By Doug Wood
I’m not one for change and this change is especially painful for me and my family.
In these pictures our new neighbor is prepping this field to plant pistachios this fall. I’ve met the new neighbors and I can already tell that it’s going to be a great new neighbor relationship with them too.
The down side is that the Sano Family that recently sold their entire Firebaugh ranch will no longer be our neighbors.
The Sanos have been our neighbor for the last 39 years and they have been nothing short of tremendous.
They’ve loaned (never rented) me equipment over the years at the drop of a hat with no questions asked.
They’ve sold me things that were in phenomenal condition and never asked anything close to the what they could’ve gotten for them from someone else and on one occasion I bought a 450 hp Amarillo gearhead for a deep well and then after the fact, they threw in a 12” galvanized heat-exchanger (that are very expensive) because it used to be on the same well as the gearhead.
One year my brother’s and my cotton was very late and we got caught with big rains and had a lot of acres still to go. Sano’s were about 1 day from finishing their cotton and Alan Sano asked me how much more we had to go.
When I told him he immediately went quiet on the phone because he knew with the older cotton picking equipment we had and the wet conditions we had to now deal with we wouldn’t be able to finish for at least 3 more weeks and there was more rain in the forecast.
About an hour later Alan called me back and asked if we would like for them to come help us pick and I immediately gave him a resounding YES.
He then proceeded to tell me that he and his head man Jesse Sanchez has just discussed coming over to help us and that they had decided that they were only going to charge us their “actual costs” of running their 6 row and 4 row John Deere’s and their module builders.
I pleaded that they charge what was the going rate at that time and he insisted upon only charging their costs and he gave me their price per acre. I was astonished at the number he gave me and called my brother and told him and we both had a good cry.
Then about 2 or 3 hours later Alan called me back and said they’d made a mistake in their calculations of their costs (I knew the number was too low) and proceeded to tell me they were going to knock an additional $10/acre off the price they’d given me.
Sano’s helped us get started in growing processing tomato in 1989. They did everything for us that year because we didn’t own a single piece of tomato equipment or even a single tool bar for 3-row 60 inch tomato beds. Again, they charged us the absolute minimum per acre amount for each and every pass across our field saving us a tremendous amount of money AGAIN.
I’ve copied them or as some call it “windshield farming” since day one!!!! I’ve gone in to their tool yard a hundred different occasions just to measure something and take photos so I could copy it.
Finally after 10 or 15 years of me being the follow- er rather than the leader Alan and Jesse had noticed a toolbar for working cotton beds that my dad had “re-fabricated” a few years earlier and had made a platform-jig for precisely repositioning a shank to be rewelded and they asked to borrow it to be able to do the same to their implement.
I’ve never been so happy to loan something to someone as I was that day because I could finally do something that would help them, it had always been such a one-way street when it came to borrowing or copying and I finally had our first opportunity to reciprocate.
Alan has called me a few times over the years asking to borrow something when theirs was out of service for one reason or another and has always wanted to “rent it from me” and not borrow it. My response has always been “if you want to rent it you can’t use it, but if you want to borrow it I will have it serviced and ready for you ASAP.”
They always brought everything back in a better condition than when they took it.
Are you starting to realize just how tough it’s going to be to not have the Sanos as our neighbor anymore?
God bless Alan and Bobby Sano and their late father Rinks and Jesse Sanchez for all the years of being the absolute best neighbor any person of any occupation could ever ask for.
When they have finished harvesting their last 2019 field and pack up and are gone it will truly be one of the saddest days of my farming life.
