- Ralph B. Bilson, Sr. Interview,
Highlights of the interview of Ralph B. Bilson, Sr. by Tom Isern on Oct. 28, 1981.
“I went to Kansas State College and I studied Animal Husbandry. I got out of school in 1925 and I got married in February of 1926. My father-in-law bought a ranch east of Eureka when I was getting married, it was called the Hoover Ranch, and we ran that for one year. My father-in-law and I were partners. He furnished the money and brains, and I did the work. We got along fine and he was really good to me. Harry Hoover, who was in the cattle business also, owned a ranch called the White Ranch, about 20 miles northwest of Eureka.
In 1926, times got tough for Hoover, and my fatherin- law bought the White Ranch from him. We did not like it here, so we moved to the White Ranch and have owned it ever since. We had five sections up there: 150 acres is cropland and the rest is bluestem. I started with 20 head of cows which I bought from my dad. We have about 300 now. We raised mostly sorghum when we first went up there and we built three silos up there. We were up there until 1931 when we moved down here. We bought these sections down here and my brother-in-law took the ranch on up there.
He was the instigator of buying this down here. He wanted to get married and he wanted the ranch up there. My uncle, Elwood Marshall, had passed and they had to sell this land for estate money, so my father-in-law bought it.
We have been down here in the river bottoms since 1931. There is about 250 acres of cropland down here. My brother-in-law passed away in 1936. The family ran the whole thing until the estate was settled and we inherited the White Ranch.
Chinch bugs were a problem back then and we still have them. They were sure hard on the sorghum. 1936 was a bad year. We were down here in 1936 and my father-in-law and I hauled water every day for 136 days. We had some land over east of Sallyards, maybe a couple of sections, and the pond went dry. He and I hauled water in a Chevy truck to those cattle. We also hauled water to the north end of the White Ranch from the river down here. We had a good river down here, so we did not have to haul down here.
“To kill the chinch bugs, we had a tar/creosote barrier. We put creosote in a trench, and every now and then, we dug a hole in the trench and put cyanide crystals in the hole and the bugs would drop into the hole and die. We could buy the cyanide at the store. We would make the trench with a plow and throw the dirt towards the sorghum. It worked pretty well. You had the furrow made and when you saw the bugs move, then you put the creosote in the furrow. The last few years, we have had a lot of trouble with grasshoppers down here. We used a lot of spray last summer. We had a power sprayer, which holds 200 gallons, so you can spray a lot of area.
“Back in 1936 when we hauled water, the cows just stayed in the pasture as there was no place to go. We shipped a lot of the steers out early. We kept the old cows. It was pretty tough going, I will tell you. In 1937 and 1938 we had some pretty good rains and the pastures came back pretty good. Last year, our pastures were awful dry right through here. The grass has come back here.
The bluestem will take a lot of punishment. During the dry years we get broom weed, just like now. We use to spray some pastures, but we have not sprayed for, I guess, 10 years. Some fellows mowed it. Broom weed will come and go. We also can have bindweed in the fields, but not in the pastures. Johnson grass is our biggest problem here now. This year we planted corn and put herbicide on it, but it did not rain for three weeks and we did not get a very good crop of corn, but the Johnson grass came up and it was a mess.
“Years ago, we had black leg which was a cattle disease, but now we vaccinate for it. Every fall we have a bunch of vaccines. Black leg was a real problem when I was a kid. You could feel the air bubbles under the skin. We had more trouble with the calves than the older cows.
There might be a few calves you missed and did not vaccinate. We have never had to borrow any money and we have had our own cattle. We have a calf, and we may make money or lose money on him, but he is all ours. So far, we have been able to hang on, but we are not getting rich. A boy who wanted to start out on his own could not do it and accomplish anything the way finances and prices are today. I have a grandson who wants to farm, and without my help, he could not do it. He works hard. Back in the 1930s we bought a fourth of a section southwest of here and gave $12.50 an acre for it. It was pastureland and was not very good. I think today I could sell a lot of pastureland for $300 an acre. This cropland would be about $1,000 an acre. The Jackson boys bought some land that joins us up northwest and I understood they gave $325 an acre.
