Steven Bales, Sr.
Steven Bales, Sr.
Buckeye - Maricopa
Inducted in 2008
By virtue of the alphabet but no less deserving of inclusion, Steve Bales Sr. was the first Hall of Fame inductee. The Bales/Beloat family story begins, as many stories will begin, with a migration to Arizona in the late 19th Century from the Midwest (Arkansas) and the establishment of a family enterprise that persists today.
Because of the ease of travel today, we forget what an arduous journey it was to Arizona. We also forget that Arizona, like its sister state, California, was viewed as a land of opportunity by many in the East and Midwest. We could claim it as the American “promised land.” This is the story of a man and his family who saw that “promise.”
Steve Bales Sr. brings to Arizona agriculture the best of two of Buckeye Valley’s pioneering families, the Bales and the Beloats, both of whom have left an indelible imprint on the area and on the farming/ranching industry.
The Beloat family came to Arizona in 1886 from Arkansas as part of a wagon train headed west. They planned to make their home in California but did not like it when they reached their destination, so they moved on to Peeples Valley, AZ. The mountain setting was beautiful but proved to be too cold, so they packed up again and headed down the hill to an area near the fledgling community of Buckeye on the Gila River.
“My Great Granddad, William R. “Bob” Beloat, homesteaded his first place in 1891 and his second homestead in 1901,” Steve said. Beloat chose the area along the Gila River for several reasons: good climate, year-round river water flow, and shallow groundwater.
The Buckeye Irrigation Company was in the process of being formed at that time. Bob Beloat helped build the Gila dike below its confluence with the Agua Fria and Salt rivers to divert water from the river for irrigation purposes. The dike worked well with a few exceptions. Constructed of sticks, Cottonwood logs, and mud, the diversion dike would wash out during heavy rains or spring runoff. They would be without irrigation water until the level at the dike went down enough for them to go in and rebuild it, allowing water to flow down the irrigation ditch again. “That canal system today is the same one that starts at Litchfield Road and goes to Palo Verde,” Steve said.
The Bales family arrived in the late 1920s. Like so many before and after him, grandfather Tom Bales suffered from arthritis. The winters in his home state of Idaho were more than he could handle, so he packed up his wife and five children and headed south to make his home in the warmer desert climate. He ran cattle from Parker East to the Harquahala Valley until a severe drought in the 1920s nearly put him out of business. With his cattle starving, he moved his operation to Litchfield Park, where he fed what was left of his herd on alfalfa. Later, the family moved to the Liberty community between Litchfield Park and Buckeye.
Born in Phoenix in 1940, Steve was raised in the two-story house on Perryville Road that his grandfather had built. The home was about a quarter mile from his current place. The children were lucky enough to have both sets of their grandparents nearby. His paternal grandparents lived just across Perryville Road from the young family, and his mother’s family lived just about three miles away on Beloat Road near the Gila River.
Steven started school at Liberty Elementary, but when he was six, his parents, Wallace and Alberta Beloat-Bales, moved into Buckeye. He transferred to Buckeye Elementary and later graduated from Buckeye High School. He tried a year at ASU but decided he would much rather be a farmer than a student, so he left and went to work for his dad on the family farm. He wanted steady work, and that’s exactly what he got, working long hours seven days a week. He credits that discipline with instilling in him a work ethic that he abides by today and has passed on to his sons and their children.
In 1958, Steve’s dad drilled the first well on their desert farm in Rainbow Valley. They put down two more wells but gave up active operation of the property several years ago when it became too expensive to work. “Our power was with large gas engines. We didn’t have electricity out there.” Steve remembers. When they started in 1958, ‘59, and ’60, it cost them $350 a month to run one of the big gas engines, but the costs continued to climb. The desert farm had escalated to $12,000 a month by their retirement. At the same time, the price of cotton went down because of competition from foreign markets such as China. Steve still runs a few of his horses and some cattle on the farm’s rainfall pastures.
In 1960, Steve married Barbara Sanders. The couple has two sons, Steve Jr., who has taken over the operation of the farms, and David, a landscape architect in Buckeye.
In 1990, Steve and Barbara leased the Boca Float Ranch #3 in Rio Rico. “We had 40,000 acres of deeded ground and nine irrigation wells, 1400 mother cows, and 95 bulls,” said Steve. “The first thing we had to do was reclaim the fields and plant pastures to graze the cattle year round. It was a good area to farm, and we had steady rainfall year-round.” Steve sold the cattle and lease in 2001 when the encroaching sub-divisions got too close; “the cows kept eating their flowers and shrubs,” he said with a laugh, and they returned to Buckeye to concentrate on the cattle and hay business.
The Bales’ properties are scattered around the Buckeye area. Steve points to the land and says, “Right here where I live is 160 acres, and towards the feedlot, we have 500 acres and some more on down the road, but we farm between 800 and 1000 acres that we own. My son Steven runs the farm now. I’m retired from it. He’s farming 1,500 acres. He bails hay on a lot of it. That’s his main crop now, alfalfa hay. Most of it is retail for horse people, cattle people, and one- and two-acre farmers with animals at home. They buy from him and also the dairies. The dairies are big buyers, too. They like the high-quality hay early in the year and late in the fall, and they’ll buy all that they can get.
Between bringing water in from the Salt River Project and buying effluent water from the City of Phoenix and the 35 irrigation wells the Buckeye Irrigation Company has sunk, the farm has always had an adequate water supply. Water is a problem in the Gila River Valley, but not in the same respect that it is elsewhere in the Valley. It is close to the surface, so approximately 12 of the 50 wells operated by Buckeye Irrigation Company are drainage wells. They are used to lower the water table to make farming the land easier and more viable.
Retirement to Steve Bales, Sr. doesn’t mean sitting back on his laurels and watching the sunset.
He is the president of the Buckeye Water Conservation Drainage District. He has fed lots that he leases out, raised registered Quarter Horses, continues to team rope, and is working on starting a gravel pit along the Gila River on Beloat Road.
Affiliations
Buckeye Irrigation Company – past director
Buckeye Water Conservation Range District- director/president
Arizona Stabilization Service – past president
Liberty Elementary School board – past director
FFA (high school – president)
