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A few years ago, I had the great pleasure to interview Earl Hall, to hopefully find out and report why he is such a unique individual. What I found out from this interview was, Earl is even more unique than I had thought as well as captivating. I came out of the interview in awe and wishing I were able to write a book about him. If anybody ever does write a book, I know it will be inspirational to anyone that reads it, especially young people just getting out in the world. Earl is truly a self-motivating, positive person without a negative thought about anyone or anything, and therefore able to bring out the best in people that not only work for him but also work with him or are just his friends. He treats everyone with respect and as equals and knows no other way. I could go on and on but let’s see if I can convey a somewhat brief description of how he became what he is today.

Earl was born in Wilburton, Oklahoma, in January of 1941. He was the youngest of three sons of Joe and Gertrude Hall. Joe was a farmer in Oklahoma with over 100 acres of land and as most all farmers in Oklahoma were doing, was experiencing hard times. It was rough and almost impossible to make a decent living. The entire family packed up and moved to another farming community, (the only livelihood Joe knew), Wasco, California, when Earl was just six months old. Joe joined a farming company in Wasco and worked and worked, made manager, and worked as the farm manager until his retirement. They didn’t starve, but they were in no means, rich either.

Earl’s biggest motivation growing up was the want he had, to be able to leave out of Wasco to build a better life for himself. He had fears that if he stayed in Wasco, he could only go so far and would hit a ceiling and he had visions of a lot more for himself. Little did he know when he was in grammar school and then high school that he was destined to become the largest, and voted the best, farm labor contractor (winner of the Fresno Bee’s 2003 Central California Excellence in Business award), and the second largest and best labor contractor over all (over 20,000 W-2 forms to employees for 2002), in the state of California. "He is rated in the Top Five over-all agricultural employers in California by state and federal agencies, farm employer groups, and safety organizations in safety, compliance, payrolls, and over-all services". His average payroll per week is upward of one million dollars and that does not include the many benefits he insists on giving his employees. He wants and sees to it, that all his employees are treated the way he himself would like to be treated, as equal and with respect.

When he got out of high school, he worked his way through Junior College both in Bakersfield and in Fresno. Earl knew that the only way he would be able to succeed was to work and scrape to get out of Wasco and into the much larger world. He sold real estate while in Junior college in Fresno and in doing so, learned and memorized every street in Fresno. He took many hard classes as well, so his days were long and his nights for sleep were short. Earl had a professor that took a liking to him and advised him during Junior College. Earl wanted to quit Junior College to save time and go to a University. The professor told him not to do it, but to finish the two years of Junior College and get his AA degree and then go to which ever University he wanted to. The reasoning he gave for this advice was that if Earl quit without finishing the two years, then he would quit other things and not finish what he started. If he finished, he would have the sense and pride of accomplishment and it would go with him in everything else he ventured into. Earl stated in our interview, "It was some of the best advice I had ever had". And it did everything the professor said it would do for him. It stopped him from becoming a quitter.

Earl then went into Fresno State. He still did not have an Ag major, but he took Ag and Business classes, as well as marketing. He did finally go into Ag major and got degrees in Marketing, Exporting, Pesticides, Services, and Custom work among others. He also got married while in college to Beverly, a nurse at the time, and still his wife to this day. He laughed and said, "I had finals one day, got married the next with a big wedding, and started a new semester five days later."

Beverly worked for a doctor at the time that wanted to get into farming. He bought a farm and wanted Earl to run it. It was during that time of going to college, running the farm and other businesses that Earl started finding out about the farm labor problems. He also had studied as an elective in college, varietal grapes, 87 varieties in fact, which at the time were fairly new in the farming and marketing age. Earl developed and ran the doctor’s grape farm. After college, a friend of his, Jim Wyman, went to work for Vidal Winery and got Earl to come with him. Earl found out that farmers wanted to grow grapes but did not know how to get them started. So Earl went into developing vineyards. He marked fields, did rootings, and built up a farm labor business. He started by farming 160 acres, which developed into a half ownership, which has developed now into owning farm properties in 29 different counties in California with the one million dollar payroll of today.

