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J. G. Boswell: The King of California

Posted by: Maven on April 13, 2009 at 6:14 am

From the Sacramento Bee:

He was the biggest farmer in America and the last of California’s great land barons, a man who had drained an inland sea and made the rivers run backward as he carved out the richest cotton patch in the world.

How his family had brought their Southern plantation to a corner of the West in the 1920s was a story of astonishing vision and will and the flouting of nature, not to mention a parade of hubris. Yet J.G. Boswell was quite determined to die without ever telling it. “You don’t get it, do you?” he snarled at me during a phone call in 1999 to discuss the idea of a book about him. “I don’t give a damn about my legacy.”

He died April 3 at the age of 86, still clutching the notion that he could take a $10 million cotton subsidy check from Uncle Sam and remain a rugged individualist, that he could amass a 200,000-acre farm in the middle of California and “own” 15 percent of the Kings River, and still righteously bristle at the suggestion that he had built an “empire.”

“What are you, a tax collector? I abhor the word ‘empire.’ It’s a word for nations, for civilizations. Why do you have to get into this whole damn ‘big’ thing anyway?”

Boswell had built the most highly industrialized cotton operation in the world and grew more irrigated wheat, safflower and seed alfalfa than any single farmer in the country. Now he was aiming to do the same with onions and tomatoes. Though he would deny it, he dictated California water politics in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. I was drawn to his story for the simple reason that he had created the quintessential “factory in the field,” from laser-leveled earth to gleaming gins to labs that minted new varieties of seeds – all of it rising out of the bottom of what was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi.

Read more from the Sacramento Bee by clicking here.

April 13, 2009 · Filed Under Agriculture

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