we use selective deworming.” He said he will give his cattle cottonseed to help them digest grass in the winter. He said his cows had a low conception rate, and he had to rebreed them to his South Poll bull. Many of the births weren’t until February when the grass is at its thinnest, and his herd is looking a bit lean. On the rest of his 140 acres of pastures, cattle graze on bahia and carpet grass. He also leases land to a local farmer to grow rice. Several groups have toured Fuselier’s farm. This year, his farm is on a statewide Louisiana Farms Bus Tour organized by the Louisiana Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative set for May 9-11. Others on the tour include the Cliff Vining ranch in Pioneer, the Delta Dairy in Baskin, Hunt Hill Cattle Co. in Woodville, Mississippi; Richland Hill Plantation in Norwood, Four Oak Farms in Morganza and Bunch’s Creek Longleaf Tract in Ragley. Registration for the tour can be made on the LGLC website, www.Louisianaglci.org.
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Story and photos by Bruce Shultz ROANOKE - Two dozen Yankees invaded Jefferson Davis Parish recently to learn about crawfish and rice farming.
Most were retired farmers from the Madison, Wisconsin, area. They were visiting the Tall Grass Farm owned by Burt Tietje (pronounced tee-jay) near Roanoke. He’s done tours of his farm numerous times, and he has several more booked this year. “This is our biggest draw in Jefferson Davis Parish,” said Dion Sablehaus with the parish tourist commission. “It’s a very unique experience. Even people from our area don’t know what goes into farming crawfish.” Already, she said, four bus tours and 15 school groups have booked the crawfish tour. In his presentations, Burt tries to be as thorough as possible with the brief time he has with the group to explain the crawfish life cycle, biology, ecology and economics, and he also talks about growing rice. He mixed that with some humor for the Wisconsin visitors. “Around the first of October, LSU usually loses its first SEC game and I know it’s time to turn on the pumps,” Burt said, getting a hearty chuckle from the group. He asked the group if any of them farmed, and several hold up their hands. “Then you know nobody can cry like a farmer.” He explains how a crawfish swims in reverse. “I always say it kind of reminds me of a Louisiana politician.” He stressed that crawfish are unpredictable, subject to numerous variables. The farmers in the crowd asked several relevant questions about traps-per-acre, harvest frequency and details about the crawfish boat. Dick Colby, wearing a Green Bay Packers shirt, asks a question that reveals his farming background with alfalfa, beans and corn. “Is this land normally this level or do you have to level it?” John Link, a corn, wheat and soybean farmer, was intrigued with what is required to run a crawfish operation. “It looks like a lot of work to me.” Burt admits to the crowd that he has someone do the harvesting for him now because of tendonitis from the repetitive motion of lifting, dumping, baiting and replacing the traps. Another corn, wheat and soybean farmer, Jim Qualman, asked about the moisture level for harvesting rice, and whether the grain has to be stirred in the bins. Later, Qualman said he was impressed by the amount of work involved before harvesting any crawfish. “People think you just do this overnight but it ain’t that way.” Pauline Ballweg couldn’t get over the lack of topography. “It’s so different. Very flat.” But she didn’t want anything to do with eating crawfish. “We don’t eat crawfish where I’m from.” Ray Antoniewicz, a sheep farmer, said the variables in crawfish farming add to the risk factor in farming. “I can see where you’ve got a lot more things you can’t control.” Antoniewicz said he was glad that Burt talked about where food comes from. He said he conducts tours of his sheep operation during lambing season. Burt was at home with the farm crowd. “We all talk the same language.” Pam Jahnke, who has a farm show on 26 radio stations and one TV station in Wisconsin, was pleased. “This is what we came for. We’re all connected with agriculture.” (You can see and hear her presentations on her website, www.fabulousfarmbabe.net/, and eventually the segment on the Louisiana visit will be included. She’s also on Facebook.) But Jahnke, who grew up on a dairy farm, admitted to Burt that she and her fellow Wisconsites were out of their element when it came to aquaculture. “You’re talking to people who have no foggy, flipping idea what you do.” She interviewed Burt for her show, and fired off several to-the-point questions, like, “There’s not a mechanical way to harvest these little rascals?” Jahnke said farmers in Louisiana and Wisconsin have a stake in what happens with renegotiation with NAFTA, and the farm bill debate. After the tour and Burt’s farm, the group traveled a couple miles to I-10 Crawfish where the day’s catch is processed and shipped out. He tells them the crawfish trade is as unique as the farming practices. “It’s the last true supply and demand in the agricultural market that I know of. It’s a conversation between the buyers and sellers every day.” The group was pleased that they had finally gotten to see agriculture between the stops in San Antonio to see the Alamo and New Orleans. “This will be the top on our list,” Betty Buss told Burt on her way to the tour bus. “We don’t care about museums.” Tietje started doing the crawfish tours in 2008 at the urging of his boss at the time, Marian Fox of the Jefferson Davis Tourism Commission and Economic Development Office. He’s had a wide variety of groups, from Amish farmers from the Midwest to local school kids. “I change my lesson, my vocabulary, depending on the age group I’ve got.” After the Wisconsin group, his next tour is a bunch of second-graders. “I just have to adjust. I had a whole busload of German tourists and everything I said had to be translated.” He recalled giving a presentation for two Russians. “Evidently they grow some crawfish in southern Russia. One of the Russians told me, ‘In Russia we drink beer and eat crawfish.’ I said, “Here too!” The Jefferson Davis Parish Tourism Office books his calendar as one of several activities a group does in one day. Travel writers have figured out that Tietje is a good source for crawfish information so he can be found on TV and in newspapers and magazines, talking about crawfish and rice. “It’s not like I go out and seek this. It just comes out of the blue.“ A piece done by WBRZ-TV in Baton Rouge got sent up to network headquarters in New York and Tietje ended up in an interview with CBS anchor Scott Pelly. A group of travel writers, so stuff pops up in publications all over the place. Tietje’s father and grandfather farmed the land where he farms. “We’re a Century Farm. The state has a Century Farm program for farms in the same family for more than 100 years. My grandfather got here we think about 1895.” Tietje said his grandfather, William F. Tietje Sr., was a German immigrant who came to the U.S. at age 14 and first went to Iowa, then moved to Louisiana at about age 20 about 1888. “My dad said he homesteaded a piece of land in Allen Parish near Kinder. And he traded his 180-acre homestead for 80 acres where we’re standing here, and married the daughter of the farmer across the road and then bought that farm from her family.” Tietje said his research has revealed that rice farmers in the time frame of 1910-19, with increased food demand from World War I, were profitable and many paid off their farm loans quickly. But after WWI, the bottom fell out of the rice prices. “A lot of farms traded in the 1920 because of that precipitous fall of prices.” The farm is located in a low area of the parish. “This used to be a marsh, particularly the bottom of my farm. It was a great inland marsh that was about 4 miles wide and 20 miles north and south called the Grand Marais. You didn’t get to Jennings from this farm unless you went to Roanoke and got on the train or you went all around it, 10 miles north and 10 miles back by land.” Burt had bins built on the home place after the Roanoke rice coop dryer closed. “It’s twice what I need, so I paid for it by drying other farmers’ rice.” He usually has 200 acres of rice and about 135 acres of crawfish. “You can’t make a living on those 2 things at that level, so I’ve always looked for other sources of income.” Burt, an education graduate from Baylor University, is a former photographer who had a studio in Jennings, photographing babies, high school seniors and weddings. He got out of the business during the transition from film to digital. When digital displaced film, he said, “I felt like a really good harness maker after the Model T came out. All the darkroom knowledge I had, throw it away. I didn’t want to spend that many hours in front of a computer.” He accepted the change, but he had a plan to grow vegetables along with rice and crawfish. “I always knew I wanted to end up here on the farm.” How did he come up with the farm’s name? “Rice is basically a tall grass. And as you look around you see I don’t mow much, so Tall Grass Farm.” You can see his website at www.tallgrassfarm.net. He started two high-tunnel greenhouses with help from the Natural Resources Conservation Service program to grow vegetables to sell. High tunnels give him opportunity to plant in rainy weather. Sides are dropped when the weather turns chilly or windy, although the structures are not heated. “If it goes to 24 degrees like it did this winter it will get 25 or 26 degrees. You’re going to lose delicate stuff.” He has a drip irrigation system in the greenhouses to give the plants water and liquid nutrients. “There are a lot of things we can use that are approved for organic. Sometimes I get desperate and I have to use something to control pests. I try to stay as close as I possibly can to organic.” He sends soil sample results to a consultant in South America for advice on soil amendments. “He takes my analysis and gives me a recipe.” Burt admits if he had a larger operation, he would have to spray pesticides more often, but he prefers to stay small. “Here’s one form of agriculture I can do. I don’t need a $200,000 tractor and equipment and maintenance.” He uses composted cotton gin trash to add organic matter to the soil. “I get 18-wheeler loads. When it gets here, it’s smoking hot.” He depends heavily on advice from Kiki Fontenot, horticulturist from the LSU AgCenter. “I can text her any time and she gets back to me.” This year he watered heavily, and condensation built up on the greenhouse walls, providing a layer of insulation. “I walked into my greenhouse and it was 42 degrees. Of course the sun came out, the condensation melted and it went to 24 degrees.” You name it, and he grows it. Cabbage, radishes, chard, kale, collard greens, arugula, French sorrel, Swiss chard, broccoli, and now he’s trying asparagus. “Salad greens is really one of my signature crops.” Midsummer gets too hot to grow anything but a few things like cucumber. “And in the summer, everybody has got their home gardens, and so when somebody gives you tomatoes from their garden, the value of tomatoes is zero. But in the wintertime when they don’t have anything, and I’m the only game in town, I get a premium for my stuff.” He also grows some plants outside in raised beds but the plants in the greenhouses grow better because they are protected from the wind and storms, he said. He sells his produce at the farmer’s market in Lake Charles on Tuesday, Tuesdays, 4-6 p.m. at the intersection of Enterprise and Broad streets. Tietje said at 63, running a commercial garden is becoming more of a physical challenge. “I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked, physically. That’s why I so desperately need an intern, because my back can only do so much. But I love it. Story and Photos by Bruce Shultz ST. MARTINVILLE – Now that the 2017-18 sugarcane harvest is over, mill operators are turning their focus on maintenance and upgrades in preparation for the next harvest.
