My hometown of Levelland, Texas, and the surrounding communities is home to a group of about a dozen farmers who each graduated from high school within a year or two of one other. My dad’s class, 1974, boasts almost half of them. Most started farming around the same time, in the years immediately following graduation. Some, like Dad, are still going strong — bruised by the current farm economy, sure, but otherwise going strong. Others, such as Sam Stanley, have gone home to be with the Lord. 

Sam passed away just before Thanksgiving and only a few weeks after finishing his 50th and final cotton harvest. Sam was a great farmer, and he would’ve been great regardless of where he farmed. Knowing he was gearing up to plant his last crop, I went to see Sam back in April, and the conversation we had over that hour and a half in his shop was one I’ll remember for a long time. 

Sam was born into a large farm family mostly operating northwest of Levelland, near the Pettit community. While I was growing up, “the Stanleys” could refer to any member of the extended family, which included brothers, cousins and uncles. Although few of them farmed together, most were good farmers. As in all small communities and all businesses, there were detractors, but the respect for Sam throughout was exceptional — matched but certainly not topped. 

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You can read about him in a number of articles across ag media, where a common theme is working smarter and harder. Sam, along with his cousin and longtime farming partner Len, was an innovator throughout his career, deploying the latest technology in virtually every aspect of his operations, from seed genetics and equipment to irrigation. He also was the first farmer in the county to adopt 30-50 row spacing, a now common planting pattern that moves plants 16% closer to 80-inch subsurface drip tape as compared with 40-inch row spacing, which was historically used almost exclusively across west Texas. 

Sam also had an ever-positive outlook on the macro picture of agriculture, even when the short-term outlook was bleak. One thing that struck me during our conversation back in April was his opinion of the situation with groundwater availability unfolding over the southern Ogallala Aquifer. After acknowledging that a real problem does exist, he said he believed technology would find a way to overcome it in ways we can’t foresee today. 

At first, I wasn’t sure I agreed. After all, we have radically less water today than we did even last year in many cases, and that trend only seems to be accelerating. Then, I realized I was missing his bigger point. He wasn’t narrowly arguing that technology will make tomorrow look like today. Rather, he was rhetorically painting with a much broader brush and saying a combination of new technology, stronger markets, different policy, alternative crop mixes, innovative capital structures and the ingenuity of the American farmer will help us find a profitable way forward. Although there may be short-term pain, his argument continued, Southwestern agriculture didn’t come all this way only to collapse now.

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In other words, we’ve overcome before, and we’ll overcome again. 

Although it remains to be seen what the exact path forward looks like and whether Sam’s sentiment will ring true in five, 10, 15 or even 20 years, I wholeheartedly agree that the American farmer will forge ahead one way or another. And we’ll do it on the foundation laid by Sam Stanley, Don Duff and so many others of their generation who worked — and are still working — smarter and harder to give all of us a better way forward.