Black Gold: A Conversation with Sam Cobb
January 10, 2024
Click here to view the original post and listen to audio clips from the conversation.
Sapelo Square: You refer to yourself as an agronomist. What is the difference between an agronomist and an agriculturist?
Cobb: Well, an agriculturist is a general term. An agronomist is a very specific person with very specific training. Agronomy is a branch of agriculture that deals with crop production and soil management. And that’s what a lot of people do, not take the time to study. They just want to be a farmer, put the stuff in the ground and grow it and harvest it. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the ground. There’s a lot of stuff happening above the ground. Every major farm in the world, every one, that is serious about anything has an agronomist on staff. The agronomist is the guy that tells them the health of the plant, when to plant, when to fertilize, when to water, when to spray, when the harvest is coming. The agronomist is everything. That’s the main person. That’s the farmer of the farm, is the agronomist. So when I say on my website that I’m an agronomist, the people who know agronomy say “whoa, this guy knows what he’s talking about”.
Sapelo Square: You’ve loved soil from as far back as you can remember, where did that love come from? Do you have family members who were farmers and you saw that or was it something that was simply innate within you?
Cobb: You know, you will be the first to learn this, because I just learned it within the last three to four days. I was talking to a cousin of mine who grew up in Mississippi and Louisiana and she was around my grandfather. And she just learned, she’s like 80 years old, she just learned about my website and she said, “I went to your website cuz and when I saw those John Deere tractors I said”, she got so excited, “our grandfather LOVED John Deere. He was a John Deere man.” I said, you gotta be kidding me. [Mr. Cobb’s cousin went on to state] “Our grandfather, he was a big farmer. He had all kind of people working for him.”…I just learned that within the past few days. I said, that’s where it has to be, it’s in the genes. Wow.
Actually both sides of my family. My dad’s parents, they were pretty good sized farmers, bout 250 acres. And on my mother’s side, they’re like a couple of hundred acres. But farming tends to skip generations. The kids always say, “This is terrible. I’m not doing this. You work too hard dad.” So they’ll take off. The grandkids will say, “Grandpa, this is the greatest”, because the grandkids don’t have to work too hard. You know, they’re little, they get driven around everywhere and just think it’s wonderful.
Sapelo Square: It’s been quite a journey to get to where you are. What did that journey look like?
Cobb: Well, it has been a journey. It’s been a nonstop journey. I refused to give up on my dream. I just would not let it go. From when I was three or four years old, seeing that tractor across the street from the house, standing on the porch. I just wanted to be where that tractor was headed. Within a year or two I was across the street watching the tractor. Within another year I was on the fender of the tractor. And I rode the fender of a tractor for nearly 10 years, and in that 10 years, that’s where I learned everything about farming. You know, soil tillage, planting, cultivation, irrigation, harvesting, crop protection, insecticides…harvest, then tearing the crop down, then starting it over again. Eventually I asked a friend, the farmer that I was working for in Fresno, well a guy I had been hanging around. I said, Melvin, I want to be a farmer like you. What do I do? He said, “Sam, when you get to high school join this organization called the Future Farmers of America and they will help you out. And then get to college, go study agriculture.” I said, thank you. I’m gonna do all of that. And that was the path I went on. I got to high school, I signed up for the Future Farmers of America and they said, “You have a pretty good voice. We gonna teach you how to be a public speaker.” I said, I have a good voice? “Yes, that’s a good speaking voice.” So they did. They trained me to be a public speaker. And I became a champion public speaker. I’m still using my public speaking skills. I’m using them right now. (Mr. Cobb laughs) Then I went on to Fresno State and the Bank of America paid my way through college, if I would agree to become an Ag teacher which I did not want to do. But my Ag instructor, my advisor, grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me in the face and said, “Sam. Sam, take their money, go to school, get the degree, and then go do what you want to do with your life.” I said, oh, I can do that? He said, “Yes, you can do that.” So I said, okay, I’ll take their money.