The work is extensive. Grinders that crush the cane have to be reworked. Steam plants that run the machinery have to be refurbished. “We have to essentially tear everything apart, disassemble the pumps and turbines and inspect the boilers and vessels,” said Mike Comb, general manager of the LASUCA mill situated about 3 miles north of St. Martinville on Bayou Teche. “Later, we have to remove the solids from our holding ponds.” The down time also gives the mill time to resume work on expansion projects. “We want to increase the mill capacity by roughly 50 percent,” Comb said. “It will be incremental over the next 5 years.” Currently, the LASUCA mill has a capacity of 12,500 tons of cane per day, he said, and the expansion should increase that to 18,000-19,000 tons. Comb said it’s inevitable that plans will be changed mid-stream. “When you first start planning, you may not think of everything.” One thing that has Comb concerned is labor. The plant hires as many local workers as possible, he said, but foreign workers are needed. “You can’t find a trained sugar boiler in the U.S.” He said getting visas for those workers from Honduras, Costa Rica, Mexico and Guatemala is an increasingly difficult challenge. Comb said the expansion will require installation of a new boiler and 5 new mill mechanisms to run alongside the existing 6 mills currently in operation. The LASUCA mill is limited for space, squeezed between by Bayou Teche and Louisiana Highway 347, so Comb said the footprint for expansion is small. The plant has to have enough space to store bagasse, the fibrous byproduct remaining after the juice has been squeezed out of the cane. Bagasse is burned to run the boilers at the plant to generate steam, but making sugar produces more bagasse than the plant needs for fuel, and the leftover material occupies a lot of space. Comb said a research project at a mill near White Castle is working on development of the waste product into briquette-shaped for fuel for widespread use. Comb said this year’s crop and grinding season both went well. Some years are good for farmers and some are good for mills. “This year was a good year all around. For us it was the largest crop we’ve ever processed.” John Hebert, LASUCA agriculture division manager, said the mill ground slightly more than 1.31 million tons of cane, compared to 1.03 million tons last year, producing 300 million pounds of sugar. The grinding season began Sept. 20 and ended Jan. 9, for a total of 113 days. The harvest was not without challenges. Freezing weather caused problems getting the crop out of the fields and to the mill, Hebert said. Combines froze in their tracks, he said. “There were farmers who couldn’t get moving for 4 to 6 hours.” On the second day of the freeze, trucks were left running overnight and drivers occasionally pumped brakes to keep brake fluid from freezing. Farmers started combines at 3 a.m. and tractors with engines running were huddled around the combines to provide warmth. In parishes further north, ice on the roads caused more problems, Hebert said. “We took our trucks off the roads until they thawed.” The recent freezes were enough to damage the crop, he said, but cool weather afterwards prevented a disaster. If warm weather had followed the freeze, the standing cane would have been infected by bacteria to enter the plant and produce a chemical that interferes with the sugar-making process. But Hebert said new varieties, especially 299, have improved cold tolerance. “We’ve got a lot of good varieties. The public breeding program is the reason our yields are what they are today.” Stuart Gauthier, LSU AgCenter county agent in St. Martin Parish, said potential varieties are tested in Missouri and Arkansas for cold-tolerance. Hebert said this year’s good crop was the result of several factors. First, a mild winter in 2016-17 followed by a warm spring made provided an ideal start for the crop, he said. Then adequate moisture was available all year. “The crop never got anywhere near a drought situation.” Summer temperatures were moderate, and that’s ideal for cane because it grows best between 85 and 92 degrees. Above 95 degrees, and the growth slows, he explained. Diseases were controllable and the West Indian cane fly was not the problem that growers experienced in 2016, he said. Gauthier said the fly is a severe pest about every 17 years. “It’s a problem that comes and goes.” Sugarcane borer insects were less of a problem this past year, Hebert said. Chemical controls are species specific and they are not as harmful to beneficial insects to, he said. Varieties have been developed with better insect resistance. Hebert said growing cane is inherently less difficult than growing most other crops that are cultivated for the result of the reproductive stage. “Sugarcane is a simple plant. You’re not worried about anything but the vegetative stage.” Part of Hebert’s job is to help the co-op’s farmers with their crop, advising them on issues such as fertility, pest control and harvest preparation. “Whatever is good for the farmer is good for the mill.” “My advice to them is completely unbiased. I’m just trying to help them make better crops.” Hebert comes to the job with a degree in plant science from LSU, and an agricultural pedigree. His father, Raymond, and brother Josh are cane farmers. His grandfather and an uncle have served as directors on the mill’s board. Hebert also organizes a fleet of 62 trucks that haul cane from the field to the mill. This year, he said, the trucks hauled 500,000 tons of cane. The area of farmers ranges from the northernmost fields near Cheneyville, Jeanerette to the south and Vermilion Parish to the west. LASUCA followed the trend of several other mills by starting its own harvesting division, cutting 90,000 tons this year among eight new cane farmers who don’t plan to buy their own harvesting equipment, Hebert said. LASUCA has roughly 45 growers who produced an average of 36.5 tons of cane per acre on 35,000 acres. “We’re getting several farmers who have been grain farmers,” Hebert said. He said many of the new farmers are in St. Landry Parish. He said the state cane industry will probably increase by 40,000 acres in the next 4 years where the crop has never been grown. This year, cane was grown in Concordia Parish and near Jonesville. About two-thirds of LASUCA farmers also rotate some of their land into Group IV soybeans, Hebert said. Maintaining fallow ground still costs farmers about $150 an acre, so making $150 an acre on soybeans can cover those costs. The LASUCA mill still processes whole stalk cane along with the billets produced in the harvest with combines. “We probably had an increase in whole-stalk harvesting this year,” Gauthier said. Some farmers consider whole-stalk harvesting cheaper because of reduced fuel costs for running the old-school harvesters if the fields are dry, Gauthier explained. Another part of Hebert’s job is to set the dates to start and end harvest. That judgment comes from the experience of Hebert and his growers who are surveyed midseason for their perspective on what they are seeing in the fields. Most farmers can make a good estimate of their crop, he said, with a field inspection to look at plant height, plant population and comparisons to previous years. “At the end of August, you try to peg the numbers on the crop.” Growers apply ripeners in late summer, so the harvest has to be set to accommodate a window of 28-35 days after the application. Another factor is planting which usually occurs in August, but wet weather in some years, such as 2016, can cause mills to delay grinding. “In 2017, like a miracle, we had 2 weeks of dry weather,” Hebert recalled. It’s also up to Hebert to set the quota for farmers after assessing the amount of cane remaining from the previous day, and after consulting with the mill superintendent. “I try to bring in just enough cane for 24 hours.” Hebert had originally set Dec. 28 as the last day of grinding. “Then I realized I had underestimated the crop, that it was better than I thought.” So the last day was revised to receive cane for Jan. 7. “I misjudged the crop by 50,000 tons which is about 4 and a half days of grinding.” If a freeze is threatening, the co-op’s board of directors will decide if a surge of northern cane should be made to protect those growers. Hebert said without this year’s freezing weather, all of LASUCA’s growers would have finished at the same time. Hebert said the Breaux Bridge Chamber of Commerce is honoring the parish’s farmers and mill this year. “That’s a pretty big deal for us, to be recognized for our controls to the economy and the community. Gauthier said the award is well-deserved. “The mill’s value to the local economy is more than $75 million, and they are one of the largest employers in the parish.” The mill was built sometime in the 1800s by the DeClouet family. “It predates the Civil War,” Comb said. It was acquired in 1895 by the Levert family, then in 1974 it was sold to growers and it became the St. Martin Sugar Cooperative. It became LASUCA in 1993 when it merged with the Breaux Bridge Sugar Cooperative, and the Louisiana Sugar Cane Cooperative which was made into the LASUCA acronym. By Avery Davidson and Kristen Oaks-White NASHVILLE, TN — Russell and Amelia Kent of East Feliciana Parish are the 2018 American Farm Bureau Young Farmers and Ranchers Achievement Award Winners. They are the winners of a new Ford truck, courtesy of Southern Farm Bureau Life Insurance, and will also receive paid registration to the AFBF YF&R Leadership Conference in Reno, Nevada, Feb. 16-19.
“I’m still in shock,” Amelia Kent said shortly after winning the award, “It’s humbling and hasn’t completely sunk in yet.” The Kents raise cattle and custom cut hay in East Feliciana and Tangipahoa Parishes. In those lush pastures and rolling hills, cows happily graze where the green grass grows. The Kents have grown more than cattle here, though. They've raised a business which has earned them the 2017 Young Farmer and Rancher Achievement Award during the 95th Annual Convention of the Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation in summer of 2017 after several unsuccessful attempts. "It feels great to be selected for this honor, amongst peers who are great farmers and great advocates across the state," said Amelia Kent. "It's a farm that we started on our own and built into a family operation." Russell echoed that sentiment. "It's always a good feeling to be complimented and win an award. If anyone else had won, we would all be happy for each other because we're all friends," he said. Part of the growth of the Kent's farm has been to expand their cow-calf operation from exclusively selling cattle to feedlots into one that includes custom, grass-fed beef. "Even though the custom cutting is only five percent of our business, it is a lot more work than that. It's a growing part of our operation that has not only gotten us this award, but will help us grow in the future." The Kents run nearly 400 head of commercial cattle and said whether it's for feedlots or for their custom operations, good beef starts with good grass. “Without the grass they don’t grow, they are not healthy, they’re not marbling, they’re not gaining weight," Russell Kent said. "Our income is off of weight. So, instead of like a corn farmer, their income is off bushels per acre. We sell it by the pound, so we’re taking the grass and converting it into meat, which is how we get paid.“ “We frame our entire crop year around grass," Amelia added. "When we live in a setting with an 11.5-month growing season, we care about grass. We plant rye grass proactively in September and October, with hopes of grazing it as early as Thanksgiving. We also grow perennial peanut hay, which is the closest thing to alfalfa that we can grow. We’re able in the leanest part of the grass year to still keep high quality forage in front of these animals.” In the last year, the Kents have shifted their focus to producing more retail cuts and custom grass-fed beef. "We’ve pretty much doubled how much we’ve sold from last year to this year," Russell said. "It’s just word of mouth. We harvest a calf and sell it out of the freezer. People like it, come back and want a whole calf. Our volume really has tripled over the last few months.” The Kents recognized the growing demand for grass-fed beef and as such, began adding that part of their operation to diversify. “It’s always good to diversify even if it’s a different crop," he said. "Most farmers grow a combination of soybeans, corn, wheat, sugarcane and cotton. It’s not that much different from what we’re doing.” Amelia said much like all of farming, it's taken a lot of time and a lot of patience. “It’s a little bit more time involved in terms of selling calves at the yearling age, we’re keeping them a little bit longer," she said. "It’s fitting into our existent management scheme, so it’s not that much different.” While they still sell most of their calves in contract loads to feed lots out West, Amelia says the grass-fed niche opened the gate to direct consumer sales. “I always say if the cow-calf cycle is A through Z, with Z being the beef on the plate and the consumer, we rarely get to see that step," Amelia said. "With this method, we do, which has been very rewarding." For the Kents, the real rewards remain in the relationships with their customers. “We love what we do," Amelia said. "But to hear someone take our end product home and thank us not only in texts, but thank you cards for a product that they can have full faith in, it reiterates why we do what we do.” In the field and in the office, the Kents have married their strengths to make their operation a success, crediting, of course, their marriage. “She is very good at talking to people" Russell said. "I can produce it, and Amelia is better at selling it and marketing it. I can talk it, but I’m a terrible salesperson.” “We rely on each other," Amelia said with a laugh. "We complement each other. I don’t think we would be able to have the farm that we have without the partnership that we have.” The Kents qualified to compete on the national level after winning the Louisiana Farm Bureau Young Farmers and Ranchers Achievement Award in June 2017. For winning that competition, Russell and Amelia received $35,000 toward the purchase of a Ford truck, along with other prizes. Story by Bruce Shultz WELSH - The Watkins Cattle Co. is bullish on Brahman cattle. But there’s not a bull in sight at the WCC ranch.
