Jess had a tremendous gift of foresight. He could see that if you took certain steps today,. It would lead to certain outcomes tomorrow. We was not a man of many words, but his words when he did say something were well thought out and were truly words of wisdom. In addition to being a visionary man he was not afraid to take chances. He had been a small-scale valley farmer most of his life, when in 1961 he took a chance and leased some irrigated potato land on the Rexburg Bench from Bert Webster, which we only farmed for two years.
WE now had equipment for that many acres, so Jess started looking for ground and when he couldn’t find any to rent he went off on his own. Bill Summers owned the ground above Lee’s house and it was summer fallowed which meant that every year you had to leave half of it unfarmed. Bill was a jewel of a person and told Jess he could. Jess was risking everything he had by investing in a pump and sprinkler system. If we didn’t harvest a crop of spuds we would lose everything. Jess had confidence he could do it. He designed his own system and due to his previous record he didn’t have any trouble borrowing the money.
We couldn’t afford to drill a well so we pumped out of the canal and ran a pipe line up the hill. He put in an irrigation pump in the canal just by Lee’s house. Had mainline installed up the hill and planted half the acreage to spuds while Mr. Summers farmed half of it in grain. It was a miserable spring. It rained and rained and we cut all the seed by hand by May 31 we had our 180 acres planted. The heavier valley ground could not be planted until the middle of June.
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