Word: cottons
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Like the Murchisons. From cotton and cheap housing, Estes rapidly branched out into many other businesses-selling fertilizer and farm implements, digging wells, lining irrigation ditches, providing other agricultural services. He even founded a funeral parlor, thereby fulfilling a prophecy in the 1943 Clyde High School yearbook that he would become an undertaker. In the Estes manner, it was a grandiose establishment, far too fancy for Pecos, and it lost money...
...spending a lot of money at Agriculture, he sure wasn't getting much for it." The Schemer. All the while that Estes' assets were growing, his liabilities were mounting even faster. In 1960 he ventured on another desperate scheme for making big money. Estes had found cotton-farming profitable. The only obstacle to growing more cotton and making more profits was that the U.S. Government, in exchange for its generous price supports on cotton, imposes strict acreage controls...
...Each cotton farmer has an acreage allotment, which cannot be sold or otherwise transferred; it remains attached to the parcel of land...
...Government makes a special exception for farmers whose land is taken over under the right of eminent domain -to make way for a new highway, perhaps. In such a case, if the displaced farmer buys another farm within three years, he has the right to transfer his old cotton allotment to his new land...
Schemer Estes saw a way to get hold of allotments so he could increase his cotton plantings and profits. He and his agents persuaded numerous farmers in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and Alabama, who had been dispossessed by eminent domain, to buy Texas farm land from him, transfer their allotments to the new land, and lease the land-plus-allotments back to him for $50 an acre. Each farmer agreed to pay for the land in four equal