“We don’t even have a bull on this place,” said Stuart Watkins. “The recipient cows will never see a bull, ever.” The ranch specializes in high-quality replacement heifers, using a high-tech system of sexed semen with in-vitro fertilization and embryo transfers. “Our largest market is the replacement heifer market,” Stuart said. “Our goal is 60to 100 Brahman females thru IVF and sexed semen.” The WCC is a family-run operation started by Stuart’s parents, Carson and Marilyn Watkins. “We bought our first Brahman female in the mid to late 90s. I was old enough to show cattle then.” Stuart’s sisters, Caroline and Olivia, also showed cattle and they also have roles in the Watkins Cattle Co. “Showing cattle was a big part of our lives growing up,” he said. Allen Hogan, retired LSU AgCenter county agent in Jefferson Davis Parish, remembers the Watkins well. He worked with the Watkins when Stuart, Olivia and Caroline showed cattle in 4-H. “I enjoyed all of my years working with all three of those kids,” Hogan said. They were a good 4-H Club family.” The Watkins family benefited the 4-H program, he said, and they were willing to haul animals, loan equipment and give advice to newcomers to the show arena. “They would even provide animals to kids who couldn’t afford cattle.” Hogan said Carson Watkins was innovative and willing to adopt new ideas, such as artificial insemination and embryo transfers. After Stuart graduated from LSU, where he was class president 2009-10, the Watkins Cattle Co. shifted from a cow-calf operation to a purebred registered Brahman enterprise specializing in replacement heifers. To start an embryo transfer, unfertilized eggs cells called oocytes, are first collected from the ovaries of donor cows. Flushing 10 oocytes in one session is good, Stuart said. “We’ve had cows give close to 30.” Next, they are matured in a Petri dish and fertilized 20-24 hours later with sexed semen that ensures the process will result in females. To obtain sexed semen, sperm cells with the two X chromosomes that will produce females are segregated in the lab. After fertilization, the embryos can be implanted in commercial cows. “We do implants every 2 months,” Stuart said. The WCC has up to 150 recipient cows that receive embryos from 20-30 Watkins donors. Any surplus embryos left over from implanting are frozen to be used later. Stuart said the percentage of fresh embryos that result in pregnancy is higher than frozen ones, about 60 percent compared to 50 percent. Stuart praised two reproductive technicians, Audy Spell and Joel Carter, for their expertise. “They lead the world in embryo implants. The success of our operation is because of those two guys. We’re so lucky to have that in Louisiana.” And he said vet Chip Fontenot of Welsh plays an integral role in the process also. “Having him within 2 miles of the ranch is such as asset.” The Watkins ranch has red and grey Brahmas. At first, they had greys only, but they got into red Brahmas after 2011. Both colors have attracted an international market for the Watkins. “At any given time, people from all over the world will be here,” Stuart said. He listed a number of foreign visitors from Colombia, Australia, Mexico and most Central American countries. But most of the Watkins’ clients are from the Gulf Coast, primarily south Louisiana, Stuart said. He also travels abroad to meet with customers, and to judge cattle shows. “I enjoy every chance I get to go to those countries. I went to Australia in October, and I went to Vietnam last year.” And he said the Brahman breed is the common denominator. “These cattle are made to go in the harshest terrain and environment. A Brahman cow in July or August will be out grazing, while British cows will be under the trees.” While most buyers are looking for replacement heifers, some will use Watkins cows to produce F-1 outcrossings of Brangus or Braford. Showing cattle is a good way to advertise, and Watkins cattle have a string of several grand championships. The ranch was well represented at the 2017 National Brahman Show in October in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where Miss WCC Donnatella 117/4 was named National Grand Champion. She is now being rebred at another ranch. Donnatella follows a long line of Watkins’ cows that have been winners in the show ring. In the pasture can be found a national champion, known as just 335, that has led the U.S. in recent years for producing the largest number of champions through her eggs, Stuart said. “She’s the matriarch of our operation.” The Watkins have a bull, Maximus Rojo, at a ranch in Texas. He’s never been to Louisiana but his semen has been used in more than 20 countries. “He breeds live cows, just not here.” The ranch has two online sales a year. “We’ll probably do another online sale in April.” Stuart said videos of their cattle draw considerable interest, and buyers make bids online. “It’s kinda like eBay.” Watkins Cattle Co. is on Facebook, and it has a website at watkinscattlecompany.com. Stuart also is on Instagram to show photos of the cattle. “Social media has really changed the game, especially for purebred.” Stuart said customer service is the key to the family business, even though it adds to the expense of producing an animal. “People come here to buy a superior product, so it’s worth it. We put the customer No. 1.” That means providing a genetic verification of each calf to show that the mating matches the listed pedigree. Calves are weighed at birth. Cows that produce calves with low birth weights are a priority, he said, for easier birthing. Stuart said an effort is made to frequently visit the calves to get them acclimated to humans. “Docility is a big factor for our customers.” The current calf crop is small, but Stuart has picked out one calf that shows promise with good lines and musculature. “That one in the middle, I think she’s got a great future.” He’s already considering what pairings he will use for the calf’s eggs. “I had her genetic makeup in mind since 2014, and I already know what bull I will mate that animal to. I do matings two generations out. It’s all about flushing the right cows for the right genetics.” After Stuart graduated from LSU (all Watkins family members are LSU graduates)he went to work in Austin, Texas, doing public relations work for a real estate development company. Much of what he learned working there for 5 years has helped in the cattle business, he said. But he said the family has been the key to the WCC. “We’re successful here because it’s me, Mom and Dad and my two sisters.” He credits his parents for their willingness to try new approaches. For example, he said his father decided they should use sexed semen. He said he handles much of the repro aspects and marketing while his dad runs the ranching functions. Stuart divides his time about evenly between Welsh and Austin where he is a real estate salesman for ranch properties. “Mom is the backbone of the company with crunching numbers and forecasting where we’re going.” His sister Caroline is married to a cattle rancher in south Texas, and his sister Olivia also lives in Texas and she has a small herd. “All of us have such a passion for these cattle,” Stuart said. “We’re so lucky to have parents who raised us around a farming and ranching environment. I love working with my parents. Every day, we just enjoy working together.” He said the work is hard, and sometimes the hours are long, but he loves raising cattle. “It makes it all worthwhile to drive out and see those baby calves.” Story and photos by Bruce Shultz Willis Provost has been farming sugarcane since he was 16. So for 58 years, he has made a crop.
He marvels at the high-tech world that agriculture has become with computers and lasers and the high costs of farming. “In my time, we had all those old tractors and mules.” Provost, 74, recalls raking the cut sugarcane and cutting drainage channels all by mule, then using a shovel to finish ditches. “I don’t believe those kids could bear that now.” He still wears his dark-blue farm outfit with his name and “Willis Provost Farms” monogrammed on his shirts, and he occasionally rides out to the fields to check on the workers’ progress. “They know they’ve got to work if they see my truck driving around.” Willis is pleased with this year’s crop. “That rain helped us out. That’s the first year I’ve seen it that tall.” And he’s pleased with the tonnage and sucrose recovery. “Things are in our favor this year.” Provost now leaves most of the work to his son, Paul Provost; sons-in-law Gerald Sonnier and Troy Boutte; and godchild Chad Zenon. His daughter, Crystal, and his wife, Linda, also help with the farm operation. The group has a division of labor. Chad does field preparation work and laser leveling, in addition to maintenance. Paul supervises harvest at loading sites and coordinates what fields will be cut. Troy maintains the equipment and tends to the paperwork for the Farm Services Administration for the farm that has cane from New Iberia, Coteau, Delcambre, Erath, Youngsville and Kaplan. Chad said the group pulls together with an esprit des corps. “It’s all family, and that’s why we do good. It takes a cooperative effort. Just keep things flowing, that’s the name of the game.” Willis is a third-generation farmer, and he recalls his father, Frank Provost, farmed back in the day when cane was cut by hand. “My poor momma was out in the field too with my father. Whatever he would do, she would do too.” Willis recalled that Sunday was a big day because after math, the family would trade eggs that they collected from their chickens to trade for the upcoming week’s groceries. He said his father died at a young age, leaving the 21-year-old Willis and his older brother, the late Wenceslaus Provost, to farm more than 400 acres near the Port of Iberia. Gradually, he and his brother picked up more land in Coteau. Then more around Erath, Delcambre, Abbeville and eventually Kaplan. “Land was hard to find around here.” He admitted other farmers thought he was crazy to farm land an hour’s drive away, but he figured he had no choice if he wanted to expand his acreage. Willis figures the farm’s acreage will be close to 4,000 next year, and he figures he can retire from farming soon. “We’ve been hearing that story for 10 years,” said daughter Crystal. Troy said Willis’ influence is ever-present, even when he’s not in the field. “My father-in-law is a one-of-a-kind,” said Troy. “He’s just trying to keep the legacy going.” But whether anyone will carry on that legacy is uncertain. Gerald, Troy and Paul said they doubt their children will want to become farmers. Chad’s son, Kyle, is a possibility. He’s majoring in agribusiness at McNeese State University, and Chad is certain Kyle will have an agricultural career. Kyle plays tackle at McNeese State University. He’s easy to find on the field. Look for No. 77, standing 6 feet 5 inches tall and 300 pounds. He also is on the McNeese track team. While at Vermilion Catholic High, he was 2013 state champion in the shot put and discus and runner up in the javelin. He said Kyle works on the farm when he’s not at school or on the athletic field. “He gets on a tractor every chance he gets.” Willis is amazed at the price of everything these days. Starting out, he said, a harvester cost $30,000, and he was able to make all the repairs himself. Now, a new harvester costs more than $350,000, and it requires a computer technician to make repairs. :”You can change a bolt on it and that’s about it.” He doesn’t envy young farmers just starting out. The high cost of farming, and the need to get bigger, have complicated making a living from the land, he said. “It wasn’t stressful in my time, and right now it is stressful.” But on weekends, that stress melts away when Willis and Linda get on the dance floor. They are avid fans of Zydeco musician Geno Delafosse. Willis said he noticed that Delafosse will be playing at Pat’s in Henderson the next weekend. But Linda reminded him that he has an upcoming doctor’s appointment and a check-up after a health upset. “If it turns out all right, that’s where we’ll be,” Willis said. “Got to get that exercise.” Sure enough, things turned out all right, and Willis and Linda were on the floor dancing to Zydeco. Willis said they probably know everyone on the dance floor when they venture to Pat’s in Henderson or Vermilionville. Linda grew up on a farm, so she knew what she was getting into when she married Willis. “I guess that’s why she married me.” Linda said she met Willis at her grandmother’s house. “He stole me from my boyfriend.” Willis revealed his automobile might also have had something to do with the budding romance. “At the time, I had a 1963 Chevy Sport with 4-on-the-floor.” Willis’ son-in-law, Gerald, made his way into agriculture when he married Crystal. Gerald has been a farmer for 22 years. He grew up in New Iberia and had no farming background. “I didn’t grow up doing this. I had to learn everything.” He had worked at the Musson-Patout car dealership as a body repairman, and he attended Southern University with plans of becoming an insurance adjuster. Gerald said Willis Provost wasn’t content to farm just a few acres to get by. “He had vision. He realized for a minority farmer to get land, he had to hustle.” Gerald said the decision by his father-in-law to expand into Vermilion Parish. “A lot of farmers told him you’ll never make it farming that far away.” Gerald said he especially appreciates Linda Provost, and not just for her cooking. “I have the best mother-in-law in the world.” Gerald said he learned farming from Chad, Willis’ godchild. He said Chad is dedicated to farming. “He loves farming. He lives and breathes farming.” Chad said he went to work on the farm full-time as soon as he graduated from Vermilion Catholic in 1992. He credits his parrain, Willis Provost, and his grandfather, the late Eldridge Zenon, for teaching him about farming. Paul Provost, Willis’ son, said he was 8-9 years old when he started working on the farm and driving a tractor. Chad readily admits farming is his passion. “That’s my thing. I told my grandfather years ago, I’d like to learn every aspect of the farm.” He said he tries to learn as much as he can, and he explores different techniques and methods used by fellow farmers. “Better production brings in better money.” Like Gerald, Troy had no farming experience, and he married another Provost daughter, Mary Candy. Before his life in sugarcane, Troy was a salesman for the Coca-Cola distributor in New Iberia and he studied to be a travel agent. But Chad said his wife, Penny, and the other partners’ wives keep things on course. He said his wife is quick to provide encouraging words when things look bleak. “When the going gets tough, she can see it in my face.” To work the Provost land requires a crew of foreign labor from Guatemala and Mexico, along with a few locals. Gerald said the work crew has overcome the English-Spanish language barrier with just a few hand signals and experience. “I can read their mind. We communicate just by looking at each other.” Chad said they were able to get their workers about a week before the harvest started. “I’m worried about the season to come. Without them, we’d be in trouble. It would be hard to do without them.” The Provost group is pleased with this year’s cane crop. “Tonnage is great. Sugar recovery is great. We’re loving it right now,” Chad said. Paul said the relatively dry weather has resulted in fewer breakdowns and maintenance problems. And he said good weather also means cleaner roads, which cuts down on complaints from the public about mud and debris on the highways. The West Indian cane fly was not as much of a problem as it was last year, Chad said. “We suspect that affected our tonnage last year.” Rain in late summer interfered with planting, and some cane lodged from stormy weather. Paul said the 226 variety seemed to lodge more, while 540 and 299 has been stronger. All of their crop is hauled to the Cajun Cooperative in New Iberia. The cooperative’s custom harvesting group also cuts about half of the Provost crop. Chad said Blair Hebert, LSU AgCenter county agent based in Iberia Parish, is a valuable asset. “He’s never hard to reach. We trust him and he’s out to help the farmer and that’s what makes him a good county agent.” Hebert said the Provost operation is tight-knit, with a good work ethic, a love for farming and teamwork. “It’s in their blood. They have a good system.” Story and Photos by Bruce Shultz HESSMER - Back in August, Ricky Juneau wished the rains from Hurricane Harvey would stop in time to start harvesting his sweet potato crop. Sure enough the rain stopped, and now he would like some of that rain to soften the soil and reduce the dust.
