Bill Baldwin
Skull Valley - Yavapai County
Inducted in 2012
Bill Baldwin was born in 1933 on the Crystal Springs, Mississippi, family farm. Two sisters preceded him into the world, and another sister and a brother followed several years later. Bill grew up doing everything a typical farm boy would, helping with the chores and attending the local school. After graduating high school, he attended Copiah-Lincoln Junior College in central Mississippi. At the time, he was more interested in chemistry than becoming a farmer. This is where he met the love of his life, Bonita Herrington. They were married in June 1952. 1954 was a momentous year in Bill's life. He left his native Mississippi and headed west to California.
"I came out with friends," he said. "I caught a ride from Mississippi to Blythe, California, and had a job lined up before I left. A friend of my father's was a partner in a cotton gin in Blythe. He was developing some land in Cibola Valley.”
Bill's journey was not without its challenges. His first job was as a rod man with a team of surveyors, earning a modest $2 an hour. When he transitioned to a farm job, his pay dropped to $1.25 an hour. However, he was given a small house in which to live, and there was no limit on the hours he could work. He put in as many as 4,000 a year, demonstrating his resilience and determination in the face of adversity. The alkaline soil in the Cibola Valley taught Bill a lot about converting marginal land into soil producing good crops.
Out of work in 1957, he was offered a chance to buy a hay baler for custom baling. He purchased with the help of the local dealer and began to build his own business. "I harvested custom hay in Blythe and Cibola Valley in that area." In 1964, Bill and Bonita packed up their family. They moved across the river to the Parker Valley in Arizona, settling on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, where a new farming area was being developed. "I decided to pick land that didn't have such a high price tag," he recalls. "I could get it for a longer term." Through hard work and his previous experience working with land with a high quantity of alkali and salt, he could lease parcels that were poor in quality and turn them into rich, productive fields. It was a challenging journey, but his perseverance and innovative farming techniques paid off, yielding alfalfa hay that was of such high-quality many dairymen sought it out for their herds. "I owe a lot of my success to the fact that I could lease this land from the Indian tribe. This is all tribal land in Parker Valley," he said. Eventually, Bill's focus shifted from custom farming to working on his land, except for a few custom jobs he continued to handle. "We worked our way up to approximately two thousand acres of alfalfa," he said. Bill used several techniques to improve his land, including deep ripping, slip plowing, dead flat leveling, and leaching. It was a slow process, but one Bill found satisfying and ultimately paid great dividends.
Bill's generosity extended beyond his farm. Always ready to share what he had learned, many farmhands who worked for him eventually owned successful farming operations, a testament to his commitment to sharing his knowledge and helping others succeed. Baldwin Farms grew a variety of crops, but Bill's primary focus remained constant—growing the finest alfalfa hay he could produce. His dedication to this goal is awe-inspiring.
In the 1990s, he became associated with the La Paz County branch of the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension Service's field project. His work developed the Baldwin Select alfalfa variety, a high-yielding and protein-rich variety that revolutionized alfalfa farming. *We had these fields in for three years and did a perfect test on all the cargo and these seeds that we had worked up ourselves, how it yielded and made a better protein and the other varieties." He said the test crops were planted in different sequences across the field. "We were cautious to keep track of the exact number of bales and percentages of mixed bales in each plot, and we weighed most of those bales." He said, "We had a stretch 28 feet wide in several sequences across a 40-acre field. It wasn't just one strip. It was several strips of each variety."
Michael D. Rethwisch, the Crops Educator and Unit Leader for the University of Nebraska, was the U of A's Extension Agent for the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation when the tests were conducted. He collaborated with Bill on the field project. He said, "It should be known that very few growers want to be involved with field length replicated strip plot alfalfa forage experimentation on non-bedded fields, especially those that involve commercial harvesting equipment." One of the reasons is the careful driving techniques that must be employed during planting and harvesting to avoid contamination of the experimental plots. Rothwisch said, "Although this may not seem as challenging today, it should be remembered that these trials were conducted in the 1990s before Global Positioning System (GPS) technology was readily available."
In 1999, Bill retired, and he and Bonita moved to Skull Valley, where he continues to garden, have a small orchard, and raise a few cows. They chose Skull Valley for a couple of reasons. "Many people living in the lower country start looking for a cooler place to spend some time. I was looking for a place to fly into, so we looked for something close to this little airstrip right by the store." Bill had a Cessna.
“A man who believes in doing things on his own,” Bill says, "I'm proud I never drew any government subsidy check. I was able to survive without that. I mean to tell you, that's worth mentioning."
Bill and Bonita have four children: two daughters, two sons, ten grandchildren, and eleven great-grandchildren.
