Kim Kimbrough: Always trying to figure out the next thing

People knew that Kim Kimbrough and I were tight. He had been a regular contact for our weekly Midsouth cotton report since its first season in 1999. For several years, Kim and I cooked as a team in a fund-raising competition in Lexington, Mississippi, his home town. His son Duke and my son Aaron were in Scouts at about the same time and members of their council’s Order of the Arrow lodge. My wife Debra and his wife Debbie were friends, as well.

We had all that history, so I wasn’t surprised when several mutual friends called or emailed last Thursday to make sure I knew that Kim had died the afternoon before. The calls came from the ag community, both consultants and Extension folks.

When people called that morning, I already knew about Kim’s sudden death from what probably was a heart attack, and I also knew that I likely couldn’t attend the funeral. My brother’s only child was getting married in Memphis 2 days later, and that commitment was set.

Those calls about Kim were appreciated and important because they were as close as I could come to the thoughtful conversations that always unfold at visitations and in the quiet lulls before and after the funeral, itself. Stories are told, people remember the good, positive and funny moments. It’s part of the grieving process. You’re still sad but also buoyed a bit by common experiences and shared recollections.

The comment that stands out the most from last Thursday came from Ernie Flint, the Extension area agronomist whose territory includes Holmes County, where Kim farmed and operated his crop consulting business.

“Kim was always out there trying to figure out the next thing,” Ernie said. I couldn’t have agreed more.

Of all the people who called that morning, Ernie probably knew Kim the longest and could surely make that statement without fear of contradiction. He and Kim first met in 4-H when they showed and judged livestock as boys, Kim from a club in Holmes County and Ernie from his club in adjoining Attalla County.

Later, they attended Mississippi State at the same time. Ernie majored in agronomy and Kim picked up his degree in animal science. It said something about Kim’s versatility, Ernie noted, that he was known mainly as a crop consultant, yet his primary degree was in the management of livestock. Kim, the founding president of the National Alliance of Independent Crop Consultants (NAICC), had his academic roots mostly in cow pies.

When Ernie made that statement about always figuring out “the next thing,” he cited Kim’s recent involvement with drip irrigation. It’s a new concept in much of the South. As far as I know, only Kim had installed a drip system in that transitional area where the flatness of the Delta gives way to the state’s eastern hills. Furrow and flood irrigation aren’t options once you move into that topography, and few tracts of land there are suitable for pivots.

Kim saw drip systems as a way to make smaller, irregularly shaped fields more productive, and over the last 5 years he had installed subsurface drip systems on about 70 acres. The consummate do-it-yourselfer, he did much of the work himself.

As I visited with Ernie, it struck me that for as long as I had known Kim I had been writing about his adoption of new technology. Before my career shifted into newsletter publishing, most of my income came from writing articles for farm magazines, and my first conversation with Kim – a telephone interview while I was still living in Nashville, Tennessee – was about computerized farm record keeping. That was in the first half of the 1980s when I wrote for Soybean Digest. Few farms had computers at that point, and most producers still didn’t see a need for them.

But Kim Kimbrough already had started compiling his farm records in a computer. As I recall, it was one of those Radio Shack models with the monitor and the keyboard all in one unit. It seemed sleek and sophisticated then but probably had no more computing power than the last digital watch you bought.

Yet, it was the cutting edge, the next thing, and Kim was there. He not only bought and used a piece of early farm-records software, he started selling the software as a sideline.

I quoted him in that article and kept his name and phone number for future reference. Over the years, I occasionally called him when an article’s subject veered in his direction. At some point we met at a conference, then we and our wives began socializing at different events, like the Beltwide Cotton Conference.

Notably, the last time I quoted Kim it was for an article about drip irrigation, a piece I emailed to my editor at The Progressive Farmer less than 2 weeks before Kim died.

Kim, indeed, was always trying to figure out the next thing.

It’s a fitting epitaph. Over and over, Kim was the early adopter, the farmer or consultant who studies new technology and then fits it into his operation. The people who come later always owe much to guys like Kim, but the early adopters are mostly anonymous or get, at best, a fleeting mention in a farm magazine.

I’m reminded of that line from The Right Stuff: “They were called test pilots, and nobody knew their names.”

Kim’s also was a life cut too short. He was 62, which doesn’t seem all that old these days, especially considering his family history. His mother and his father were into their 80s when they died, both passing away within the last year. The genetics, you’d assume, were on Kim’s side. But biology makes no guarantees, does it? Too many variables and quirky health issues that stack up a little more each year.

Debra and I are thankful that on 2 occasions this winter we were able to get together with Debbie and Kim. We had dinner with them at the Beltwide, then later had lunch with the Kimbroughs at the NAICC conference.

After learning that Kim had died, I understood why I see so many people my age and older taking photos at what seem like minor social functions. When I learned that Kim had died I thought, “Do I have a photo of us together?” As Debra reminded me when I asked, she took plenty of shots during those cooking contests several years back. But nothing recent, even though we had seen Debbie and Kim twice during the winter and, between cell phones and cameras, had plenty of ways to capture the moment.

You just assume you’ll see friends again. But, like the biology that forms us, there are no guarantees.

- Owen Taylor