“A 1-inch rain would do wonders right now.” Dust from the harvesting machine and wind creates difficult working conditions, and limits the amount of time the workers can stay on the job, Ricky said. “The dust gets up so bad they can’t see anything. If the wind doesn’t pick up, we try to make the whole day.” Workers on the harvester sort through the potatoes and grade them according to size, shape and condition. Tara Smith, LSU AgCenter Northeast Regional Director, said this year’s crop is somewhat delayed. “Some areas look really good with nice yields.” But she said other areas are harvesting potatoes that have been small, so some growers are delaying the rest of their harvest until they get rain that could boost growth. “We are in droughty conditions.” She said the warm temperatures are good for size increases, but more moisture is needed to accelerate a size increase. On the other hand, other areas that got too much rain in August and September are seeing potatoes that have rotted in the field from excess moisture. “So far a lot of the producers have been able to dig and get some good yields,” said Myrl Sistrunk, LSU AgCenter sweet potato extension specialist. “It’s shaping up for those to be a good year.” He said some growers are reporting yields of 600 bushels an acre or better. He also said in some areas of the state, growers are waiting for their crop to grow before they harvest. Sistrunk said heavy rains during the growing season probably had an effect on size, but now those same fields could use rain, he said. “Most could use an inch or an inch and a half.” Juneau said last year’s harvest also started with heavy rainfall, he said, with continuous rainfall for two weeks. “Every afternoon we’d get a little rain.” Juneau’s son, Cory, said growth of the potatoes was slowed by heavy rainfall early in the season. One day in April, the area got 10 inches of rain in 3 hours. But weather is not the only problem facing growers. Selling sweet potatoes has become more of a challenge. At one time, Louisiana had at least 10 sweet potato canneries to buy Louisiana-grown product. But they have closed one-by-one, until now there are none. The closest one was a Del Monte plant in Arkansas and it shut down suddenly in September. The Bruce Foods plant near New Iberia was bought several years ago, and closed. Ricky said the companies that have bought the Louisiana plants for their brand names and they have shifted operations to the Carolinas. North Carolina has 96,000 acres of sweet potatoes, he said, compared to Louisiana with less than 10,000 acres. Now the only large buyer in Louisiana is the LambWeston plant near Delhi. A neighboring grower in Avoyelles Parish, James Deshotel, arranges the truckloads to be shipped to LambWeston, Juneau said. Currently, the Delhi plant processes large potatoes for the French fry market, but plans are being made for the facility to process potatoes for tater tots and patties, which could use any size potato, Ricky said. Officially opened in late 2010, the Delhi Plant is the world's first large-scale processing facility specifically equipped to process high-quality frozen sweet potato products. It's the first plant of its kind in the world to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Platinum certification for its sustainable and green building design and processes. The plant's unique design provides environmental, economic and health benefits to the local community, including water conservation and a substantial reduction in energy use. “Without them, all you’d have left is a fresh market,” Ricky said. He has regular customers in the fresh market, mostly groceries, that buy his potatoes. But that means he has to drive a weekly route to take orders and deliver the product regularly. There’s a market for individually wrapped potatoes for baking, and cooking in microwave ovens, as well as 3-4 pound bags, he said. “People are buying more sweet potatoes because they’re more health conscience.” He said the Louisiana Sweet Potato Commission promotes the product well with advertising but the limited acreage in Louisiana means less advertising dollars than the heavy hitters such as North Carolina. Juneau was vice president of the Avoyelles Parish Sweet Potato Growers, and he attends the state Sweet Potato Commission occasionally. (By the way, yam is just another term for sweet potato.) Ricky said he has been able to sell some of his crop to the Texas state prison system after Hurricane Harvey ruined a crop north of Houston. “That’s helping us a little bit.” A couple of niche customers have developed, Cory said. A Texas company bought some of their potatoes to make smoothies, and a distillery in New Orleans has used Juneau potatoes to make vodka. The loss of canneries has resulted in a sharp acreage reduction. At one time, several thousands of acres of potatoes were grown in Avoyelles Parish, but that dropped to 1,826 acres in 2016 with a total value of $3.5 million. According to the LSU Ag Summary for 2016, the statewide total gross farm value for sweet potatoes was estimated at $43.5 million. Total value of Louisiana’s sweet potato production, including value added of $32.6 million, was $76.1 million in 2016. Acreage in Louisiana’s peaked in 1935 at 123,000 acres. In 2016, the statewide acreage was 9,303. Sistrunk estimated this year’s statewide crop at 9,200 acres. Louisiana remained fourth in sweet potato production acreage in the United States behind North Carolina, Mississippi and California. The Juneaus have also reduced their crop to 135 acres this year. “At one time, we were planting 700-800 acres,” Ricky said. Avoyelles Parish had 167 farmers with sweet potato acreage. “Now we’re down to eight or nine.” Louisiana growers have to make $15-17 for a 40-pound box, but Carolina growers can sell their product considerably cheaper, Ricky said. The Carolina growers have the location advantage, being closer to the more populous east coast, Ricky said. Pigweed has become the main weed problem for sweet potato growers, Ricky said. Herbicides that might kill pigweed can’t be used because they would also damage the crop, he said, so the only remedy is to pull up the weeds. If any roots remain in the soil, pigweeds grow back. “After a rain, it doesn’t look like they’ve been touched.” The main insect problem is the cucumber beetle that feeds on the plant and ruins potatoes. Sweet potato weevils have been a major pest that had prevented movement of areas where the insect was found, but that restriction has been lifted. But some rules remain in place. For example, shipments of potatoes cannot be trucked in areas where the weevils are currently found. Hogs and deer also feed on potatoes. “It’s nothing for a deer to lop off a box of potatoes every night,” Cory said. Before harvest, the plants’ vines are cut to kill the plant above the ground. Left intact, the vines would get tangled in the harvester. Cutting the vines also encourages a potato to develop tougher skin. “It basically starts curing in the ground,” Ricky said. Small potatoes are used for bedding in February and March after the threat of frost to make plants for seed. Planting of the slips is done the first part of May. The Juneaus are leasing a storage building and packing shed from Nelson Bordelon who has scaled back his operation. Potatoes are stored unwashed to retain the protection provided by soil, Ricky said. “Once you wash them, they’re only good for a few weeks. As long as it stays dirty, they’ll be good until April or May. We’ve had some go to July.” Added to the problem of losing canneries is the difficulty of hiring dependable workers willing to work for $7.50 to $11 an hour, depending on experience. Ricky has been able to keep reliable workers from Ville Platte. But he admits as they get older and stop working, it’s almost impossible to find replacements. Most potato farmers have started using imported labor, he said. Usually about 14 workers are needed on a two-row harvester to grade and sort the potatoes. They can cover 3 acres a day in a 10-hour day. Harvesting is naturally inefficient as the machine digs up the tubers. Roughly 50-60 percent is left in the ground, Ricky said. “There’s a lot you’re going to leave behind.” Cory estimates that of the harvested potatoes, about two-thirds are boxed for sale. “It’s not how many potatoes you put in that bin, it’s how many you put in that box.” Ricky got started growing sweet potatoes after graduating from Hessmer High School, farming with his father-in-law, Earl Roy, in 1977. He started farming on his own in 2008. Cory was attending the University of Louisiana at Lafayette when he decided to join Ricky in the fields. “Now I’m playing in the dirt,” Cory said. Cory, 31, said he can count on one hand the number of farmers his age. “Every other farmer I know is over 50 years old.” In addition to growing potatoes, Ricky and Cory have a herd of commercial cattle, along with custom hay baling and a dirt work business. Justin Dufour, LSU AgCenter county agent in Avoyelles Parish, said Ricky is respected in the community. “He’s very active in the community with 4-H and livestock shows.” Ricky and his wife, Celia, ran a Little League program in the Hessmer area for 9 years for kids ages 6-18. “It’s all about the kids, not the parents,” Ricky explained. Ricky also served a term on the Avoyelles Parish School Board, and he’s planning to run for the office again next year. Ricky said he also followed in his father’s footsteps by planting potatoes. “It’s a good life. It’s just the obstacles that get in the way.” Story and photos by Bruce Shultz AVERY ISLAND -- Making TABASCO® pepper sauce requires more peppers than Peter Piper could pick, even if he perpetually plucked pecks of properly propagated pungent peppers.
And behind that prodigious production is John Simmons, the great-great-great grandson of Edmund McIlhenny, founder of the TABASCO® pepper sauce empire. The McIlhenny Co. remains a family operation run by McIlhenny descendants. John’s father, Tony Simmons, became the chief executive officer after the death of Paul McIlhenny in 2013, making Tony the fifth generation family member to run the business. The McIlhenny senior vice president, Harold “Took” Osborn, is Tony’s cousin. John, 37, grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, and he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in history. He later graduated from LSU Law School and practiced law in Lafayette until he started working on Avery Island in 2014. He said getting the job with McIlhenny was not guaranteed even though he’s part of the family, and he had to interview for the position before it was offered. He enjoyed practicing law with an insurance defense firm, but he admits working and living on Avery Island is a less stressful way to make a living. “This is a pretty fun gig.” He is married to the former Catherine Wise who grew up in Crowley, and they have a son, Elliott. To work for McIlhenny, John had to make the transition from the legal profession to McIlhenny’s senior manager for agriculture. “I’m responsible for every pepper that goes in every bottle of pepper sauce.” Most of the peppers that go into TABASCO are grown under contracts with overseas farmers. John said that practice started several decades ago when the peppers were grown at one location and several crops were lost. Having smaller growers in diverse locations helps minimize risks of losing a year’s worth of peppers. The company contracts with Western Hemisphere growers in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. It also is grown in Africa in Mozambique and South Africa. A grower has a pretty good deal, John said. “He’s a guaranteed seller at a guaranteed price.” The countries represent a wide variety of terrain and environmental conditions. . For example, dry weather is common in Colombia, while the crop in Peru has to endure desert-like conditions. The best yields come from Colombia, where a hectare of land (approximately 2.5 acres) can produce 25 tons, John said. Plants grown there produce peppers for up to 10 months. He visits the farmers in the Latin American countries regularly throughout the growing season, and he has to visit with farmers and inspect mills where peppers are ground. All that means he’s out of the country for about a week every month. A cousin, Loki Osborn, visits the African growers. After harvest, the peppers are ground and mixed with salt to be shipped to Avery Island. All the pepper seeds are grown in the U.S, on Avery Island. A small patch also is grown in Florida just in case something happens to the Avery Island seed crop. “The purpose of this farm (on Avery Island) is research and development, and seed stock.” In February, seeds are planted in greenhouses on the island, and the seedlings are transplanted no later than April 15. After harvest, seeds are shipped to growers overseas. This year’s seed crop on the island totaled 20 acres. Pepper plants are selected for seed before pickers are turned loose on the fields. Tony, John and Osborn go through the fields and select the best plants for seed stock. A big part of the selection is based on whether a plant grows peppers that are easy-to-pick, John said. Seeds are dried to 8-11 percent moisture, then washed and packaged in 1.5-pound bags, each enough to plant 30 acres of pepper plants. The Avery Island crop usually yields 300 to 600 bags a year to be sent to overseas growers. In case of a bad seed-growing year, a reserve supply is kept in a bank vault. Research has been conducted to making a mechanical picker, but so far a machine can’t determine when a pepper is ripe enough to be picked. “It has to be done by hand,” John said. Pickers are paid by the pound, John said. “We don’t have a problem finding folks. We have a good group of people who come every year.” Normally, picking would start in August but this year’s cloudy, rainy weather set the crop behind by a few weeks. This harvest finally began Sept. 6. Harvest ends at the first frost, or when the day’s total drops to only 2 barrels a day. After the seeds are extracted from the Avery Island peppers, the fruit also is used to make sauce. Some of the peppers grown on the island also are used