Faces of Our Farmers: Phil Bohl

Cattle, Cotton, Wheat, and a Five-Year Note

Phil Bohl has never lived more than two miles from where he grew up.

Born and raised in Chattanooga, Oklahoma. Farming now around Faxon, southwest of Lawton. He's the fourth generation of his family to work this corner of the state. His son makes five and his five grandkids make six.

Ask him why he continues the work the land, and the answer is short.

"Farming is in our blood."

The family operation runs about 5,000 acres. Sixty percent wheat, forty percent cotton, and 80 to 100 head of cattle.  He explains the two crops aren't an accident. Wheat and cotton spread the work across the calendar instead of stacking it all in one month. June is the crossover which means planting cotton with one hand, and cutting wheat with the other. Cotton harvest starts in late October and can run into January.

He strips his cotton rather than picks it. The equipment costs less, and on a dryland farm, every decision eventually comes back to what it costs.

Here's the math that governs his year. A bale of cotton is 500 pounds and brings around $350. An irrigated acre can produce 1,500 pounds. A dry acre makes about 500.

Bohl doesn't irrigate.

So on a good year, an acre gets him one bale. On a bad one, less. And whether it's a good year or a bad one isn't up to him.

"Weather runs in cycles," he says, "and we're in a dry cycle."

An early freeze can take a cotton crop. A late freeze can take the wheat. Live and die by the weather is not a figure of speech in Faxon.

Which is why he'll tell you plainly what keeps the doors open.

"If it wasn't for crop insurance, we wouldn't be in business. It's survival. Without it, we do not survive."

The cattle side has its own arithmetic right now. The national herd is the smallest it's been in generations, mostly because inputs cost what they cost. Bohl can sell a 500-pound calf today for one and a half times what an 800-pound calf brought him a few years ago.

He learned all of this the way most farmers do, by doing it year after year, trial and error. Innovation and intuition.

There are college courses that teach the business end of agriculture — his son and daughter both graduated from Oklahoma State, his son with an ag econ degree. Bohl jokes that went to the college of hard knocks.

"You remember your mistakes," he says.

His biggest one has a date on it. He bought a farm in 1980, right before the oil bust and the farm credit collapse took southwest Oklahoma apart. He came through it. Plenty of people didn't, and he can still name what that decade cost the men and families around him. The nineties were better and he says it hasn't been that bad since. Although an optimist at heart,  he still watches for the next one.

In the eighties,  he ran a custom wheat harvest for several years — crews coming down from up north to help cut Oklahoma wheat, then everybody working their way back north with the season. That kind of thing built a lot of the relationships he still has. Today he serves on the National Cotton Council.

Ask what worries him most about the future, and it isn't the weather. It's the cost of getting the work done. A new tractor can run $750,000. Fertilizer prices go where they want. Bohl buys used and keeps it running.

Ask what gives him hope, and he doesn't reach for anything complicated.

"Farmers are optimistic. You throw a seed in the ground in June and believe you're going to harvest something in October."

He's 68 years old. This year he bought a four-wheel-drive tractor on a five-year note. He figures he'll retire when it's paid off.

Nearly half of Oklahomans can't say whether the food they buy was grown here. A lot of it comes from places like Faxon. And from a man who's never moved two miles, who's kept the same ground in the same family for four generations, and who signed a five-year note at 68 because he still believes in October.

That's the promise behind Oklahoma All for Food.