Farm Labor was still the one problem he observed throughout the farming community. He watched and learned what the problems were and he developed ways to solve those problems. He built a labor force that was reliable, honest, and ambitious, by being fair with his workers. He made conditions for them better, making sure they had better facilities and amenities than anyone else. He gave them respect and awarded them for work above the call of duty. "He challenged them to dedicate themselves to their jobs and to find satisfaction in a job well-done". "He is very generous to his employees encouraging top employees to explore their full-growth potential, both professionally and personally. He encourages his top management to capitalize on opportunities outside of Hall Ag". Along with all this for his laborers, he also made sure he had work forces available for farmers when they needed them for harvesting that sometimes would be in hours and the harvesting couldn’t wait. He would keep his laborers working by shipping them to all different kinds of farms. Because of the different times of planting or harvesting of different crops, his workers had steady jobs. His name in the labor force became well known and laborers would come to him because of his reputation.

In the seventies, he started developing successful tomato farms where they had never been developed before. He built and helped develop tomato-picking machines, which got him contracts with big canneries. He started with two or three machines and built them up to 130 machines, which he contracted out to the different tomato farms. The canneries noticed his growth and worried some about it. They bought his machines and still contracted with him to supply the labor. This helped him even better because he did not have to pay for the maintenance of the machines. His farm machine labor force would work 10-hour shifts with two hours between in which his mechanics would do maintenance on the machines. So the days were actually 24 hours of work. This went on almost continually throughout the year because the different varieties of tomatoes were harvested at different times. Through research, ways were developed to make sure the tomatoes would all ripen at a set date and at a set size and weight. With this, Earl went into exporting of his products overseas. While hiring laborers for these jobs, he would hire people that others would not. For example, refugees from Cambodia came to the United States for safety. When they got here, no one would hire them. Earl did! It so happens that two of those he hired were top royalty in Cambodia that had to escape. When things were straightened out in Cambodia, those two helped Earl get into doors he couldn’t have gotten into on his own. He also shared the business he did with Cambodia with the refugees as partners and you can imagine how one helped the other. To this day, they are good friends and business partners.

Earl has his own accounting offices from which all his employees are paid. He makes sure that all workers are paid on time. Once, on a new contract he had, the workers did not get their hours into the accounting office in time to be able to get their checks sent overnight by Federal Express. Earl hired a driver to drive the checks to the job site, so they would get their checks that next morning on time. He did not want any worker to think that he didn’t care.

In his office of accounting, he hired a fellow that no one else would hire because of his past. The fellow had cleaned up his life but no one would give him a chance. Earl did. He helped put him through college to get a CPA license and had him working for him during and after. The fellow told Earl that he wanted to start his own business. Earl asked him how much money he could earn on his own. He then told the fellow he would pay him close to that, give him an office, and he could do all the outside business he wanted to as long as he did Earl’s accounting also. The sharing arrangement worked out well for both of them and Earl has a very loyal employee.

Most of Earl’s businesses, and there are many, (farm labor, accounting, marketing, exporting, hay, farming, septic, insurance, etc.) are on a sharing basis. In other words, Earl delegate’s jobs to people working for him and then gives them a fair share of what they bring into the business. The harder they work, the more they make. He does not pay them just so much for such a job. He shares the profits with them and they do not have the overhead to tend with because Earl makes sure it is taken care of, including all the red tape. Some of them are given shares of the business; some are given the business. All according to how hard they work.

Earl does many charity benefits. While going to his San Joaquin office one day, he spotted two little girls walking across the road, one with just one shoe on. He could not figure out why the little girl only had one shoe. Did she lose the other or what? He asked the fellow with him who was from the town they were in and found out the family the little girl was from was very poor; the father was out of work. Etc. and the little girl had worn out the other shoe and they could not afford a new pair. Within an hour, the whole family had several pairs of new shoes along with food, etc. and the father had a job.

In another town, while visiting an office of his, he was informed about some families that were down and out with no homes, no jobs, no money, no food, and no transportation, in other words, homeless. They fell between the cracks of society in that they could not get any government assistance. Earl set up a foundation that finds these people, rents them a place to live, gives them groceries to last and clothes to wear so they can be presentable and jobs, so they can get back on their feet. He doesn’t just give them money but helps them do for themselves. I asked Earl if any of them disappointed him. He said very few did. Most did well.