to make the Tabasco Family Reserve pepper sauce that’s aged longer than 3 years. Farm manager Kip White said harvesting spreads disease as the army of pickers moves through the rows, dispersing concentrations of viruses and fungal spores throughout a field. In just one week of picking, the spread of disease is striking, he said. Peppers are to be picked when they are dark red, a sign they are fully ripened. A red stick, or “le petit baton rouge,” is used as a gauge to measure the ripeness of the peppers. Peppers on the bottom ripen first, but sunny weather is required to speed up ripening. From flower to ripe fruit requires at least 72 days. “You’ve got to have clear days and clear nights to ripen,” White said. John said the peppers have never been bred for disease and insect resistance. Fungicides and insecticides are needed to control pests such as hornworms, aphids, stinkbugs and cucumber beetles. Diseases include tobacco etch and pepper mild mottle virus. White said sunflowers are being used to lure the insects away from the pepper plants, and the bugs are sprayed on the yellow flowers. LSU AgCenter scientists provide expertise to help McIlhenny, just as they help backyard vegetable growers. Mary Helen Ferguson, a plant pathologist with the LSU AgCenter, visits the field to help the company identify disease and insect problems. She said some plants are showing signs of disease that’s to be expected with the wet summer. “I’m finding surprisingly fewer than expected.” She is collecting samples to find out what is causing fruit rot. “We’re looking for any problems we can address.” Early in the season, cucumber beetles were found on young plants, and stinkbugs have been found along with some aphids, she said. Fortunately, since the peppers are dried and ground, slight cosmetic insect damage is not a concern. “LSU has helped us in numerous ways,” John said. He said Ferguson’s assistance helps identify pests before they become a big problem. An agronomy team run by crop physiologist Dr. Raj Singh, soil scientist with J Stevens and weed scientist Ron Strahan makes soil fertility recommendations and helps manage weeds. “We’ve worked with LSU for 3 years, and all 3 years we have had good harvests, healthy plants and strong healthy seeds to send around the globe,” John said. “It’s a good team and they do a lot for us.” After harvest, the plants are shredded, filling the air with the strong tang of pepper as tractors pass over the fields. “We try to cut into the wind,” White said. After spraying, a flock of 100 blackface sheep is released on fields to control weeds and to provide some fertilizer. Fields are left fallow for 4 years before planting. TABASCO® pepper sauce is made from the recipe by Edmund McIlhenny in 1868 with salt, vinegar and peppers. The peppers are ground into a mash the same day they are picked. “We don’t have sinus problems when we grind the peppers,” White said. The pepper mash is aged 3 years in wooden barrels. It’s the aging that makes the distinct flavor profile of TABASCO®, John said. A thick layer of salt seals the barrel lids, and the salt is replaced every 6 weeks. The salt is from the salt dome that Avery Island sits on, mined by the Cargill Corp. Each barrel has enough pepper mash to make 10,000, 2-ounce bottles of pepper sauce. Wooden barrels from the whiskey distilleries are used, and that explains why many of the barrels have labels from such well-known companies such as Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. The increased demand for whiskey has resulted in more barrels available for TABASCO®, John said, and distillery laws restrict the use of barrels to only one batch of bourbon. “The boom in the bourbon business is good for us.” The interiors of whiskey barrels are charred to give the liquor its smoky flavor and amber color, but that is undesirable for making pepper sauce, so that layer of charcoal has to be removed. The company had a special decharring machine built to solve that problem, one of only a handful in the world. Another special machine had to be built to install stainless steel hoops on the barrel, replacing the original iron hoops which rust badly from the salt used in the aging process. After aging, the peppers are mixed with the vinegar. Tony Simmons inspects all the barrels entering the blending plant each day of processing to make sure every barrel contains a good batch of mash. “Quality is the most important aspect for us,” John explains. The importance of quality is a key component of the company mission statement hangs prominently throughout the company’s buildings: “Since 1868, the McIlhenny Family has been committed to premium products that enliven the flavor of food. Our mission is to assure that our TABASCO® diamond provides uncompromising quality.” Two trucks from Alabama arrive at the plant daily with 5,000 gallons of vinegar to mix with the mash. McIlhenny started using vinegar made from sugarcane instead of corn because of concerns by the European Union about GMO corn, John said. The pepper-vinegar concoction is held in mixing vats for 2-4 weeks. Solids are filtered out of the pungent red sauce in containers that hold enough sauce to fill 200,000 2-ounce bottles. The leftover dried solids are used for a variety of food and industrial purposes, such as analgesic ointments spices. An in-house lab tests the sauce for such qualities as pH and salt content, and a gas chromatograph is used to analyze the sauce’s flavor profile. “Everything is tested before it’s bottled,” John said. Bottling is accomplished with dizzying array of automated machinery that dispenses the sauce into bottles, installs the distinctive red cap, applies the labels, and seals and boxes each bottle. TABASCO® is sold in over 180 countries. The McIlhenny Co. vigorously defends its trademarks, and the name of the company’s product, John said. “Nowhere in the world can you use TABASCO®.” Even the octagonal cap and bottle design are trademarked. The TABASCO® peppers are scientifically labeled Capsicum frutescens. “All the capsicum comes from the Amazon Basin and it spread throughout South America and the Caribbean,” John explained. Columbus took capsicum peppers back to Europe, he said, and from there it spread to Asia to become a key ingredient. But the exact origin of the Avery Island TABASCO® peppers is a mystery. “We don’t know how Edmund McIlhenny got the seed in the first place,” John said. A story of a letter seems to indicate he may have gotten seeds from someone in California, he said, but it’s not clear if that was the original source. Tabasco peppers have some distinct differences from jalapeno and habanero. Tabasco peppers grow upward, while the other peppers hang down. Tabasco peppers also are loaded with juice that make them excellent for making sauce but other peppers are dry inside. The Avery Island peppers aren’t the hottest on the planet. The Scoville scale is used to measure the pungency (spicy heat) of chili peppers in Scoville heat units. John said Avery Island peppers when dried have 42,000-43,000 Scoville units, and the sauce is 2,500 to 5,000. The hottest pepper, the Naga Jolokia, has around 1 million Scovilles. But McIlhenny has developed an eye-watering habanero sauce. “We want to let everyone know that we can play in that space,” John said. The company has branched out in past years, partnering with other companies to use TABASCO® pepper sauce in jellies, jelly beans, A1 Steak Sauce, popcorn, pickles, dips, mustard and even SPAM. But the key product of the McIlhenny is the original pepper sauce. “We know how to make really hot food taste really good,” John said. Story and Photos by Bruce Shultz ST. MARTINVILLE – Talk with Wanda Barras for a few minutes and you’ll realize she doesn’t do anything at half throttle.
She’s an all-or-nothing kind of woman. “When I do something, I do it all the way. I just get absorbed with something.” So even though she only intended 18 years ago just to get a goat for a pet (to add to her menagerie of miniature horses and a thriving exotic bird business), the plan for just a couple of pets took a big turn. Before long she had a herd of goats and a lot of goat milk. Wanda bought her first goats in 1999, when she went to a goat farm in Jackson, La., with a relative. “I thought maybe I’d get one as a pet.” She ended up buying two females, and later a buck. “Believe me, a herd will expand quickly.” Not only did she have more goats than she planned, she also had an abundance of goat milk. She didn’t like store-bought goat milk, but was surprised that milk from her herd was tasty. She also used the goat milk to make soaps, but that didn’t put a dent in the supply, so she signed up for a cheese-making seminar in North Carolina at the Goat Lady Dairy. Her aviary for exotic birds was about to become the fromagerie. From the course, she decided she would start making her own cheese, and she obtained a license in 2003 to sell her products with the label “Belle Ecorce,” French for “beautiful bark” referring to the bark of the live oak trees lining the road to the family land along the Teche. She entered a few competitions with her cheese, and won several awards, including one in Wisconsin. Wanda started selling her cheeses at a farmer’s market in New Iberia, then in St. Martinville before deciding the Baton Rouge Farmer’s Market is her best outlet. “That pays my feed bill, and my people.” But she realizes she has reached a plateau with the business. “I’ve reached a point where I’m backing off. I’m not promoting myself like I should.” The hard cheese is made with milk from her two Jersey cows, a breed she prefers because they give higher fat content. Her goats are Nubian and LaMancha. She prefers LaMancha. “Nubians are not as smart.” She said LaMancha goats catch on to the milking routine quickly, and they don’t have to be shepherded as closely. She has cut down from 40 milking goats to 25. Wanda admits that trying to keep a goat herd in south Louisiana is a challenge. “Trying to raise goats south of I-10 is a challenge.” Goats prefer a rocky, sandy environment instead of muddy conditions that have been constant this year with frequent rains, she explained. “They’re not happy.” She said she can tell the goats’ dislike of the sloppy ground has affected them because their milk production has decreased. One of her big sales venues is the Baton Rouge Farmer’s Market, held every Saturday morning where she sells cheese and sometimes fresh eggs. “It takes us all week to get ready to go to market.” She sells her cheeses at several stores, including Joey’s and Great Harvest. And her cheeses are used by several restaurants including Dark Roux and Bread and Circus and Saint Streets Inn. In Lake Charles, her cheese is sold by Crave Gourmet Baskets and Gifts. “Her products fit real nicely with our offerings,” said Catherine Parrino, owner of Crave. “There’s something very special about her products.” Parrino said she carries the herb-infused goat cheese, and the goat cheese sampler soaked in olive oil. “You don’t just like them, you love them.” Wanda said several groceries carried her cheese, but she reduced her sales. “I backed down, and I didn’t want to get that big.” She has a small modular unit adapted for her cheese aging house, kept at a constant 50-55 degrees in low humidity. The cheese ages a minimum of 4 months, up to 18 months. Aging gives the cheese more flavor, she explained. Unlike cow’s milk, goat milk is naturally homogenized so it doesn’t require separation of the milk from the milk fat. To start the fermentation process, the freshly made cheeses are inoculated with penicillin. “I don’t follow recipes exactly. It’s more art than science, and I’m horrible with numbers.” She makes a wide variety of cheeses, including camembert, brie, chevre, feta, gouda and blue cheese. The chevre, made from goat milk, is used for cheese spreads, mixed with a wide variety of ingredients such as jalapeno, sweet peppers, herbs and figs. Several things can be added to infuse an interesting flavor in all the cheeses she makes, such as beer, sesame oil and chocolate mole’. She uses olive oil or pecan oil for a natural rind instead of wax. Wanda said it’s not uncommon for her to spend all night doing research or combing the internet for information. “I’m one of these people who doesn’t sleep,” she said. “Four hours, and I’m good.” But she admits that recently, she has started to scale back on her work. “I was working 16 hours a day, and it was killing me.” Wanda first obsession was art, and she attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana in art education. After school, she trained horses, then ran clothing stores before getting into exotic birds. As long as she can remember, food and animals were a major part of life on Belle Ecorce. “We’re foodie people. We know good food.” Her cousin is chef and culinary writer Marcelle Bienvenu. Every Sunday, her husband, Kenny Barras, cooks a big meal for the family. In a pen near her milking herd, she has three miniature horses, including one that was a champion mare. Before there was the goat operation, she had a thriving exotic bird business, selling macaws, cockatoos, parrots and African greys, and all the accessories, all over the U.S. She still has a breeding stock of birds One of her grandfathers had a dairy, and another raised monkeys. The Broussard family (originally Brossard) can trace the first family members’ migration from France to Acadia in 1654. When the British expelled the French settlers in the Grand Derangement in 1755, Joseph Beausoleil Broussard led an armed resistance campaign. Eventually he was captured and he led a group of Acadians to what would become St. Martin Parish in 1765. “We’re direct descendants of Beausoleil Broussard,” Wanda said. Stuart Gauthier, LSU AgCenter county agent in St. Martin Parish, said Wanda is actively involved with her grandchildren in the 4-H livestock program. He said she doesn’t just focus on the competition aspect of showing animals. “She’s focused in the right direction, and I appreciate that.” Story and photos by Bruce Shultz WELSH - Craig Zaunbrecher of Welsh could only look at the dark skies hanging over a field of mature rice, and shake his head.
