The Moors of Hankamer

In Lafayette, LA., Calvin met and married Lavinia Abshier and together they had ten children. Joseph Asa, their youngest surviving son was the great-grandfather of Halley Ray Moor, Sr. Calvin was a farmer and taught his sons to share in the responsibility of farming, teaching them how to farm and care for livestock. He also took time to teach them how to fish and hunt and as soon as they became old enough to handle a gun, they were taught marksmanship.  

“After I graduated, I went to college for about a year and a half and decided that wasn’t for me. I came home and Sheila Pennington and I got married and I started working for Dad the next year, in ‘72. He had two old combines and Pluggy always got the good tractor and the good horse, and I got the crappy ones,” laughed Halley. “Back when Pluggy worked for Grandpa and Euell he would ride his horse to Grandpa’s place. When they were harvesting there was a group of men and they had to ride across that ridge right there by where you live, the ridge ran down past where our camp is. They rode the wagons past our camp house down to where Grandpa farmed south of where the interstate is now on Eddie Ferguson’s land, that was White land at the time. I remember the stories about them being out there shocking rice until right at dark. Then they’d have to load up on the wagon, take the wagon back across the ridge to Grandpas, go out to the barn and catch their horses, saddle’em up, ride back to Hankamer and be back at daylight in the morning. That was a tough life for those guys, it was a tough life, it really was” Halley softly replied. 

“I’ve farmed in Liberty County and Chambers County, and a little bit in Jefferson County. I leased a lot of land and finally bought some land in 1998, I believe, from the Boyt boys, Mark and Jeb. When I started farming, I was farming probably 350 acres. I remember back in the day we’d shovel to cut the overflow where the water goes from one levee to the next. We’d have someone holding the rice sacks and put the dirt in the sacks. A lot of shoveling and no four-wheelers back in the day. 

Photo Courtesy of Dylan Reeser

“Back prior to aerial planting, the farmers had to drill to plant their rice. When the airplanes came into play they started flooding the fields to get them ready, then they’d throw their seed rice in sacks off in the canals. They’d let it soak for a couple of days then we kids would go in the canals and retrieve the sacks. We’d swim underneath them and catch them and load them on trucks, then they would put them in the barn overnight and let them sprout. The water was pink and purple from all the chemicals. It was fun for us at the time, but I’m surprised none of us have developed cancer or grown a third arm or something, it’s not too late I guess,” laughed Halley. “They would take the sprouted seed and drop it in the field and turn the water off. The birds, blackbirds primarily, were probably a problem when they first started, but they came out with a chemical called Aldrin that they treated the seed rice with. I never saw the birds eating the rice because they sensed it was on there. Aldrin got outlawed and then when you dropped your seed it landed on top of the ground and the blackbirds would eat it up. When you see all that money you’ve spent getting your fields ready and the blackbirds eating it up, it’s really sickening. So, the farmers started trying to put the seed back in the ground, like they did in the old days. Some farmers would muddy their fields and drop the seed from airplanes, and it would kind of bury in the mud, not all of it but most of it, and the birds wouldn’t eat it like they did when it was on top of the ground. But that’s just a mess, when you work in the mud it’s never good. It’s hard on the equipment and the people, so most guys go back to drilling. Most all farmers now drill their rice unless it’s organic. The organic boys they’ll water up and will plant late in the summer when maybe the birds aren’t as bad. After the rice is planted the best way to get it up is to have good rain because it doesn’t put too much water on it. Rice can’t take too much water for a long period of time when it’s in the ground ‘cause it will rot. 

