Texas Grower Turns Passion for History Into a Treasure Trove for His Community

For Dan Taylor, collecting agriculture artifacts and mementos has always been a passion. The Ropesville, TX, farmer has always felt a sentimental connection to history – something that goes beyond standard nostalgia.

“I’ve always had an appreciation for preserving some of the past,” Taylor says. “Even when I was a little kid, I can remember hating to see an old church tore down, or things like that. It was always sentimental to me.”

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Now, after a career spent in agriculture, Taylor has taken a step back from teaching, ginning and farming to focus on that passion for history.

He began collecting artifacts in the mid-80s – driving to neighbors’ farms to pick up the odd piece of out-of-date machinery. From those simple beginnings Taylor has amassed a mountain of historical agriculture artifacts – from diesel-powered gins to decades-old classing records. On his property near Ropesville, Taylor houses two large showrooms of museum-ready displays. And these are only what are left from the substantial donations he has made to the newly-named Bayer Museum of Agriculture in nearby Lubbock, where he serves as Chairman of the Board.

To tour Taylor’s showrooms on his property is to realize he missed his calling as a tour guide. His enthusiasm for the pieces on display is readily apparent. To spend years collecting such a massive amount of history is one thing – to have the enthusiasm of sharing with outsiders is quite another. Taylor says that comes from a life spent enjoying what agriculture has to offer.

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“In my short years left, I hope I’m able to give something back,” says Taylor. “Agriculture has been very good to me.”

Finding His Calling

Growing up in the north-central Texas town of Blum, Taylor says he was dead set on avoiding agriculture as a career.

“People used to ask me what I was going to do for a living,” Taylor says. “My standard issue was that I don’t know, but I know what I won’t do. I won’t have anything to do with farming or anything to do with cotton.”

At the time, his idea of working on a cotton farm involved hand-weeding and hand-harvesting – backbreaking labor “in the hot sun of central Texas” that simply didn’t interest the young Taylor. But after one semester at an agricultural college, Taylor said he realized he had a future in agriculture. He transferred to Texas Tech University immediately.

After graduating in 1964, he set out to become a teacher, landing at a small high school just outside of the Lubbock city limits. He taught agriculture, and before long found himself farming a 10-acre plot as a hands-on tool for teaching his pupils.

“You would have thought that 10-acre plot was the biggest thing in the world,” Taylor says, laughing. “I was so proud of it.”

It was around this time that he married his wife, Linda, and the two both taught high school and raised three children from a small four-room house.  Taylor says he is proud of the agricultural education program he was a part of as a teacher in those years. In fact, he’s carried the educational mission throughout the latter stages of his career.

“Texas still appreciates the agriculture program,” Taylor says. “I’ve been on the Texas FFA Foundation for 24 years, and we’ve gone from 85,000 members to 103,000 in a five year period. The urban growth of agriculture programs has been phenomenal in Texas. They’re recognizing the value.”

After 11 years as an educator, opportunity came knocking for the young Taylor family. Through his side-project of farming, Taylor had begun to develop contacts in the farming community around Lubbock. It didn’t take long for one of those contacts to see the potential in Taylor.

“I was very blessed. I loved teaching, and I had no plans to get out of it,” Taylor said. “But I loved farming, too, and we had a chance to buy into this gin that was just about to close – they had ginned 1,100 bales the last year. So I decided to try it.

“I was young and dumb. If I had been knowledgeable enough, I’d have run backwards from that offer,” Taylor jokes. “But being young and dumb paid off. When you’re young, you think ‘What have I got to lose?’ I could always go back to teaching.”

But Buster’s Gin wound up being a good gamble for Taylor and his family. In fact, he would make his life’s work at the once struggling gin, eventually turning it into one of the largest and most successful privately-owned gins in the area. In 1986 Taylor went from being a minority owner in the gin to buying the whole operation outright.

“That’s when our growth really began,” Taylor says. “At that point, the gin looked much like it looked when it first opened in 1947. But all the big changes happened after 1986. I put a new press in that year. I went from five bales an hour, which was about all we could do, to 45 bales an hour. Sometimes we did as much as 50 bales an hour.”

Taylor effectively retired from the ginning business in 2009, selling Buster’s Gin in the process. He says he always had an open mind when it came to innovation both on the farm and in his gin.

Growing a Crop

Today Taylor still oversees 800 acres, the majority of which is planted to cotton each year. Nearly everyone across three generations in his family has made a career in agriculture, and a son-in-law, Thomas Hicklen, farms another 4,000 acres which Taylor used to be involved with.

Over the years, Taylor has had a unique perspective on the advancements that have taken place with cotton seed on the High Plains. As Buster’s Gin grew its capacity to handle more bales, West Texas cotton producers began to churn out significantly more cotton. Taylor says the volume of cotton that came through his gin in 2004 was remarkable compared to the previous year.

“We ginned 38,000 bales in 2003, when our farmers were just about all still growing conventional cotton,” Taylor says. “In 2004, after a few had tested the water, they just about all went over to planting FiberMax. We ginned 100,000 bales that year.

“Now some of that was weather related, sure. But we had had good growing conditions before, and we had never ginned over 100,000 bales at our gin. That 60,000 bale increase had more to do with the varieties these guys were planting.”

Taylor took note of the success his neighbors had with FiberMax over the years, and planted much of his acreage to the brand. In the 2013 growing season, he broke the 2,000 pounds per acre mark with FiberMax FM 2484B2F, earning himself the honor of inclusion in the FiberMax One Ton Club.

Giving Back

But for all his success in the gin and on the farm, Taylor has devoted most of his efforts to showcasing cotton’s history in recent years. He found a kindred spirit in the now 86-year old Alton Brazzell, a former county commissioner who initially started the collection of artifacts that grew into the now sprawling, impressive Bayer Museum of Agriculture.

“He started the collection,” Taylor says. “It really was his vision for a long time.”

The City of Lubbock eventually leased a 24-acre plot to the group that was pushing for the establishment of the agriculture museum. Taylor has remained heavily involved in the operations of the museum, soliciting corporate and private donations at first to establish a proper home for the collection.

Today he works tirelessly to raise funds to house first class displays of agricultural history. And he has no plans of slowing down.

“Our next phase will be a building with a small classroom to target school children, to get them to realize where their food and clothing actually comes from,” Taylor says.

For a man whose highly successful career began in a humble high school classroom, the next steps at the Bayer Museum of Agriculture seem perfectly appropriate.

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