I remember one time my father bought a carload of steers and fed them out, but they sure did not do us any good. He bought them high and sold them too cheap. Back in the 1930s we farmed the Green Cattle Company and the family owned it and we would go down into Chautauqua County and buy cattle and feed them out. Sometimes we made money and other times we just made enough to pay for feed and we dissolved that cattle company. Now we raise our own. This last summer we grazed 300 head of steers up there. We do not have enough cows to graze the Otis Creek pasture, that’s where W-7 watershed is at, so this last summer I leased it out and put 300 steers in there. Willis Brown owned part of those steers and had an interest in them and we took them up there and grazed them. I made $60 a head. They weighed 500 pounds when they went up there and gained 300 pounds. Growing up, we had Hereford cattle and always have. We had Hereford bulls too. The last few years we have crossed them with Angus and like them.
“I belong to the Greenwood County Cattlemen’s Association, Kansas Livestock Association and National Association. I also belong to Farm Bureau and have been president a few times. I have also been president of the Greenwood County Cattlemen’s Association and on the Board of Directors of the Kansas Livestock Association and on the Range Commission.
I helped organize water district #1, which was twenty years ago, and since that time, we have built 28 structures in this district.
The pride and joy is W-7, where Eureka gets all of its water. Half of it lies up on our land, The White Ranch.
The boys and I worked awful hard to get that built. The city owns 51% and the district owns 49%.
Eureka gets all of its water out of it as well as District #2. I put a lot of work in it because I believe in it. All of our land is under the soil conservation plan. Merle Teter, W.I. Boone and some of the other fellows up here who were on the extension board got it going and I think there are only three of us left, the rest have passed on.
"I got my first tractor about 1928 when we got the White Ranch. I bought a second-hand Ford and have had them ever since. It was that little conventional tractor, with a two-bottom plow. We used it to plow, disc and run a wood saw. We did not keep it long before we moved it down here. Then we went to buying Farmall and had three or four, then the dealer quit. Then this friend bought a John Deere and we have had John Deere tractors ever since, until we bought this White tractor this summer. You could buy those tractors for $600 to $700 a piece back then. This one we just bought cost $32,000. The first corn picker I bought was a John Deere one-row picker. It sat on the side of the tractor and that was in the 1930s. Then we went to a two-row that we pulled.
Then we went to a two-row mounted that we put on a Farmall tractor. Then we bought an Allis Chalmers combine. We tried an International drag combine and we did not like that one.
“We started irrigating about twenty years ago. I got one of the early water permits and I was lucky I did. They are hard to come by now and we have used it ever since. We have pumped out of the pool down by the bridge for thirty days, night and day. We pumped about 800 gallons a minute and have never run out of water.
We never have used flood irrigation, it has always been sprinkler irrigation. We now use a traveling gun and have used that now for three or four years.
It moves along in the field.
We have 120 acres we can irrigate. That includes alfalfa, corn and sorghum. It runs into work and there are no other people in the valley that irrigate here, but they could. It costs money and I’m beginning to wonder about it.
“Propane costs 50 cents per gallon. It burns 6 gallons an hour for 18 hours a day. It pays for us because we have got to have this corn and sorghum out here for our cowherd. Whether it rains or not, we need the feed and it might be different if it was just a cash crop. Last summer (1980), we had 80 acres of corn and we irrigated it. All the water it needed. When it got to tassel, we were irrigating it and it got so darn hot, it killed it and we did not get anything. My cousin in western Kansas, Charles Brookover, told me that would happen. The year before that, which was 1979, we had 100-bushel corn, which was a good crop for this country. It would not be up around Topeka, but it is down here in this country.”