“Herbicides have changed over the years with different formulations. They are put out by airplanes and the more water you can put out per gallon per acre the better coverage you get. We have chemicals now that we put out half an ounce to an acre, a half an ounce to an acre in ten gallons of water. That’s not much, but it works, it’s amazing,” Halley said with emphasis, but chuckled when he added. “but it costs a thousand dollars a gallon! It’s a lot easier to kill grasses now than it was back in the day. Back then, if you didn’t get it when it was young you had to fight it harder and harder and that made it more expensive. The chemicals have changed a lot, you don’t put near as much. When you used to go to the store to pick up chemicals you had to take a trailer, nowadays you can haul it in the back of your pickup truck. You use lesser amounts but it’s more potent. Red rice is one of the biggest field problems, although it’s not as bad as it was back in the day. It’s a wild rice that’s probably been around since the days of the Indians. It grows really tall and bushes out real big and has a tendency when it’s really thick to just take your crop down when the wind comes in. It will choke out the good rice and the mills, the buyers, will dock you for the red rice. I’d have to say the biggest problem for the rice industry is the price. Rice has not kept up pricewise with the cost of living. It’s still basically the same as it was back when my grandpa and dad were farming. As a matter of fact, back in 1973 rice got up to over $20 a barrel and considering the ratio of production and profit they made as much then as they do today. It was right after the war and we were pretty much the big boys in the rice industry. The other countries grew rice, but they were not mechanized like we were. After the Vietnam War the world began to grow up on us, now Thailand, Vietnam, India, they’re some of our biggest competitors on the world market. We’re having to produce to compete with them and our cost of living is so much different than theirs. That’s probably the reason the price hasn’t gone up. It’s just an expensive crop to grow, I’ve heard farmers say right now it can range from $800-$1,200 an acre in and out. When you’re farming a thousand acres that’s a lot of money. Our yields have increased with the varieties A & M and Louisiana have come up with, but, unfortunately the prices haven’t increased enough to keep it going. We all know the government has subsidies, but my thought pattern on that is, the government knows we have to have farmers around to farm and without the subsidies it would be over with, it would have been over with a long time ago. There’s somebody up there smart enough to know that. If we get to where we have to import food like we do oil, we’re in trouble.   

“One of the toughest things about farming is the financial burden; you’re borrowing a lot of money and almost everything depends on the weather. I remember in 1983 when Hurricane Alicia came through, I was farming 300 and some odd acres on Patty Boyt’s land south of the headquarters. We started cutting about two or three days prior to the storm coming. I had my old 95’s out there cutting and couldn’t cut a whole lot. We cut as much as we could, I think we cut about 100 acres. I had some friends helping me cut and lightning was popping everywhere. How we got out of there without getting hurt, I don’t know. I had better than 200 acres left to cut and Alicia came in, which was a big wind and rain event. I’ll never forget the next time I saw my crop, which was probably about ten days later. I couldn’t get in there before then because all the bayous and everything was flooded. The remainder of my crop was underwater, and that’s not good for it because the seed sprouts and the second growth starts growing up. That’s when Jerry Jenkins sent me some combines to help get the crop out, I’ll never forget it,” he said wistfully. “He sent the old 95’s with crew and everything. We harvested the crop and got, I think, 17 barrels to the acre, about half of what we would normally get, which is not good, but we got through it. The rice we have now is short in stature, which has helped the rice industry a lot. The drought has certainly hurt the rice industry this year cutting many yields down to about 15-16 barrels per acre. That’s bad when you consider all the money that has been spent on production such as seed, fungicide, herbicide, and aerial costs.” 

“Junior bought a Walkabout Mother Bin for his rice farming, and I thought that was the dumbest thing he ever bought on the farm. But when it came time to harvest, and they set it up in the field I realized it was the smartest thing he ever bought. We were running six or seven combines and we needed those carts to get back to the combines to keep them going. The carts came on one side of it and the trucks on the other. The trucks are able to load from the mother bin at the same time the carts are dumping. The auger at the mother bin was so big the cart could dump in 3 or 4 minutes and be back in the field. Prior to the mother bin, they’d have to pull up to the trucks and slowly dribble the rice out, always having to pull up to finish dumping. We hardly ever wait on carts now, where in prior times we might have waited 3 or 4 hours on them. I think the mother bin will hold three truckloads of rice. I don’t know what it costs, but for someone farming a lot of acreage it is a very helpful tool,” assessed Halley. 