And I did. I took their money, went to school, got the degree in Agricultural Education and along the way picked up a degree in agronomy. I liked the agronomy more than the agricultural education, but they’re both fantastic degrees and have helped me immensely. Agronomy taught me about soil and crop management. And then agricultural education, I learned about animal science, plant science, ag mechanics, keeping all the equipment going, motors and all the tools, and the last part which was ag economics. I learned the economics of agriculture. We had to do a farm budget and plan in school. Wow. You know I learned that stuff and as a result of doing those farm management plans in school, we even had to do the taxes. Tax returns in college. I still do my own taxes to this very day. Even for my farm, as complicated as it has become, I still do my own taxes.
Sapelo: You had what you called a detour for a little while, working for the Department of Agriculture?
Cobb: Yep. I got detoured. Right out of college I started farming immediately and that was rough. Within five years, my wife and I, we were bankrupt. We lost everything. So, had to move back in with my mother to regroup for a year or two. I eventually started working, accepted a job for the United States Department of Agriculture, which I did not want to do. But my wife and I we laid out all the pros and cons. Put a line down in the middle of a piece of paper. Put all the pros for working for a private industry, then the pros for working for the government. And the ones for the government kept getting longer and longer and longer. I said, forget it, I’ll go work for these people and I’ll come back to farming after I retire. So, we set a plan in motion to work for the USDA and I just kept looking for land wherever I got transferred to. I said, Is this the place? No. Is this the place? No, not yet. Is this the place? This is the place. I wound up in the Coachella Valley, Indio Palm Springs area. And working with date farmers and slowly fell in love with dates. I said, these guys are just like cotton farmers or corn farmers or bean farmers. They’re concerned about their crops just as much. They want healthy plants, healthy soil and they want to make as much money as they can if they grow a good crop. Shucks. That’s what farming is! I said, I’ll just be a date farmer. I’m in Rome, I may as well do as the Romans are doing. So I started growing dates and then I declared that I am going to be the best date farmer there can be because I actually know what I’m doing. And that has been my goal, to grow the best dates possible.
Read Full TranscriptSapelo: You have a short video on your YouTube channel about flood irrigation as a way to grow dates. What are the various ways to grow dates and why do you believe flood irrigation is the best method?
Cobb: There are four methods of irrigation. There is flood or basin, that’s the most basic at the bottom. Then there’s furrow irrigation, where you run water down rows, like cotton or corn. The other method of irrigation is sprinklers. You put a line of sprinklers out there and you sprinkle the fields. And then the other method is drip irrigation. Now, they all are good, but for dates, there’s a lot of dates on drip irrigation. I prefer flood irrigation because the water is also used to decompose the branches after we compost it or pit them, then we can turn them into compost. If you remember in that video of me doing that soil pit, I mention, look at all this compost slowly becoming available to the plant, that’s just years of plant material just built up on the ground and it slowly becomes available to the plant after about five to seven years. The system just stays in a circular motion. New stuff going down, old stuff going out. Man, you have some good cycle in place. I like flood because date palms are deep rooted plants. Like, very deep rooted. My backhoe goes down 20 feet into the ground and I was still hitting roots at 20 feet. It’s hard to move water deep into the soil more than about maybe five feet, six feet, before the plant has grabbed it and it’s used up. So, I like flood because it allows us to stack the water in there and get it down deep. Six feet, seven feet. And thing about it, dates they will continue to capture the water even though it’s that deep. Now, if you use flood irrigation and you’re growing say lettuce or some beans or even corn, well corn is kind of deep rooted, but some shallow rooted plant, what’ll happen is when you put all that water in there and if there’s fertilizer in the water, it will begin to wash the fertilizer beyond the root system and it’s gone. And people be crying. You’ll be very upset. That’s not a good system for shallow rooted plants, but dates are deep, very deep rooted plants. When you wash the fertilizer down deeper, it just starts developing roots down deeper to capture the fertilizer that happens to show up out of nowhere seemingly. Push deeper, the tree reacts. For me it’s good, and also it was an easy system to get set up. I’m slowly in the process of moving it to a more advanced system, but it’ll be ten or fifteen years by the time we go through it all. We’ll start out with the flood, and then we’ll put pipelines, we started out with gated pipe above the ground, on the ground and now we’re putting pipe below the ground. And then the pipe that’s below the ground, someday we will either switch it to an automatic system or a drip irrigation system or we’ll also have a dual system, meaning we can have drip irrigation or flood irrigation. Flood irrigation is great for decomposing trash. All the places that have only drip irrigation, they have residue problems. Or they have residue buildup…We’re getting assistance from the USDA to help us do that project. It’s an irrigation water management project.
