Chambers County Rice Farmers

 It was Ira Jett Hankamer (1904-1992), Daniel Hankamer’s father, who continued the family farming and ranching passing on this tradition to Daniel by the 1960’s. For a brief period during the 1950’s Jett was a CASE tractor dealer and furnished Dan with one of the first rubber tire tractors to plow the soil. Dad said, “This was the first tractor I learned to drive, it had a manual lever to gradually engage the clutch to get the tractor going, and when it did all you could do was hold on to the steering wheel because there was no power steering”.
By the mid 1970’s Dan also farmed several hundred acres of soybeans to rotate land from constant water flushing of nutrients from the soil when growing rice. It was the decaying soybean stalks that put nitrogen back into the soil once the land was plowed before spring planting of rice again, plus soybeans were somewhat profitable. Once the rice was harvested and put in storage to dry, it was later sold through the Winnie Rice Farmer’s Co-op on the open market. Once it was sold it was trucked in the winter months to the port of Houston or Beaumont.  

Possibly Dewey Hankamer on left

   In the picture above Clara Stagg Jenkins and William Dodds Jenkins are seated in center and surrounded by their 13 children.  Third from the left in top row is Dr. Harry Jenkins.  I believe the gentleman on the far right is W. E. 'Tan' Jenkins.  Both William Dodds and Clara Stagg Jenkins are buried in the Mount Calvary Cemetery in Eunice, Louisiana.
William Etienne ‘Tan’ Jenkins, born 13 July 1888, to William Dodds Jenkins and Clara Stagg in Acadia Parish, Louisiana married Mary Lydia Guidry in Church Point, Louisiana, 30 December 1908. Mary Lydia was born in Church Point, Louisiana, 24 September 1889 to Joseph Terville Guidry and Marie Coralie Savoy. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Jenkins had advanced educations. They went to about the third or fourth grade in the country schools in Acadia parish, La. Mr. Jenkins went to work on his father’s farm when he was 14. He was 19 before he realized it was a handicap not to be able to read, so he went to a special school for a few months to learn that art. 

 Twelve children were born to Tan and Mary Lydia in Eunice, Louisiana: Wallace Cedric, Clara Cecilia, Anita, Bennett Meigs, Jenora Ellen, Mary Virginia, Eldera, June, Walter Terville, Lynn Nell, Jerry Alden, and William Etienne.
They saw to it that all of their children went to school just as long as they wanted to. Four of their 12 daughters and sons have college degrees, seven of them have been to college, and all, except one, completed high school.William left Louisiana in search of good rice-farming land after his father lost the family land due to the great Depression. They settled first in Rosedale, Texas, near Beaumont, but in the mid-30s tragedy forced them to relocate.  
“Twice I’ve been flat broke,” W. E. said in a 1954 interview with Sara Marsteller, “so broke that one time my children were standing in the street in the only clothes they had, and they had no place to spend the night,” he says. That was back in the middle 1930s when the family home in Rosedale burned to the ground. “It was through the goodness of L. P. Tullos, president of the First National Bank of Beaumont, who loaned me $1000 on little or no security, that I was able to start back,” Mr. Jenkins said. It was also his inability to find a house to rent in Beaumont and Rosedale that was the deciding factor in his moving his family to Devers where he really began to fight his way back the last time.W. E., or “Tan” as he was called, was actually headed to the Katy prairie, after the tragic house fire forced them to move, when his truck happened to break down in Devers. He was told by the locals that they were selling rice land in the area. The H&TC Railroad had purchased much of the land in the area and when the depression hit, they started liquidating their assets. W. E. Sr. unloaded horses from the trailer he was pulling, saddled up and headed out to survey the land. He was pleased with what he found and decided to buy a section, and since the original purchase, the Jenkins Farm has grown considerably in size. They bought a home in Devers and also built a two-story house on the farm where they spent much of their time.  

  “When we moved to Texas, I began rice farming,” Mr. Jenkins told Enterprise Farm and Ranch Editor, Monk Vance in 1953. “That was all I had ever done. Been doing it for 45 years.” He rented land at Seabreeze for three years to produce rice before buying 1000 acres of land and leased more in order to plant 1500 acres of rice. “We have our own land, cattle, rice dryer, irrigation system, and produce almost all of our own food.” Mr. Jenkins told Monk Vance in that 1953 interview. “The only thing we go out for is manufactured parts and new equipment,” he added. “These boys are partners in the place, and we have no bosses. Any of them can raise rice crop or work cattle.”  

