Cart: First generation farmer

Many of those who enter the state’s farming industry are born into the business, but several first generation farmers are also breaking into the profession in St. Landry Parish.
“I’m making a living,” said first generation farmer Caleb Cart of Eunice. “I know there are a million other jobs where I could make more money, but I enjoy my job.”
“I’ve always been interested in learning some kind of trade. It’s hands-on, and I’ve always enjoyed being outdoors.”
The son of a mother who is a CPA firm worker and a father who has owned a fabrication shop, worked in real estate and is currently a salesman in the oilfield industry, Cart is one of about two brand new farmers who join St. Landry Parish’s farming industry each year, according to the St. Landry Parish Farm Service Agency office.
“With the 1996 Farm Bill ‘ Freedom to Farm,’ we noticed new and young producers coming in,” said Mardell Sibley, county executive director with the St. Landry Parish Farm Service Agency. “That was because the number of farms eligible to participate in St. Landry increased from just under 300 to over 2,000.”
“This is mainly due to sons and daughters entering through their family’s operation, parent’s retiring. This applies across the board to all commodities from livestock and hay operations to rice and crawfish to soybeans to commercial fruit and vegetable growers. St. Landry is one of the most diversified parishes in the state in many ways – land use, capability and commodities produced.”
Sibley also cited the parish’s location and transportation system and expanded opportunities available through the 2014 Farm Bill as more reasons why new farmers are getting into the industry.
Sibley called Cart “a hardworking, successful first generation farmer.”
“He calls his wife by her maiden name ‘Fontenot’ and has several little ones running around,” Sibley said. “From the first day that he walked into our office, my entire staff has been impressed by his attention to paperwork, meeting deadlines and taking care of his business here in the office. He is funny and smart.”
Cart’s introduction to farming came through his work on his uncle Raymond Fruge’s farm.
“I spent summers with him,” Cart, 31, said. “I leveled off rice trucks with a shovel, drove a tractor, plowed and shredded.”
A few years after high school, Cart was offered the opportunity to farm in a partnership with local farmer Seth Brown, and the two farmed together for two years starting in 2005.
“It was mostly his grandfather’s land,” Cart said. “I wanted something that was mine.”
“I don’t know what I’d be doing if not for the Seth Brown partnership. I’d be doing anything else outdoors.”
In 2007, Cart found some farmland in the Prairie Rhonde area, and he ventured into the farm business all on his own with a 90 percent guaranteed loan through First South Farm Credit and a equipment loan through the Farm Service Agency, which he pays on once a year.
“I found out about the land being available by word of mouth, and it’s land that has been farmed for years,” he said. “One farmer will move off the land, and the owner will rent to another farmer.”
“The money from the loans set me up when I got started, and now I pay what I can out of pocket. That’s the hardest thing about getting into farming – every nut and bolt I have, I had to purchase. I had to borrow and work, work, work and buy as little as I could.”
Cart rents about 3,000 acres of land, and he pays about $25 an acre per year for non-rice field land and between $40 to $60 per acre per year for rice lake land. He also shares about 10 to 15 percent of the sale of his crops with the landowner, and he owns three tractors, one combine and push boats for crawfishing. His first crops were rice, soybeans and crawfish.
Since 2007, Cart’s has hired several employees, including eight seasonal foreign national employees hired through the H-2A program, and become a father to some future farm hands with wife Katie, a cosmetologist – they are parents to Owen, 7, Sloane, 6 and Hallee, 4. The seasonal workers are employed by Cart December through October. He also has one full-time local worker who works year-round on the farm, and this worker also drives Cart’s 18-wheelers. Cart’s crop rotation now also includes sorghum and wheat.
“Up till 2012, I had zero (full time) employees,”Cart said. “I did everything myself. I would hire part time people or even get family members to help – my dad would plow and my wife ran a cart spreading fertilizer.”
During the winter, a typical work day for Cart starts out with dropping his children off at school then checking the water levels in the fields and servicing equipment after the height of crop harvesting season.
“I also do some hunting,” Cart said, laughing.
The spring planting season is the busiest time of the year for all farmers, and Cart spends his spring days and summer days spraying and watering crops, repairing equipment and shuffling workers from field to field.
“When we’re planting, we plant 24 hours a day,” Cart said. “Three of us rotate to run the equipment. Sometimes with planting, there is not a big window to get the crop in.”
Cart said he has had good years since getting into the farming industry, with the exception of 2008, when bacterial panicle blight hit his rice crop.
“There was a drought that year, and there was not enough water in the fields,” he said. “With the majority of row crops that year, yield was down. Another year, we sold rice fora record high.”
“Production costs have also doubled since I started farming,” Cart added.
“Work hard, wake up and do your job every day, stay on the course – that’s the first thing I learned, advice that another farmer gave me when I first started,” Cart said. “Keep moving forward. Perry Smith Jr. told me that when I started farming.”