With his seemingly 24 hour a day work, I asked him how he got into team roping. Earl said, "From the time I was in high school, I always wanted to rope". When he was 18 years old, his dad bought him his first horse for $150. He took the horse to Ray Miller’s arena in Bakersfield and ran practice runs. He didn’t even know how to coil a rope let alone rope, but he went right into the box anyway. Dave Boynton took pity on him after watching him and taught him how to coil a rope. Earl had bought his saddle for $50 and it wasn’t much. Dick Flemming was there the few times he was trying to rope and asked him if he could afford $25 a month. Dick was a saddle maker and built Earl a saddle and Earl paid him $25 a month for 5 months!

Earl bought a 46 Dodge pick-up, built wooden racks for it and that is how he hauled his horse. He would jump the horse into and out of that truck at ropings.

When Earl was in High School, he played football, but when he went to college, he roped. He went to Bakersfield College during the day but before school he ran a cleaners route from 6 am until his classes started. Then from 6 pm to midnight every night, he irrigated for a huge farm he worked for.

As I knew Earl has had a few health problems lately, I asked how he was doing now. Earl said, "I am doing much better" with that constant smile he has. In fact, he had just had surgery on his thumb before the interview, while he was waiting for his neck to heal, which he had broken two years earlier, let go (because he thought it would go away), and finally had surgery on in November. He thought that both his neck and his thumb would be healed by the time of the "Earl Hall Challenge of Champions".

Before we got on the subject of Earl’s health though, I asked Earl with all of his work force, how does he afford worker’s compensation? Farm labor workers comp is the highest cost premium there is. Earl said, "I paid it regularly until they raised it the last time. Then I sued the state of California because I could prove they raised it fraudulently". With that, he was brought into the Compensation board for his Ag advice. He dropped his suit when they started taking his advice, but he formed his own insurance company anyway. He went to insurance classes and now he is self-insured.

Earl has a high work ethic. He is proud of and should be, that he started with nothing and grew to where he is today. He is proud that both his son and daughter have their own branches of businesses from his business and are doing great jobs. He is proud of and should be of all his accomplishments and the help that he has gotten through the years from friends, acquaintances, and most of all, his wife Beverly. He did not forget others all through his life and helped everyone he dealt with. He proved that when you see a need, you should fill it and always be willing to take chances or you won’t go anywhere. You have to work; scrape and more to go up, and you can do anything you want to do, if you want to do it bad enough. Earl loves life and loves people. He says to grow; you have to also be able to change.

I asked Earl how long he was going to continue to work. He smiled and said "Probably until I die". His mom and dad are still alive, as is one brother. Mom is 84 and Dad is 92, so I imagine Earl will be working at least another 30 years if his parents are any example of longevity. Earl’s Mom and Dad live on one of Earl’s ranches. His daughter Stacey is married to roper (who’d guess?), Todd Hampton. Earl is proud of Stacey for being in charge and running her part of the business and proud of Todd for all his work too. Earl’s son Brad is 37 now and still not married, "but looking!" Earl laughed. Brad is in Cambodia running his business over there "and doing a great job" Earl says.

Earl believes in the sport of rodeo and is currently the president of "Friends of Rodeo". To help preserve our heritage he is working constantly to build up the image of rodeo people, contractors and competitors alike and to show and prove our constant care and love for our animals. (Friends of Rodeo Inc. is a non-profit organization formed to fight the constant battle of the Animal Rights activists and needs the support of all of us.)

Earl is especially proud of the "Earl Hall Challenge of Champions". He wants team roping to grow even more and faster than it is today.

While trying to keep notes on Earl’s life, a phone call came in. It seems one of the ladies working in one of Earl’s offices, a single mother trying to support her kids and herself, had her refrigerator quit. Her boss called Earl. "Just go across the street to the hardware and buy her one" Earl said. "She has to have one for those kids!" "Charge it to Hall Ag!"

His philosophy of life is to work hard, love people, and don’t forget to help others on the way. "Earl Hall leads by example in all aspects!" Quite a guy!

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