 Family co-operation is the key to the Jenkins’ family success. Tan said of his children, “They get up at daylight and stay late at the farm when there’s work to be done, and the only complaint about it all is “just didn’t get enough done.” All the success they enjoyed did not come easy. It took years of hard work and cooperation even though Mr. Jenkins denied that they ever really worked. “We don’t call it work,” Mr. Jenkins said in explaining his wonderful philosophy of life. “Work is doing something you don’t want to do.” There are farmers, mechanics, and architects in the Jenkins family. Everywhere on the farm are pieces of equipment that the combined genius of the boys and their father perfected. As an example of their resourcefulness, the father pointed out to Sarah Marsteller in 1954, a massive truck. “The motor cost $400, and it cost another $700 to buy the material to make the body, but it would cost $5000 to buy that model off a farm implement dealer,” he said. “When we need a building, we all pitch in and build it. When we need a piece of equipment, we design and make it. We save a lot of money that way.”  

 The Jenkins family built the five-bedroom two-story farmhouse, located on Jenkins Road with their own hands. 

June Jenkins Hiegal said the era of the binder machine, the rice shocks, the thresher, the hay stacks was about to come to a close in the rice industry in the late 1930s.  W. E. Jenkins, Sr., his loyal wife Lydia, his five sons, and his seven daughters were on the cutting edge of change that thrust the rice farming into a new era.  Rice dryers, combines, bank-out carts, trucks carrying loose rice, planting and fertilizing by air are all part of the scene and have been since the early 40s.  W. E. or "Tan" was already in his early 50s when he conceived the idea of getting the rice out of the field when it was ready ripe and into storage bins.  He had heard of this being done with other grains and so envisioned a similar operation in Chambers County.  He was a great novice architect and so he set about to design a dryer which would use air.  Combines were bought and enough storage included to store his crop.  In the following years farmers began to bring their crops in for drying and a price of 50 cents a barrel was set and that price was not changed for 30 years.  During this time he bought a dragline and proceeded to build a levee around 160 acres to "save" water during the wet winter months to ensure a water supply during the growing summer months.  These inovations worked so well that others watched, saw success, copied, and eventually the whole rice industry changed its ways.

Jenora Jenkins Long said, "W. E. built the first rice dryer in Chambers County in the fall of 1940 and it was completed in time for the 1941 rice crops.  The equipment for the dryer was bought at a junk yard, it was an old cotton gin.  There wasn't any electricity, so it was run by a Case tractor.  The lumber used was bought for $15 a thousand from a sawmill north of Hankamer owned by Mr. Harlow.  The total cost of lumber was approximately $20,000.  There was no blueprints made -- W. E. Jenkins Sr. drew them out on a piece of paper.  It has been in continuous use since 1941, " she said.  "Thru the war years it dried most of the rice in mid-Chambers County and shipped to Devers and loaded on the railroad."

They constructed the rice dryer themselves as well, and Granddaughter, Alexis states it is still used and operated by Sue’s sons and grandson today. Much of the material used to build the dryer was purchased from the World War II surplus store.W. E. said, “Building the dryer and storage has been the best single move I made in developing the farm to produce greater income. In the 1954 interview with Sarah Marsteller, Tan said, “Our rice dryer on the Jenkins farm is the only one I know of in this entire section that can be operated by one man. We designed and built it so I could run it alone at night after work in the field was done,” he explained. In 1954, 42,000 sacks of rice were dried in the building.  Mr. Jenkins also added that, to his knowledge, he built the first privately owned and operated rice dryer in that area of the rice belt. He not only stored rice from his farm in his dryer, but the crops of surrounding farmers as well.  

 Since the fateful day in the 1930s when they started from “scratch” with an even dozen children – seven girls and five boys – to feed and educate, the Jenkins family have gone a long way together. After three years of renting farmland in Stowell when he first arrived in Chambers County, W. E. Jenkins added 1000 acres and leased more in order to plant 1500 acres of rice.
In 1953, Mr. Jenkins was planning to harvest a rice crop from approximately 5000 acres, four miles east of Hankamer, estimated to be worth $300,000, the profits of which he and his sons shared equally.  