Halley Ray Moor, Jr.’s sons are already working side-by-side with their dad in the rice fields along with Junior’s cousin, Dylan Reeser, son of Nicki Moor Staner. With the tenacious grit and love for the land ingrained in the Moor family, I have no doubt they will continue to carry on the family legacy and succeed at everything they put their hand to. 

“The other day, I got to thinking,” said Halley, Sr. “and I’ve thought about this a lot, back when I was young there were a lot of farmers, in Anahuac, Winnie area, Barbers Hill, Liberty, Devers, but over time those “old timers”, most of them were “old timers,” he laughed, “they’re all gone, nobody replaced them. A lot of it was because of economics, the cost of farming; rice is the most expensive crop to grow. So, what’s happened, in the last twenty years especially, we’ve lost acreage in Chambers County, but not to the extent you would think. I think it’s because with equipment getting more expensive and living expenses increasing, and the whole nine yards, farmers, including myself, had to farm more acreage to make a decent profit, so they acquired more land. I would say the average rice farmer in Chambers County now farms probably somewhere between 800-900 acres if not 1,000. There’s some that farm several thousand. 

“It’s kind of sad,” said Halley as he continued to reminisce of bygone days, “I remember the old guys, my dad and I used to help them cut rice, everybody helped everybody back in the day. There was Joe Bonnin Harvey Wolff, and Harvey Haynes, I can’t name them all, there were a lot of farmers, I mean a lot of them,” he said emphatically. “Nowadays you can probably count them on one hand, especially around the Anahuac area. There’s just not that many breathing bodies, the other breathing bodies have taken on more acreage to help try and keep it going. When I was a kid and we’d drive around Chambers County you could hardly find a field without rice in it, nowadays you almost have to hunt for it. It’s kind of sad. The bird population, the ducks and the geese, they’ve migrated to other areas or short-stopped in Arkansas because they don’t have the feeding here they had back in the day. People might see a flock of geese today and think that’s a lot of geese, but that’s nothing like it was back in the day. The Jenkins’ area was well known for having tens of thousands of geese, but they don’t come around anymore. It’s hard on the hunters, the geese have become almost non-existent, but they’re going to go where the food is at” he proclaimed sadly. 

“We’re going to have farmers, I think the government knows that we have to have farmers to feed the country. Rice is the biggest staple crop in the world, unfortunately, a lot of the world that buys our crop are the poor nations and they don’t have the money, that’s why the government has to step in. There will always be some farmers, but if I was going to guess I think at some point in time,” surmised Halley, “you’re going to see a corporation come in like Uncle Ben’s used to be, somebody like that who comes in and hires farmers to grow so much rice, maybe with an incentive to produce a certain quality and amount. I see that kinda’ coming, because the individual farmers are just having a tough time, they really are. In our area too it could go by the wayside, because the American Rice Growers Association has shut down the rice drying facility and I’ve been told this is the last year Beaumont Rice Mill is going to operate, so your rice dryers around here are going to be slim to none The LNVA who control the canals don’t really want the farmers, but they inherited them because that’s what the canals were started for. They make their money by shipping it over to the industrial oil facilities, we’re a nuisance, basically. A lot of things going by the wayside,” Halley noted sadly.

 Pray for our farmers, pray for the perfect weather to make and harvest a plentiful crop, pray for a healthy economic system, pray for endurance as they rise before dawn and usually work long past dusk. Pray for their safety as they work in inclement weather or drive down country roads. Pray for encouragement when they sink to their knees and weep in their fields destroyed by circumstances out of their control. Pray for their families who often work side by side with them either in the fields or feeding their crews. Our farmers are an invaluable necessity in our world, along with praying for them . . . THANK them!