Sapelo Square: There’s about four to five hundred gallons [of water] pumping out of the well a minute?
Cobb: Yes. That’s right. Every minute. That’s a high powered well.
Sapelo Square: How often do you have to irrigate?
Cobb: The soil is like a bank. Like a checkbook. Once you fill it up the trees slowly withdraws the water. So you see all that flood irrigating? We don’t have to come back and do that for another three or four weeks. I think once a month that we actually do that. It’s not everyday that we’re running water on the field. Can’t afford it, at least not in the same spot.
Sapelo Square: What have been some of your challenges in producing dates or in farming overall? Whether in the past or potential hindrances in the future? For instance, potential roadblocks related to climate change. Has that been a challenge for you?
Cobb: Not with me. Believe it or not, dates are the perfect crop to combat climate change. They can take up to 130 or 40 degrees on the top end and they can take down to 17 degrees on the low end and everywhere in between. So, I’m not really concerned from the climate change angle with date palms. But some of the other challenges is actually, having enough water for the size farm that I have, so we’re always innovating, trying to improve upon our irrigation system to manage the water better. Plant health and soil health, those are challenges. Trying to grow the best quality of date possible. So, it’s always these nutrition concerns. A lot of people don’t, well I don’t know if they know or maybe they do, a lot of the health benefits that are in a date a lot of people don’t know that those things have to be put in there by the farmer because they dissipate. Once the date leaves the tree it takes all of those minerals or a lot of those minerals with it. So part of being a date farmer is making sure that the adequate mineral level is within the soil for the tree to pull back up. Nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, you know, all of those type things we have to watch. That’s all part of growing good dates. Because I keep an eye on that stuff, people say “mmm these dates are so good”. That’s a healthy date. That’s the agronomist in me that makes that happen.
Sapelo Square: What are some of the benefits of dates?
Cobb: They have some protein…calcium, iron, zinc, magnesium, copper, sulfur, not a whole lot of sulfur but all of those things are in there. You can live on dates for months if you had to. You can live on dates and water for months. I guess some people have had to, but currently they would rather not.
Sapelo Square: You have two locations. How large are your orchards?
Cobb: Yep, I have two locations. One is three acres, and the three acres blew up into, so far, 60 acres. Another 60 acres out at Blythe. I have 20 acres that are in production. I have another 40 acres that are on line, they’re about 10 years away from production. It takes a date palm 21 years to mature. The tree is seven years old when we actually put it into the ground. And I put it in the ground and then it has to go another 14 years after those seven. It has to be in the ground another 14 years before it’s mature. So I have about another 10 years. So I’ll be an old man. So my grandkids will have to take on this challenge. Or else I’m gonna have to sell the farm. I don’t want to do that. I want them to put a big picture of me on the wall and say “my grandpa got all of this going.”
Sapelo Square: What do you have to do to get it to the point where you are able to put it in the ground?
Cobb: When we started the orchard, we bought 100 off shoots from another farmer, or suckers, that grew on the side of the tree. So you cut those off and you plant them, you get another tree. An exact carbon copy clone. And in seven years, a little sucker will produce seven more trees. Seven good ones. They might produce 10, they might produce 12, might produce 15, but there will be seven that are A NUMBER ONE and when you put them in the ground they will take off. So basically, in seven years, if you manage your operation correctly, you can be seven times larger than you are today, if you choose to hang on to all those trees. And that’s what we did. We bought 100 off shoots and in seven years we planted another 700 off shoots at the new farm that we purchased over the seven years while we were waiting. And so it went from three acres to 20 acres. And then, seven years after that we went from 20 acres to 60 acres.
Sapelo Square: As far as you are aware, you are the only Black date farmer in the United States?