 By Carroll Headley ~ Editorial Director ~ Rice Farming ~ 1994

John, Jay, and Jerold Jenkins are the sons of Jerry Jenkins, a former Farmer of the Year in Texas. Avid young rice farmers themselves and brothers who still remember begging their father to let them drive a tractor, then when he put them on one, begging to get off.“Mom and Dad went out of town one time and left us with our Uncle Billy, the youngest of twelve children,” John recalls. “It was in the wintertime—a cold clear day with a north wind—and we were working ground with some old Case tractors. Uncle Billy had put us in three separate fields so we wouldn’t run over each other. When Dad called in to see how the ground working was going, we had all three quit. My field was too cold, Jay’s field was too big, and Jerold’s was too windy. Uncle Billy said we had managed to find something wrong with all three of them.”Today, though, these three guys are in charge of 1,235 acres of rice so they know they have to stay on those tractors.

AERIAL SEED AND HARROW

In the fall, the Jenkins try to get all of their ground work done—land planning and pulling levees. In the spring, until about three years ago, they would clear water plant, then drain the field to allow the rice seed to take hold in the soil. “However, this particular approach left the seed on top of the ground, and that’s when the blackbirds went to work,” John explains.“We knew we had to get the rice covered somehow. One way is to put water on the fields, mud them up, then drop the seed in so when the silt falls, it covers the rice before the water is drained. Blackbirds will pick off the top of the ground, but they don’t particularly like to dig in the mud.”Unfortunately, another problem the Jenkins brothers had to deal with that6 goes along with water seeding is the water midge, or the larvae of a fly. This minute pest breeds in the borrow ditches alongside both sides of the levee. It likes to attack the germinating seed near the emerging root. “The water midge won’t attack the seed if the seed is under the ground,” John explains.Since the Jenkins get the majority of their ground work done in the fall, they decided to replace water planting with another method to help alleviate their blackbird and water midge problems. The significance of their having done most of the ground work in the fall is that this other method requires more time in the spring that they might not have if they had not already completed most of the soil preparation.“We fly our seed and base fertilizer on dry, then harrow the rice in with two 28-foot harrows,” says John. “This puts the seed about an inch deep into the soil. You would think the rice would be uneven, but it’s not. It’s uniform across the field. With this equipment, we can plant about 35o acres a day.”The Jenkins plant all Gulfmont since it has a better second-cropping potential than Lemont.

INCREASING YIELDS

“Our yields went up after 1989 because we changed some of the ways we do things such as harrowing the rice in to take care of the blackbird problem. We knocked down all of the old levees that had been there for about 30 years, then resurveyed them. We didn’t laser plane the fields at that time, but we did us a laser to mark where the new levees would be. This made a lot of difference.“However, the problem we had in a lot of places was that where we knocked down the old levees that had been there so long, it was like concrete with a ditch on either side. So, we had a high spot with two low spots. We had to go in with a land plane to get the fields more level, then resurvey the levees.“Two major keys to increasing our yields over the past five years have been putting the seed under the ground and resurveying our levees,” John concludes. Jay Jenkins gives credit to their pre-plant fertilizer, too. “The pre-plant fertilizer goes in with the rice when we plant. One airplane flies on the rice seed, the second plane comes right behind it with the fertilizer, and we’ve got the tractor and harrow sitting in the field ready to go.”

HERBICIDE PROGRAM

In addition to re-thinking their planting strategy, the Jenkins brothers also altered their weed control program.“Last year we did something different with our herbicides,” says John. “First we planted our rice and flushed the field. Then we drained the field and while the field was still wet, we put down three pints of Bolero before the rice emerged. Then before the ground got too dry, we flushed the field again. That’s when the rice came up. Bolero’s specialty is sprangletop, but it helps control red rice, too.”Jerold adds, “Bolero pretty well covers the spectrum of weeds that we have trouble with here on the farm. We’re trying to lower our herbicide cost so we’ll have some money left in the budget in case we have to put out a fungicide. Sometimes we have a bad problem with sheath blight.”John describes another herbicide scenario: “On one field, we used a Bolero plus Facet tank mix (two pints of Bolero and 6/10 of a pound of Facet.) The rice was planted on April 28, which is late for us. This combination is a little more expensive than just applying Bolero by itself, but it’s got the residual, so you don’t have to come back again. This tank mix controlled a terrible indigo and sesbania problem we had. So, we saved on the chemical and the air service.”