“This is enough to make a preacher lose his religion,” he said with disgust as rain clouds circled around the field where he had staged his combines and tractors. Zaunbrecher started his harvest July 6, and he managed to get 500 acres cut. But rain shut down the harvest after that. The field he was planning to cut next received 1.5 inches of rain, and he figured the ground wouldn’t be dry enough until the weekend. With four combines, he estimates he could cut as much as 300-350 acres a day, but he’s worried that he will get behind, nevertheless. “No matter how you spread it out, we always get backed up,” said his daughter, Kali Lalande, a fifth-generation farmer who planted her first crop this year. That field that he cut, planted with CL111, yielded 39 barrels. Zaunbrecher suspects cloudy weather at flowering probably reduced the yield by around 10 percent, and he hopes the first 500 acres is the lowest yielding of his crop. Zaunbrecher is eager for the rain to stop so he can resume harvesting. He has four combines and 20 18-wheelers to keep the crop moving out of the fields. He has a crew of Mexican and local workers, and his father, Steve Zaunbrecher, helps by operating a combine. “We’ve got very good help.” The growing season started well, with good planting conditions. “This year is the earliest I’ve ever planted.” He planted CL153, CL172, CL153, CL111, Mermentau and hybrids XL745 and XL729 on 5,400 acres. “This will be my biggest rice year yet.” He still can’t get over he started planting Feb. 16. “I’ve never planted rice in February in my life.” Planting usually starts in the first week of March, and wraps up by April 10. He had 3,400 acres of crawfish, and he shut that operation down for the year in late June. But he had to deal with flooding after he had planted much of his crop. Heavy rain inundated 1,100 acres of young rice planted Feb. 16, and it was almost in green ring. He was forced to replant 300 acres after backwater flooding covered it for 3 weeks. “It was pretty rough. I’ve never seen it like that.” But Zaunbrecher has known darker days in his farming career. He has 25 bins with a partner. “We can dry over 200,000 barrels and we still have room left.” Bin heaters are butane-fueled, and all the vessels are equipped with stir-alls. His operation extends to 23 different farms, or tracts of land. Some of the farms are contiguous, so pilots from Lake Arthur Flying Service working his crop can cruise for 3 miles before making a turn. To keep track of the farms, he uses a handwritten notebook. “I call it my bible. Without this book, I’d be totally lost.” A checkmark at the top of a page tells him that everything has been done to a field until harvest, and several of those pages were checked by late June. Kali, who got an online associate degree from the University of Louisiana at Monroe, has done some of her father’s record-keeping on computer, but he has resisted using one of those newfangled devices. “I don’t think he knows how to turn on a computer.” Zaunbrecher is worried that the consistently cloudy weather at flowering and pollination could affect this year’s crop. Dr. Steve Linscombe, director of the LSU AgCenter H. Rouse Caffey Rice Research Station, agrees that the weather conditions might not be the optimum conditions for a rice crop. Linscombe said he’s heard preliminary yields that are below average, and he said below-par harvest could be blamed on, “the combination of cloud cover and the weather we’ve been having over the past 2 months.” Zaunbrecher has 3,000 acres of beans planted in March. “We’ve never been high yielding on soybeans in our area.” Usually 26-35 bushels of beans makes Zaunbrecher happy, although he has had harvest reaching 52 bushels. Last year’s rice crop was 6-7 barrels off from 2015, he said. Too much rain at the wrong time, he figures. For his operation, he considers a good yield to range from 40-53 bushels, with conventionals in the low 40s and hybrids in the high 40s to low 50s. Fields are flooded with 18 electric-powered pumps, eight fueled by diesel and 3 by natural gas. Zaunbrecher doesn’t have to decide whether he’ll use fungicide. “We spray fungicide on everything every year. We’re too close to the coast, and I think it helps with the second crop.” He used AV1011 to keep the birds from eating the seed on the first half of his crop. Zaunbrecher has his share of outcrossing and herbicide-resistant red rice, so he’s eager for the availability of Provisia. “We’re definitely going to have to try it.” He spoon feeds his fertilizer, figuring that the sandy soil won’t hold the nutrients long enough for them to be fully absorbed. “It seems to be working over here.” Zaunbrecher knew he would farm from age 8 and he has been farming since 1984, straight out of high school. He grew up on a farm under the wings of his father, Steve, who still farms rice near Elton. “Farming is what we did, and that’s all we knew.” He admits he almost went broke farming, and he would have thrown in the towel had his wife, Shonda, urged him to hang tough. “She has been great. She’s the one who keeps us all together.” It’s painful for Zaunbrecher to recall how he told his wife he could see no way out of debt, telling her, ‘I guess we’re done.’ ” “We didn’t have enough money to pay our electric bill,” he remembers. But Shonda persisted. “She said, ‘Don’t worry. We’re going to get through this. You’ve got crawfish. Why don’t you open a restaurant?” So they did, reopening a boiled crawfish restaurant, Frey’s, that had been started by an aunt and uncle. It provided enough cash to get a foothold on a mountain of debt. “We worked out way out of it with family, friends and a banker.” He particularly credits banker Ronnie Petree of St. Martin Bank for standing beside him through his darkest hour. Zaunbrecher remembers asking Petree why he risked his career standing by him. “He said, ‘You didn’t make mistakes farming, you made your mistakes at marketing.’ “ But he said there were others, friends and relatives, who also stood by him, so many that he doesn’t want to start listing them for fear he will forget someone. “So many people helped me, it’s just unbelievable.” Zaunbrecher admits he got in that mess by sitting on a rice crop in the bins, waiting for a better price. It never came. The experience made him more cautious. As he got back on his feet and expanded his operation, he took on partners Allen Hebert, Kenny Hicks and Bobby Hanks. He said their business expertise has helped him with selling his rice. “We’ve made mistakes in the past year and we’ve made some gains.” Craig, age 52, doesn’t even have time to think about retirement, and he’s OK with that. “I’ll keep farming as long as the good Lord lets me. I love what I do, and I love the challenge.” Zaunbrecher considers family his greatest asset. His son, Blain, is a sophomore at Notre Dame High School in Crowley. Zaunbrecher said he might make a farmer out of him. “He’s more into duck and goose hunting right now.” His four daughters have all bought farm land. Angelica Nunez and her husband Jeremy have bought a farm. So have Lacy Guinn and her husband Philip. Jesslyn and Brock Sullivan bought a place near Stuttgart, Ark. She works for Riceland Foods. And then there’s Kali, the youngest daughter who’s following in her father’s footsteps as a fourth generation farmer. She bought a farm before she married Jason Lalande, who works in the oilfield and had no experience in agriculture until he met Kali. “I taught him everything he knows, or everything he needs to know,” Kali said while driving her Ford F-250 truck crammed with new electric fencing material. A couple weeks later, her truck was filled with maternity clothes, as she was expecting her first baby. She also has her first rice crop this year, 81 acres between Woodlawn and Fenton, planted in XL745 at a seeding rate of 24 pounds per acre, all treated with Dermacor seed treatment. She water-leveled the land twice and reduced the number of levees. Kali had herbicides Clearpath and Permit flown on her crop, and fertilizer was applied when the crop was not quite at heading. Tenchu was used because it’s considered safe for crawfish. Kali has a cattle herd of around 100 head. She showed cattle and pigs in 4-H. This year, she used a longhorn bull on 11 heifers for her first calf crop that she’ll sell when they weigh 200 pounds. She plans to sell 15-20 of her calves in July and the rest in November. Kali has a quick answer when asked why she wanted to farm: “That’s what I like, and that’s what my daddy does.” She admits signing for a crop loan was intimidating. “When I saw those numbers, I got nervous.” She also got nervous after planting when she checked on the seedlings struggling to break through the soil. “She burned my phone up,” her dad recalled. “I said, ‘Don’t go in the middle of the day, or you will see nothing.’ “ Craig said he helps his children. “But we try to teach them nothing is free.” When her sisters and other girls were playing with Barbie dolls, Kali was on a tractor as young as age 11. “I refused to wear dresses, and I wanted to be in jeans and boots, and be with my daddy on the farm. “I probably call him twice a day. We’re very close. Like best friends.” Story and Photos by Bruce Shultz BATON ROUGE – The Alma Plantation of Pointe Coupee Parish has brought its sugarcane from the field to the bottle.
The Cane Land Distilling Co. started up in 2013 by Walter Tharp to make rum from Alma sugarcane. Tharp can trace his family’s ownership of the operation to 1858 when Alma was purchased from the Barrow family. His uncle, David Stewart, is the president of Alma Plantation and sugar mill. Alma’s tradition and storied heritage is being captured in their products. Cane Land currently has four liquors: Argente, a rum intended for mixed drinks; Parade spice flavored rum for sipping, the Original Mississippi Floated Whiskey; Shindig Vodka and Red Stick cinnamon rum. Also planned are a dark rum, a gin and a tequila. Obvious remnants of the sugar mill are everywhere at the Cane Land facility in downtown Baton Rouge at 760 St. Philip St., (adjacent to the location of the old Steinberg’s Sporting Goods store.) A cane cart turned on its side provides a sheltered seating area. Large gears and wooden beams provide a rustic setting for the reception area. The walls are lined with pecky cypress boards. Beneath the glass-covered bar is raw sugar from Alma. “Most everything you see here came from the mill,” Tharp said. The distillery also has a French connection. Wooden vats were obtained from the Remy Martin cognac distillery in France. Two French coopers came to Baton Rouge to meticulously piece the staves and hoops together to form the vessels. “It took them four days to reassemble them,” Tharp recalled. Each barrel holds 22,000 fifths of liquor. Tharp explained that the barrels have been used to finish the Original Mississippi Floated Whiskey. Cane Land commissioned a Tennessee whiskey maker (Tharp can’t say who it was) to make a batch of whiskey and ship it to Baton Rouge via barge on the Mississippi River. The whiskey is aged in the barrels to absorb the subtle tones of cognac. “We’re taking 5-year-old whiskey and putting it in cognac barrels for 4 to 5 months. That gives it a different flavor profile.” The distillery also has a set of 1,100 gallon, Italian-made fermentation tanks to make for its other products. Most of the rum Cane Land produces is made from molasses from the Alma sugar mill. Molasses is cane juice reduced by heat to syrup. It’s usually sold for cattle feed as blackstrap molasses. But the crème de la crème of the distillery is rhum agricole, and it requires fresh cane juice, which begins to deteriorate almost immediately. Rhum agricole is the French term for cane juice rum, a delicately flavored rum originally distilled in the French Caribbean islands from freshly squeezed sugar cane juice rather than molasses. The distillery wasn’t ready until the end of the recent grinding season, so only 2.5 barrels were made of the high-end liquor. “Next year, we’ll shoot for 100 barrels,” Tharp said. The distillery has a steam plant as a heat source for the distillation process, heating water to 210 degrees. The man in charge of distillation is Jonny Ver Planck, a former rock and roll soundman and recording engineer for groups such as Reverend Horton Heat, Voodoo Glowskulls, Linkin Park and Hank Williams III. He started distilling rum in Belize 15 years ago. “I’m always trying to make things better,” Ver Planck said. “A lot of it is written down and a lot of it is by feel.” Ver Planck said he has been crafting alcoholic beverages since he was a boy. “The first thing I ever made was an apple cider. I was 10 years old.” Ver Planck explained in detail the components of the distilling process that are called heads, hearts and tails. Heads are bad, containing methanol, ketones and other nasty chemicals. The hearts contain the ethyl alcohol, but the tails determine the flavor, he explained. The actual still is made of copper, and Ver Planck explained that the metal pulls sulphur and other undesired chemicals that have a negative effect on flavor. The byproduct of rum distilling is a liquid called dunder. Normally it is discarded but it is high in minerals for cattle, Ver Planck said. “Dairy farmers who used it increased milk production by 3 percent,” Ver Planck said. From 500 gallons of liquid at the start of the distillation process, 50 gallons of rum can be made with 450 gallons of dunder to dispose. Ver Planck is working with Cathy Williams, LSU AgCenter animal science professor to find a way to make the byproduct usable. “I would like to work with him when we have cattle to be fed,” Williams said. She explained that she is waiting until LSU has a calf crop to be weaned, probably in the fall, before working with the dunder as a possible supplement. In the meantime, she is analyzing dunder samples to determine its exact mineral content. She agrees it probably would be a good feed additive for dairy operations, but she said the amount would have to be limited because of possible problems excess minerals could cause to cows’ rumens. “It’s just trying to figure out how we can make this work.” The Cane Land Distillery is open to the public, and Tharp plans to have live entertainment occasionally. Food trucks will be in operation also. Currently without a distributor, Cane Land products can only be bought at the company’s downtown Baton Rouge location. “The only alcohol we can sell is what we make,” Tharp said. Ver Planck said he has a secret source of Mexican agave that will be used for tequila, but since Cane Land tequila won’t be made in Mexico it can’t be called tequila and it will probably be labeled as “agave spirits.” Stewart said the past grinding season was good for Alma. “It was a very profitable year.” Alma has 2,800 acres in cane production and it uses cane from other farmers. Stewart said Alma is the only remaining operation in Louisiana under the original plantation structure with a mill, functioning commissary and living quarters for farm workers. Its plantation bell is rung at noon every day. “We’ve been able to retain the legacy, but keep current,” Stewart said. “I think Walter is one who really appreciates the legacy and I’m pleased.” Tharp got the idea for making rum from the family sugarcane operation 4 years ago while attending a wedding in Guatemala. Several men at the wedding were puzzled why rum wasn’t being made from Louisiana sugarcane, and that set Tharp to thinking about changing that. During those 4 years, Tharp had to negotiate the quirky labyrinth of local, state and federal laws requiring the production and sales of alcoholic beverages. Even the typeface on the labels is scrutinized by authorities. “The main driving force is the commitment to Alma Plantation,” Tharp said. Tharp said he wants to work with other distillers in Louisiana, perhaps to start a rum trail similar to the Bourbon Trail of Kentucky or the Sonoma and Napa Valley wine tours of California. Stewart said he is pleased that his nephew has taken this step to bring Alma’s tradition to the public, and he said he has a secret project to further raise Alma’s profile. “It’s another source of income from sugarcane that I think will be a success. Bringing Alma back to its glory days is my raison d’etre.” You can read more about the distillery at www.canelanddistilling.com, where information is provided about arranging tours of the facility. Story and Photos by Bruce Shultz LAKE CHARLES – Brandon Vail, a fifth generation farmer, is only 31 years old, but he started farming 18 years ago.
