Bobbie & John Kerr
Buckeye - Maricopa County
Inducted in 2010
A football game brought John and Bobbie Kerr together, but agriculture has been the glue that kept them strong. They come from different parts of the country and other backgrounds. To quote their son, Jerry, "John and Bobbie Kerr are truly ambassadors for agriculture and pioneers who helped shape today's farming and ranching in Arizona."
Bobbie's family arrived in Arizona first. Born in Texas, she came to Arizona by way of New Mexico at the age of five. "My dad came out to work on the Bartlett Dam when they were building it," she said. "We lived in a tent and didn't feel bad about it because everybody else lived there at the time on the job site." She went to school right at the construction site. When the project was completed, the family moved to Octave. The little mining community near Wickenburg is now a ghost town. "My dad worked in the mine there. I went to school right there, too." Bobbie remembers that the schoolhouse was built near the opening into the mine. "Finally, my mother had a new baby and brought it home to this tent." That's when the family decided it was time to move into Wickenburg. Bobbie went to Wickenburg's cherished little red schoolhouse for a time, but being in construction meant the family moved around quite a bit. She had attended 27 different schools by the time she graduated high school.
John was born on a dairy farm in Michigan in 1944. His family migrated west when his father went to work for a plant in Goodyear. Being used to the outdoor life, John remembers that his father wasn't happy being off the farm. "We bought a 40-acre farm in Laveen, and we had a bunch of cows there." The family ran a dairy in Laveen for several years before buying a dairy farm in Tempe. That's where they lived when John met an attractive high school cheerleader, Bobbie.
It was Thanksgiving time, and they were students at Phoenix Tech. "I was a cheerleader, and he was a student," Bobbie recalls. "West High had just been built, and it was their first year of having a football game. Phoenix Tech and West High had a game in the morning. Of course, Phoenix Tech won. West High had yet to have a chance to get set or anything for their games. We were so jubilant and happy. John drove up, and all the cheerleaders were in a group together. He wanted to know if we wanted a ride to the bus station or wherever we went. So he took us there. I was in the back. I hooped out, and he said, "Bobbie, I go by your house. Would you like a ride home? I said yes, so I hopped in the front this time, and we drove about a block or two, and he said, "Where do you live?" That afternoon, they attended a football game between North High and Phoenix Union, and the rest, as they say, is history.
When the couple married, they rented John's family farm for a few years, bought it from his father, and added purebred sheep (Cheviots, Dorsets, and Shropshires) to their inventory. "My grandfather raised certain breeds, Cheviots, and there was a little bunch up by New River that was advertised, so Bobbie and I went up there, and we bought those sheep," John said. "That got us started, and when we became friends with a judge from North Dakota State, that got me started judging." We'd go to different fairs and judge the sheep," he said.
In the early 1950s, the Kerrs belonged to a group of milk producers called the Arizona Dairy League. By the late 1950s, the members were moving to organize a marketing cooperative. The result was the formation of the United Dairymen of Arizona. John was instrumental in creating the cooperative and was the first board of directors member. He served on the board for 36 years.
As their three sons grew and became involved in 4-H, John and Bobbie volunteered as livestock superintendents at the Maricopa County 4-H show. They served as the superintendents of the seep and dairy goat departments at the Arizona State Fair. John's reputation as a sheep judge made him sought after by many stock shows across the United States. He judged shows from Louisville to Alaska.
John and Bobbie started a lamb auction at their farm for 4-H youth in the early 1970s. In 1970, they moved to Buckeye, where they established a more extensive dairy but continued holding the lamb auction for several years.
The Kerrs brought many innovations to the competitive livestock exhibits at the State Fair, including one that drew national attention. "We were at a fair in California, and they had a pink pig that they had decided to use as a mascot or a crowd-pleaser, "Bobbie said. The pig was a real attention-getter, so Bobbie thought they could do something like that at the Arizona State Fair. Doing a takeoff of the saying when pigs fly, the little oinker was supposed to arrive on an airplane. "They played that up." The next year, one of the cows John and Bobbie planned to take to the Arizona State Fair for display was white. It gave Bobbie an idea. "I said, you know we could dye her purple and go with that poem of the purple cow." The purple cow hit the local press and was soon picked up by Good Morning America. "They called the State Fair Ground." When someone ran to get her and Bobbie returned to the phone, she remembered she was hyperventilating. "They interview me on the phone. So many people would recite that poem when they would get to that display."
The family moved the dairy operation from Tempe to Buckeye in 1974 when they traded their 20-acre farm in the east valley for 80 acres in Buckeye. They not only moved their family and the cows, but they packed up the house they had built in 1950 with the help of John's father and took that along, too. "Our oldest son, Jerry, was in the Air Force," Bobbie remembers. "Our middle son was waiting to graduate from Tempe High School. He graduated one day, and we moved the next. Of course, we had been building out here and coming out here every weekend. John would work out here, and then on the weekends, the boys would come out, and they learned to weld and build corrals and do things like that." John would go back and forth because they were also still milking cows at the Tempe dairy. "The last load was our electric skillet, I think, and just the things we had to keep the boys fed for a few days until he graduated."
The farm at Buckeye could have had better soil. It was white with alkali and would not produce a decent crop. "I had a neighbor that farmed around her, and he had started getting a byproduct of mines in Superior…sulfuric acid. He came around and wanted to rent the farm for…I think for 25/75. I would get 25 percent of the income, and he'd get the rest. We agreed to that because we were busy building and didn't have time to farm. He put that in the irrigation water and let it drip, and it would foam just like baking soda on a battery. Within two years, he was making three bales of cotton." John added, "You can't haul it (sulfuric acid" down the road now unless you are licensed, so they don't use it anymore.
"We had 80 cows when we moved here and, of course, went immediately in debt for a bunch more because you had to have more cows than 80. We needed more cows to pay for the corrals and everything by the time we arrived. We milked right about 500 when we retired," Bobbie said. John injected. "The average dairy's dairy is about a thousand. In the 1950s, when we married and started dairying, there were 700 dairies in Maricopa County. Buckeye had little dairy farms on almost every corner. Today, it's less than a hundred.
In 1975, Bobbie played an essential role as a founding board member and commissioner in establishing the present non-profit Maricopa County Fair, giving the 4H and FFA young people an event to participate in. In 1989, the couple retired from the State Fair, but in a few years, John returned as the first livestock director, and Bobbie started the Farm Tour program.
The Kerr family's sheep and dairy history is now in its 5th generation. "All of our boys have had their diaries and then, for one reason or another, have gone into something else," Bobbie said. "Our middle son is still dairying. He has a dairy out in Palo Verde. He rents our corrals now and has about several hundred heifers here in our place. We don't milk anything here. They bring them here as soon as they're weaned, then they stay, get bred here, and when they're ready to have their babies, they take them down to his dairy."