Cobb: Yes, as far as you are aware too. (Mr. Cobb laughs) I’ve been looking for another one for 20 years and I haven’t found him. Then the other guys they just broke down and said, “Sam, you’re the only one…I’ve been in this business for 40 years. I know who’s here.” The other guys, they control all the packing. Their grandfathers got it set up for them and they’re in business. I want to get my grandsons set up. I’m the closest one for anyone else to be able to do this. There’s not another Black person that I know of that can do what I’m about to do, which is, I’m about to build my own processing facility. That’s what I’m planning for right now. I’m gonna process dates in the United States.
Sapelo Square: You have your own variety…
Cobb: Yep, my own variety. Black Gold. Only available at Sam Cobb Farms. Developed by Mr. Cobb himself.
Sapelo: Do you consider yourself a religious or spiritual man?
Cobb: Absolutely. 100 percent. If it wasn’t for God, I could do nothing. Without Him I would fail. Without Him, my life would be rugged. Like a ship without a sail. That’s a song, but there’s truth to that song.
Sapelo Square: I am aware that you and your wife hold the farm down. Are there any other family members currently involved with the farm?
Cobb: Yeah. My nephew helps me. My daughter helps me…My son. They’re out there, I expect them to come into the fold within the next 10 years. Like within the next five. I told them when I planted the trees they were like 18, 20 years old and I just kept asking them if someone would help me…Teenagers, early 20’s. I said, don’t worry about it. Go live your life. Go do what you gonna do. Life happens in your 20’s. Lots going on. In your 30’s, things are busy. I will see you when you are, hmmm, 40. (Mr. Cobb laughs) When you turn 40 the light will come on in your head. Everything will suddenly become clear. And you’ll say, Oh my God. Look what dad has done. We can do something with this. (Mr. Cobb laughs) My son is 37, my daughter is 39. So it’s about to happen.
Sapelo Square: Well, it seems like you’re a man of patience, or you would have to be in order to grow dates because they take so long to produce…
Cobb: Yep. Hey, I didn’t know they took 21 years. They told me they take seven years after you plant them. And after seven years I had barely any dates. Then another seven years went by and then I started getting dates. And then I said, man, they told me seven years, this is 14. And wait, they had to grow the shoot before they could sell it to me and that was another 7 years. These trees take 21 years. (Mr. Cobb laughs) If they would have told me that I would’ve threw my hands up…But I’ve lived through it now. That’s why there aren’t very many date farmers. That right there.
Sapelo Square: That’s an amazing journey that you’ve had. Looking back on it, it seems as though that “detour” is what was supposed to happen because the timeframe allowed you to start your farm within the timeframe that dates need to grow.
Cobb: Yes. I had a job. (Mr. Cobb laughs) I had a job working for the USDA. You’re right, it worked out perfect. In fact, they moved me to the place where I was going to be. The USDA paid for my transfers every time I moved.
Sapelo Square: And that was after your prayer right?
Cobb: Oh yeah, that was after my prayer. I prayed in 1987 and my prayers were answered that summer. The answer came to me by the end of the summer. The answer was, Sam, you have to control the marketing of your own stuff. That’s the way you’re going to make money, is to sell it yourself. And I backed up and I looked around to all the places that I try to sell my produce to. To this packing house to that packing house and this facility. In the meantime all those facilities have their own little farm on the side and they were just buying my stuff in addition. They weren’t buying it, they were selling it for me and then charging me a commission. Immediately taking 12 to15 percent off of whatever I sell. And then I come in with stuff in addition to what they have and then they can offer a bargain on my stuff. Buy this over here at $20 we’ll let you have this over here $8. They say, you got a deal! But the $8 stuff was mine. I don’t know what the numbers is, I’m not accusing anybody, but I’m just saying they had that leverage if they wanted to use it…I found out I have to sell my own stuff. That’s why I want my own processing facility and that’s why we do online sales, we do sales at the farm on the weekend, we do farm tours, we also grow at the commodity level. We grow big and sell to the packer, but in the meantime, I take as many dates as I want to sell and hold them back and clean them up for my customers. One day I’m gonna write the book and tell the story and it’s gonna be all good.
Below you will find the YouTube video about the roots of date palm trees referred to during the conversation.