“I grew my first crop of beans at 13,” he said. “It was good enough that I got hooked on it.” At age 17, he made his first crop loan from his dad, Mark Vail, for a 140-acre crop of beans that made 47 bushels an acre and sold it for $8.50 a bushel. He also had cattle starting with show cows, and every year his dad gave him a calf for a few years until he started buying calves. Mark said his son still gets teased by neighbors who remember Brandon driving a farm truck as a young boy and barely being able to see over the steering wheel. When he started McNeese State University, he grew beans and wheat, then grew rice after he graduated with a degree in animal science. “I was going to be a vet,” Brandon said. “My mom didn’t want me to farm.” One of his sisters, Allison, is studying to be a vet and she will start clinicals at Auburn this year. Another sister, Kristie, is a psychologist in Kentucky, and sister Alexis is a marketing major at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Brandon said he has liked farming because there’s no such thing as a routine day. “You don’t do the same thing two days in a row.” Mark said Brandon has a sharp, technical mind, and he has no doubt that Brandon could have been a vet. “He would have made it, and he had the grades for it. He’s smart and not lazy. When I was his age, I didn’t have what he has.” He said when his son is a consummate auction enthusiast who enjoys monitoring the prices of farm and dirt moving equipment. “He watches auction sites on the internet constantly. ”They grow a wide variety, with rice, cattle, crawfish, beans and corn. Jimmy Meaux, LSU AgCenter county agent in Calcasieu Parish, said Brandon is willing to experiment. “He’s a good progressive farmer who wants to try different things.” Growing corn in Calcasieu Parish and using raised beds for soybeans have worked well for him, Meaux said. Brandon works with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to make improvements to his land, Meaux added, and he is active in the local Farm Bureau in addition to serving as treasurer for the area Rice Growers Association. Brandon has 150 head of commercial cattle, and his dad has 250. They use Gelbvieh and Hereford bulls. They didn’t lose any cattle to the flooding in August, but they had to haul hay to cows stranded on high ground. Brandon and his dad have been coping with a pipeline that is traversing some of the land where they farm. The right-of-way has become a muddy mess that has claimed one of Brandon’s cows. “I’ve got a neighbor that lost four cows.” Farmland is becoming harder to find, or even hold in Calcasieu Parish. Brandon and his dad agree that most of the farmland decrease is because of mitigation banking. Developers who use wetlands must offset that by buying land that cannot be farmed or developed and planting trees. A 200-acre tract near one of the Vails’ farms was planted in trees for mitigation banking, Brandon said, never to be farmed again. Mark said he and his son try to maintain a base of 3,500 acres but that has required them to shift their operation to new land several times because they have been displaced by mitigation banking on 1,000 acres by the Sasol plant. Land that sells for farming fetches around $3,000, but mitigation banking pays $5,000, he said. “Mitigation has hurt us a lot more than development. And they take the best rice ground for mitigation.” They also have a dirt operation that does well with the booming construction business in the Lake Charles area, and that helps pay the bills during times of low commodity prices. There’s another benefit to having dump trucks, bulldozers and excavators, Brandon said. “One thing about having your own dirt equipment, you can haul dirt where you need it.” Brandon even tried growing 40 acres of sesame last year after reading about a farmer growing it successfully in Mississippi. “I just wanted to see what it would do here.” It didn’t do well, but that’s because of the August flood. “Where it was out of the water, it did well.” Sesame is grown for the oil, and to make tahini, a condiment made from toasted ground hulled sesame seeds. Tahini is served as a dip on its own or as a major component of hummus, baba ghanoush, and halva. Brandon is not growing sesame this year, but he said he may try it again eventually. He grew wheat for several years, but low prices and bad yields as low as 4 bushels an acre caused by fusarium scab disease, forced him out of growing that commodity. At one time, Brandon grew 200 acres of corn, but that’s been scaled back to 40 acres this year. Some of the crop will be sold as feed for cattle at McNeese, some of it for local cattle producers, and the rest for the Bails’ cattle. “It’s fun to grow something different.” He figures he’s likely to be growing the southernmost corn crop in southwest Louisiana unless someone he doesn’t know is growing it to the east. The Cropland 6640 variety of corn was planted March 4. He said it has a 113-day maturity and it gets 5.5-6 feet tall. He said the variety tolerates moisture extremes well. “I wish I would have had this variety planted last year.” This year’s crop has been fertilized with 200 pounds of 0-18-36 and 50 pounds of urea, then top-dressed with 150 pounds of urea treated with Agrotain. He sprayed Roundup and Zidua for sedges. After harvest, bermudagrass and broadleaf signalgrass will thrive among the stubble, making a good pasture for grazing cattle, he said. He said he can sell the corn for about the same price that is paid on the Chicago Board of Trade. “You don’t make a lot of money but it’s no worse than beans.” Last year’s corn crop wasn’t good, yielding only 20 bushels compared to his norm of 125. This year, he’s going to try to irrigate by flushing the zero-grade field, but he won’t use poly pipe. “I’m just curious to see what it will do like this without poly pipe." All of their pumps are diesel-powered because electrical service is limited in the rural area south of Lake Charles. They use surface water when possible, and drought years can bring high salt levels. In addition to the corn, Mark and Brandon will have 250 acres of beans and 583 acres of rice. Between planting in late April, Brandon was moving truckloads of rice to Farmer’s Rice Mill. He said he prefers to have the crop sold by January, but they held back because of low prices. He said he has received help from Farm Bureau marketing expert Mark Tall. “It’s made a difference. It’s been 30-40 cents a barrel.” Their rice crop, minus about 5,000 barrels, can be held in the three sets of bins they use. “If the yields are similar to last year’s, we’ll have 30,000-31,000 barrels this year.” They keep their harvested rice separated by variety. Brandon said last year’s bean crop was a disaster, averaging 8 bushels, because of the August flood. “Charcoal rot killed it. It was a fair crop. I planted on June 29. It was late but I thought I’d made 25-30 bushels on it.” He said he had most of his rice out of the fields when the flooding hit. Planting last year was also complicated because of high water, he said. “Last year was tougher than normal, but I know I’m not the worst off.” His father said he would rather face a drought than deal with flooding like last year. In 2016, rainfall exceeding 12 inches at a time hit their area, he said. Most of this year’s rice crop is being drilled, he said. “I’d much rather drill plant it if I have the option. Here, if you plant wet, you’re going to cut wet.” He explained that most of their fields are on pump-off land. Brandon has a 19-acre field in the LSU AgCenter Verification Program. It was planted March 9, followed by Roundup and Command herbicides. It was fertilized, then sprayed with Newpath and Regiment and flooded by April 25. Brandon said he’s taking some new steps with this field. “This was the first time I got to use a stale seedbed, and then drill.” Brandon said he’s learning new approaches to growing rice, such as using split application of nitrogen, and new herbicides such as Regiment. Keith Fontenot, who works with the Verification Program, visits the field of CL111 almost every week to check on its progress and to make recommendations. Fontenot said Brandon has proven himself as a farmer. “He knows his business, and he takes care of his business.” Taking care of business this year meant changing up variety selections. Last year, Brandon said, hybrid yields were lower than conventionals, with CL111 outyielding hybrids by 8 barrels. He also said he has shifted from Cheniere rice because its yields decreased. His average yield was 37 barrels for the first crop and 15 barrels for the ratoon. “I thought that was excellent for over here.” He said the second crop yield amounted to only 8 barrels on wet ground where the stubble couldn’t be mowed after first crop harvest. Brandon said barnyardgrass and Southern watergrass have become resistant to propanil on one of their farms. Brandon said he keeps track of what needs to be done without writing it down. “I told my dad if I ever get hit in the head, you all are in a bind.” This year, Brandon hired two Mexicans to help with the crawfish crop and rice. “I should have done it years ago,” he said. “It saves me a lot of time on labor.” “I had three years of Spanish in high school, and it’s starting to come back to me.” He said he’s also learning how to cook Mexican dishes from the workers who are fishermen back home. Brandon said he likes to cook, especially wild game. He duck hunts and his wife, Danielle, is a deer hunter. She also keeps the books for the farms, and she works for the local soil and water conservation district, but she had no previous farm experience. “She’s learning what I’m dealing with.” Story and Photos by Bruce Schultz PRAIRIE RONDE - A New Orleans woman and a farmer from Mexico are unlikely business partners, but they have set out on a venture to grow, mill and sell their own rice raised on a St. Landry Parish farm.
“This farm has been a lot of things,” said Beth James, referring to the 1,100-acre farm started by her father, the late Laddie James. He farmed row crops but he also raised prawns, redfish, catfish and frogs on the 1,100 acres in St. Landry Parish. Remains of his ventures can be seen throughout the property, including a walled area that was used to contain frogs. Since he was a road builder, Laddie James built asphalt thoroughfares on the tops of many of the levees so the enterprise could be inspected by car. He built an extensive irrigation system using his engineering expertise. Laddie James owned a road construction company, Prairie Construction Co., based in Opelousas. “He started the company with a pickup truck, two shovels and a $400 loan from my mother,” Beth said. She said rice has been grown on the farm for more than 30 years, but it wasn’t harvested until recently. “We weren’t doing it for anything other than to feed the crawfish,” she said. Beth and Rolando’s paths to becoming rice farmers are full of twists. In a previous life, Beth was a menswear designer for New York-based clothing company Nautica, and she traveled extensively overseas to supervise the manufacturing operations. “When I look back on all that, I don’t know how I did it.” Later, she worked for Cox Communications when the corporation first started getting into the internet business. Beth’s husband, Dave Malone, is a guitarist and songwriter who performed with the New Orleans band, The Radiators. Rolando’s journey began in 1981, when the James family bought a house in San Miguel Allende, Mexico. His mother was the James’ housekeeper, and Laddie James became a mentor to Rolando, recognizing his ambition and eagerness to learn. “Laddie James is the one who brought me here,” Rolando recalled. “I was told I would be working on the farm.” Beth said Rolando has kept the farm going. “Rolando has been here 29 years. He’s been through the evolution of this farm,” Beth said. “He definitely put in the hard work, and quality work. We’re careful to take care of this land. Rolando is even more careful than my father.” The Natural Resources Conservation Service has been working with James Farms in a program to improve water quality of Bayou Mallet, and Rolando was recognized by the NRCS for his efforts at an award ceremony recently in Dallas. After her father died in 2005, Beth had to decide what to do with the land. Rolando told her he wanted to grow rice. “He said, ‘I want to be a rice farmer, and I want to make money.’ Next thing I knew, he was in the rice business. He has to do all the work, and he has to take all the risk.” The first year, Rolando had a good crop, but nowhere to store it, forcing him to sell the rice as soon as it was harvested instead of waiting for a better price. Beth said the solution seemed obvious to build a set of bins with drying capability. “I was out here more and more, and I was trying to figure out what to do to grow this business.” Beth said she was driving the combine to cut the rice last year, and a thought came to her. “When you’re in a combine, you have a lot of time to think. I always say it was dad reaching down and striking me on top of the head.” The thought that struck her was to mill the rice themselves, and sell it directly to consumers. Doing that would require a rice mill. She remembered thinking to herself, “If we’re going to do this, let’s try to achieve the best quality we can.” The rice Rolando had grown tested superior, she said, and it seemed obvious that the quality aspect could be a major selling point. For Beth, that meant having control over every aspect of production, so installing a rice mill seemed logical." “As part of the constant desire to evolve, we wanted to develop our products to take them from our farm to the kitchen table. I believe that many consumers want to know where their food comes from. We plant a single variety of rice which cooks more evenly and we can control the great quality from the field to the consumer through our process." She approached mill manufacturer, ZaccariaUSA, and within a few months, the company installed a new Zaccaria ZX-6 mill on the James Farms to sort, husk and mill about 1,000 pounds of rice an hour. She has also setup a full lab with an MBZ-2 whiteness meter to verify that she is milling to an accurate degree by giving her a numerical value for the whiteness, transparency, and polish of the white rice kernel. She also bought a small mill that uses a 100-gram sample to determine milling quality. The operation is not ready to start milling rice for other producers. “We’re not there yet.” Their final product is Prairie Ronde Rice, in 2-pound colorful resealable packages with either a chicken or a pig playing an accordion. Beth sells rice at the Crescent City Farmer’s Market in New Orleans on Saturdays. It’s also available at Benny’s Grocery in Opelousas, in Baton Rouge at Alexander's Highland Market and Calandro's, and in Mandeville at Nuccio’s Louisiana Kitchen. James Farms rice is used at Carmo Restaurant on Julia Street in New Orleans. She’s also hopes to develop other major restaurants in New Orleans as customers. Meanwhile, Rolando is working on the farm to raise the crop. They avoid using pesticides, although they are not trying to obtain organic status. Rolando had 110 acres of CL111 water planted on April 6. He said he wanted to plant sooner but rains kept nearby bayous too high to drain the fields. “The water stayed up for more than a week.” He will plant an additional 100 acres in mid-April. He wanted to try another variety but decided to stick with CL111 for the entire farm. “We still have some 111 in the dryer and I didn’t want to mix it up.” He laser-leveled about 200 acres of land this year for this year’s crop. Dr. Johnny Saichuk, retired LSU AgCenter rice specialist now working with Ducks Unlimited, said he encouraged Beth and Rolando to laser-level the fields. “That was the one of the first things I had told him, to increase yields they needed to improve their irrigation efficiency.” Saichuk said he has been working with the James Farms to help them improve production. “They’ve got a lot of potential yet to be realized. I think the marketing is their biggest challenge.” The James Farms has a website, www.prairieronderice.com. Story and photos by Bruce Schultz LAKE ARTHUR – It’s the first day of March and it’s obvious that Joel Trahan is eager to help a neighbor start planting this year’s rice crop.
