Centennial Growers
Blue Diamond from the very beginning
by Cassandra Keyse
More than 3,000 California
almond growers belong to the
Blue Diamond cooperative, but
how many can say they have been
members since the beginning?
The number is less than a handful.
Of the original 230 almond
growers who had to fortitude to
form Blue Diamond Growers, only
a select few have descendants
who still deliver their family’s
almonds to Blue Diamond.
For Live Oak orchard owners
Dorothy Coats and Mary Spilman,
almond growing has been a family
affair since the very beginning —
they are second cousins, after all.
The Blue Diamond history books
will show that H.B. Spilman and
Lee Ballard signed their names to
the membership contracts, but
it was their wives who owned
the land —they were sisters who
inherited land from their father.
As the granddaughters of
Spilman and Ballard, Mary and
Dorothy have kept the matriarchal
landowner tradition alive. Their
stories read like a chapter out of
the history books — a testament
to how evolution in farming
changed the lives of many smalltime, turn of the century family
farmers.
Both families became Blue
Diamond members in 1910, but
of the two, only the Ballard family
has been a continuous member
throughout the past century —
the Spilmans left the cooperative
34 July | August 2010
Blue Diamond growers Mary Spilman, left, and Dorothy Coats in front of
Spilman’s Live Oak orchard. Both women’s families have been Blue Diamond
members since the founding of the cooperative in 1910.
for a short time and then later
returned. Their families joined
“the association,” referring to
what was then known as the
California Almond Growers
Exchange, to earn a competitive
price for their crop. Without the
guarantee of a payment from
Blue Diamond, growers were left
to take whatever price they were
offered and the options were
often slim to none.
“Buyers would ride up on a
horse, but they didn’t offer much
money. Back then, the main
objective was to be able to use
the crop pay out to pay back
taxes,” Coats said. Blue Diamond
membership offered growers the
ability to expand their operations
and improve farm technology.
“Mechanization really started to
change your whole life,” Spilman
said, referring to the effect that
farm machinery had on the dayto-day lives of farmers.
Before the technological
advances, all hands were on deck
for the tedious harvest activities.
Without mechanical shakers,
Almond Facts
people used a pole to knock the almonds out
of the trees by hand onto a canvas sheet, then
dragged the sheet from tree to tree to repeat the
knocking process all over again.
“You put the canvases down and shook the
heck out of the trees!” Coats recalled of the
“
BlueD
Diamond
played a great
deal into our
success as a
arm.
family farm.
”
— Mary Spilman
Blue Diamond Grower
tedious harvesting process. “I would get the
pleasure of going out and dragging those darn
canvasses all over the place.”
With less manual labor required to operate
the orchard, the families were able to plant more
acreage and eventually, the countryside behind
the Sutter Buttes was covered with Blue Diamond
almond growers.
“Blue Diamond played a great deal into our
success as a family farm,” Spilman explained.
“Before joining, we would just hope someone
would come around with an interest in our crop.”
She described a feeling of ostracism when
her family stepped out of the cooperative for a
number of years. It was comforting to join back
with Blue Diamond because of the constant
market available for the crop. Her son Jim now
takes care of much of the field work, making
theirs a fourth generation family farm.
“It’s an uncertain world we live in, but there’s a
certainty in this co-op,” she said.
Oldest Blue Diamond
almond tree alive in
Red Bluff
When Ed and Arlene Rosauer purchased their
property on Michigan Avenue in Corning, California 20
years ago, little did they know they were inheriting a
piece of Blue Diamond history. Located on the property,
which the couple now rents out to tenants, was 12 to
14 almond trees planted on original almond rootstock,
each one with a wide twisted trunk and long-reaching
branches. They removed all but the largest one,
preferring to keep it as a shade tree next to the house.
“It was a nice looking tree — perfect for shade. It
was just so neat looking that we couldn’t get rid of it
with such twisted roots and trunk,” Arlene said.
The tree is estimated to be at least 70 years old,
and is an astounding 25 feet tall and about the same
in trunk circumference. According to the property’s
previous owners, it has been a large tree going back as
far as they can remember. The exact variety of almond
is not known, but the Rosauers believe it to be a John
Bidwell variety that produces “huge, flat almonds —
some an inch and a half long and three-fourths inches
wide,” Ed explained.
While some older trees tend to produce a more
bitter almond, this one still produces a nice fruit.
According to Ed, getting the fruit off the tree is not the
easiest process. “Never have I seen a tree with such a
twisted trunk. I thought to myself, ‘How do you get a
shaker around this baby?’” he said.
The Rosauers have been Blue Diamond members for
12 years, even before they had a crop. “We wanted to
make sure our almonds would have a home once they
started to come in,” Arlene explained.