SUPPLEMENTAL INCOME

t goes without saying that farmers are frustrated by the general public referring to government subsidy payments as welfare for farmers. “We can’t survive without the subsidy,” says John. “There’s no doubt about that. If we could, I wouldn’t want a nickel from Uncle Sam. But to keep our family operation going, we rely on the subsidy and sometimes even that’s not enough, depending on what the weather does. Because of this situation, we have to supplement our income whenever we can.”“For example, a few years ago Jay and I looked around at our equipment and decided to put it to use when we got through with our own place. We started doing some custom ground work for people, and it has worked out real well. We also bought an 18-wheel truck in ’92 so when we catch up with our rice, we can haul rough rice to the different dryers in the fall.”“I can’t think of another farmer around here that doesn’t have some kind of sideline to supplement his income. Some raise crawfish, some have cattle, some guys bought an airplane and opened an air service. You name it and people are doing it,” he says.“I am doing something outside of agriculture, but it works around my farming schedule real well,” adds Jerold. “I work for a guy who has trucks that haul waste materials away from plants. He has a couple of daytime drivers, then another rice farmer and I are his relief crew at night. For a lot of us, it’s not like we’re getting a government subsidy, then sitting on the couch watching TV in our off hours.” 

 Cattle production on the Jenkins farm is similar to most other rice and cattle farms in the Gulf coast area. They use registered Brahman bulls and grade cows to produce calves for the beef market. They also have two registered Hereford bulls. Much of the pasture for cattle is on land that is laying-out between rice crops and not in use as a reservoir, but the Jenkins’ are doing quite a bit of pasture improvement for permanent pastures that will not be used for rice later. Here are about 400 acres that have dallis grass, fescue, and other grasses and clovers.“We do plant rye grass on rice land that is laying out to produce winter grazing for the cattle,” Mr. Jenkins added. 

   In the 1964 photo above are John Jenkins and Piper, step-daughter of Wallace Jenkins.
June 1959 News Article
Two months and more before rice harvest time, combines are working on Chambers County farms these days, "making hay" in more ways than one as they harvest a new cash crop for this area.The big machines are rolling across acres of clover, gathering in the round seed pods from which will be extracted the valuable end product of this harvest season, Louisiana S-1 clover seed. 

Separated from dirt, weed, and grass seeds, and other impurities by a complicated cleaning process, the clover seed will be worth up to $1 per pound to the grower in a market where the demand far exceeds the supply.

From a small beginning just a few years ago, clover seed production has spurted to a real money-crop status in Chambers County this year, and this area has turned into a major production center for the crop in the South, almost overnight.

From about 20,000 acres in the Chambers-Liberty County area of the Trinity Bay Soil Conservation District, landowners will harvest upward of 250,000 pounds of clover seed this season, if ideal harvest conditions of the past few weeks continue. That's the forecast of H. T. Michael, work unit conservationist of the Soil Conservation District, who has been in close touch with the development of the clover-sown pastures and clover seed production in the district in recent years.

In the span of seven or eight years, conservationist Michael and others associated with the SCD land improvement program in the Trinity Bay district have seen clover pastures spread from a small, few acres here and there beginning, to today's broad coverage which Mr. Michael describes this way: "It's possible to walk 20 miles through this district and be walking cross a clover pasture all the way."

These pasture acres of clover were developed because clover has almost everything in its favor as a foundation for economical land use, soil building, and as a profitable grazing cover for pasture acreage.

Landowners turned to it more and more as rice acreage cuts began to cut into planting of the basic farm crop in this coastal area. With a minimum of care and expense, the clover stand on pasture land returned better than ever each year, furnishing good grazing, hay production, and at the same time, conditioning rice land soils for rice production in fields subject to rotation.

The sideline of seed production, an unexpected dividend from an already profitable land use, did not become apparent to many farmers in this area until recently, but a number of them have made up for lost time this year.