Trahan no longer farms rice, but the opportunity to get on a tractor and plant a crop takes him back to what he knows best, and he doesn’t hesitate to tell you why he likes farming. “You’re out here in nature. It’s just something about the smell of the soil, watching the crop grow and then there’s the harvest. And then the second crop in the fall, and the specks fly over and you’re part of it.” Trahan, the youngest of 7 children, said it was a given that he would be a farmer. As a boy, he didn’t play sports because he was needed to help on the farm. “It was a fact that when we got off school, we had something to do on the farm.” Trahan said his crawfish operation just isn’t the same as growing a rice crop, even though there’s more of a likelihood of a profit, without crop insurance. Trahan planted 20 crops of rice in his farming career. He said if rice prices had reached a profitable level, he would still be growing rice. “I would have never stopped, no doubt. I just thought it was selfish to keep doing what I love at the expense of my family.” Two of his brothers, Neal and Jess, also tried rice farming, all following in the footsteps of their father, Louis Trahan. Trahan and his wife, Dharma, have four boys. Tyler, the oldest is a recruiter for Our Lady of the Lake Medical College in Baton Rouge. Dylan is in graduate school at McNeese, studying wildlife management. Isaac is a high school sophomore. Spencer tried farming rice last year, but realized it’s an iffy proposition with low prices. Dharma works at Lake Arthur Elementary in the computer lab. Trahan said his father, Louis Trahan Jr., started cutting back rice acreage in the late 1980s. “As he dropped land, I picked it up.” In 2005, Hurricane Rita dumped saltwater on rice fields in the coastal parishes, and Trahan lost his second crop. That made his decision to get out of farming easier. “I was making ends meet, but not gaining anything. Through it all, he was able to stay afloat financially because of crawfish. “The crawfish was what was paying for my rice habit.” After Trahan quit farming, he took a job in the oilfield, but in 2008, good rice prices lured him back into farming. But the high costs of expenses put him back in the same scenario. “I came to the realization that I was playing the same game, but with higher stakes.” Fuel costs were the main problem. Most of his fields were on pump-off land. That meant draining a field require using diesel-burning pumps at $3 a gallon. So Trahan exited farming again, taking another job in the oil business then another for a John Deere dealership. But he continued his crawfish business, and in 2014 he bought a crawfish catering business and turned it into Trahan Farms Catering. He has boiled crawfish, and barbecued, for events from Charleston, South Carolina, to Denver, Colorado, and several times in Houston. He said business is off this year because oilfield businesses have cut back on expenses, so he has worked to diversify his clientele. “I haven’t done a boil yet that I haven’t been invited back to.” Trahan revealed that even though his catering business could use crawfish from his fields, he prefers to buy graded, purged and iced crawfish from Demand Quality in Morse owned by Don Alleman. Trahan depends on Mexican labor to harvest crawfish on 340 acres. “I can’t imagine doing it any other way because I have so much to do.” Having hired labor allows him to do catering jobs without interrupting the crawfish harvest. One of his employees has been working for him for 14 years. Trahan uses an agent to deal with the red tape of immigration, but he said this year was one of the smoothest. The rice crop on Trahan’s crawfish fields is grown by farmer Shannon Daboval of Thornwell. Three wells are available for flooding but surface water in the canals is usually adequate for irrigation. A pump at one well near the lake has been converted to electricity. The 2017 crawfish crop has been a challenge, Trahan said. “This has been one of the slowest years I can remember for catch and income.” He said last year’s flooding in August had a negative effect on his ponds. “I had 3 weeks of backwater flooding with no levees showing.” After the flood, he saw females carrying young crawfish, and he doubted the young would survive. Predator fish that had found their way into his ponds took their toll, he said. “I’m pretty confident my earlier generations were wiped out.” He said his catch has been about a month behind his usual totals, but improvement has been obvious. In two weeks, he said, the catch went from one sack for every 20 acres, to 1 sack per 10 acres. But Trahan said the price for crawfish has dropped considerably, to $1.25 a pound. “I don’t ever remember $1.25 this early.” He said part of the reason for the price decrease is simple supply and demand with more farmers turning to crawfish to make extra income because of low rice prices around $15 a barrel. “There’s a lot more people getting into it that haven’t been in it before.” Mark Shirley, LSU AgCenter and Louisiana Sea Grant aquaculture agent agreed. “The number of acres affected by the flood in August is more than offset by additional acres of production in rice fields,” he said. More rice farmers started harvesting crawfish because of the low rice prices, Shirley said. Shirley said some processing plants have not been able to start peeling because they had trouble getting foreign workers into the U.S., and that probably has also resulted in lower crawfish prices. Warm weather has helped the crawfish crop, he said. Usually the peak of production is in March and April, he said. “This year, we are approaching the peak 2-3 weeks earlier.” But he said fields that were flooded in August for more than a few days have taken longer to produce a respectable crop because of bad water quality and predator fish. “Those are the exceptions I’m hearing.” He said more and more crawfish is being shipped out-of-state. “But we still have a lot of crawfish available locally.” Ray McClain, LSU AgCenter crawfish researcher, said the abundance of crawfish has led buyers to stop buying earlier in the year than usual. “It was unheard of for buyers to shut their fishermen off in February but it’s happened this year.” McClain said there are encouraging signs for the market. He said more small towns in surrounding states even have crawfish stands. And the big shipments from China are no longer being made that was being sold in groceries at low prices, McClain said. In addition, Scandinavian buyers are sourcing crawfish and they have returned to the U.S. to find big crawfish. McClain said a good rule of thumb is that a pond should be producing crawfish by the time oak trees, but not live oaks, begin to bud. “If you’re not, you definitely have an off crop.” He said the warm winter has resulted in more small crawfish. But he said it’s not a good practice to throw small crawfish back with the expectation that they will grow to a more profitable size. He said it’s not surprising to hear that ponds subject to backwater flooding in August have been slow to produce. He agreed that more crawfish ponds are being fished. “I think a lot more people are fishing,” he said. “Either more people, or people are fishing more.” Story by Sam Irwin, January 2017 Rodney Simoneaux of Assumption Parish is surveying a wet field on the north side of Highway 38. Even though it’s late November, he’s hoping it will dry up enough to plant sugarcane.
The tract was filled with spoil from a summer Bayou Lafourche dredging project. It’s part of the plan to send more water down the bayou for coastal restoration, Rodney said. It was too wet for Rodney to plant in the summer and he was holding out hope that he might get a chance to plant it in December. He’s not sure. Back in 1982 Rodney wasn’t quite sure if he was going to be a sugarcane farmer. His father and uncle were sugarcane farmers. His maternal and paternal grandparents were dairymen with a bit of sugarcane on the side. It seemed like the farming life was pre-ordained for him. Young Rodney, however, was having fun. He was living the carefree college life and studying agronomy at Louisiana State University where he was an associate to Dr. Laren Golden and Dr. Ray Ricou and working alongside Dr. Kenneth Gravois, who was Dr. Golden’s assistant. "I got my degree and interviewed for a job with Halliburton,” Rodney said. "My professor said to take the job if they offered me a good salary.” Halliburton did offer him a good job, but Rodney had other things on his mind. He took a job maintaining the LSU golf course. Was Rodney too caught up in ivory tower life? It was touch and go, he admits, but ultimately there was a method to his madness. "I had taken a turf management class and was cutting grass at the golf course,” Rodney said. "I was kind of aimless. I didn’t want to give up that college life.” Rodney has a certain twinkle in his eye. On the surface he seems to be a bit mischievous and folks down Bayou Lafourche would not have been surprised if Rodney managed to live out his life cultivating turf and driving golf carts at English Turn. Then Rodney got a phone call from back home. "Daddy called and said, ‘Are you interested in coming back to the farm?’” Rodney said. "I said yes.” Rodney worked in the laboratory at Glenwood Co-Op Sugar Mill and for his father, U.B. Simoneaux, for three years until the severe freeze of 1989. Even though the freeze was devastating, he never looked back. Rodney’s son, Stephen, 30, is now farming alongside his father. He’s a lot like his dad – cheerful and always smiling. "Stephen, like me, never indicated he was interested in farming,” Rodney said. Rodney manages 1,000 acres while Stephen runs another 500. Rodney is very active with the Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation and works with LSU AgCenter to host an annual sugarcane field day in Napoleonville. But he and his wife, Michele, are probably best known at the present as the parents of three daughters, two who have been selected as Louisiana Farm Bureau queens and Sugarcane Festival queens. "My oldest daughter, Sarah Elizabeth was a Washington D.C. Mardi Gras princess,” Rodney said. "Mary Claire was Assumption Parish’s first state Farm Bureau queen. She also won the Sugarcane Festival queen’s crown. And then Rebecca followed in her footsteps. She also won Farm Bureau and the Sugarcane Festival queen contest.” How did that happen? "We go to the Farm Bureau convention in New Orleans every year,” Rodney explained. "All the kids would take over the hotel every year. It was better than Disneyworld for them. "On the pageant night, my girls would go and sit right in front of stage and took it all in. When they were young girls we never once thought they’d have an aspiration to participate in the contest. Then they were in four pageants and they won four times. They sat there and watched and aspired. They wanted to be Farm Bureau queens. They worked out here on the farm and did what they had to do to win and they never lost.” There’s always a certain amount of adversity in anyone’s life and Rodney has experienced a share. He lost part of a finger to a sugarcane harvester. "You can always tell the cutters from the loaders,” he joked. "The cutters all have an appendage missing.” A more serious calamity came in 2000 when he was struck by Guillain-Barrésyndrome, a disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). "I was aching all over and thought I had the flu,” Rodney said. "I kept on working but it got to where I was just in pain. He ended up in the hospital for 69 days and then several more months in rehab re-training his body to do the basics like sitting and walking. Fortunately, his body responded. He overcame the disease and he happy to be alive and lucky to be a farmer. "With 10 weeks in the hospital and eight months of rehab, I was not able to work,” Rodney said. "My father had to come out of retirement to run the farm. He and my three brothers, along with Just about every farmer in the parish got the crop planted and harvested. "It was extremely humbling to experience so much selflessness from my fellow farmers. If the cliché that a man’s wealth is measured by the friends he has is true, then I am the gold standard.” Rodney feels lucky to be a farmer. "When people ask me why I chose farming as my occupation, I tell them there are easier ways to make a living, but there is none that are better,” Rodney said."Every morning I wake up, get dressed, and walk across the street to my parent’s house for breakfast. After visiting with mom and pop and reading the newspaper, I walk to the tractor shed with a smile on my face. "I had three older brothers and I wanted to be like them. One of my favorite memories was being out in the field with my big brothers. We’d get called in for dinner and they’d always give me a head start. I would take off running for the door but they’d chase me and somehow I would end up always being the last one in.” Family and farming. It’s the gold standard. |
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