The Family Behind the Decades-Old Firm

J.G. Boswell Co. has been the main force in farming within the Tulare Lake basin for more than 70 years. The company was founded by Col. James Griffin Boswell, one of 13 children from a patrician cotton-farming family that was chased out of Georgia by the boll weevil in the 1920s.

Boswell migrated to Corcoran and began carving out a cotton-growing and -ginning empire. He and other farmers struggled to control the four rivers that emptied into the lake. They formed a network so vast that in flood years one could take a boat from San Francisco to Bakersfield.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, Boswell and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a series of dams and levees that contained the rivers and all but dried up the lake. The water rights that the Boswell company controls are said to be worth about $1 billion.

The colonel’s legacy is complicated. By the time he died in the 1950s, he had helped drain one of the greatest wetlands in America and benefited from government subsidies to begin building an unrivaled farming operation. His marriage to Ruth Chandler (a daughter of land baron and Los Angeles Times Publisher Harry Chandler) was childless, but his nephew, J.G. Boswell II, assumed command and amassed tens of thousands of additional acres.

Boswell the nephew, now in his mid-70s, recently came out of retirement to chart the company’s course, and the dairy development is a slice of that future.

Although he is viewed as a visionary, environmentalists have criticized him for continuing to farm land that has already been degraded by man and nature. The company has established drainage ponds throughout the basin to siphon off a toxic brew of runoff from its chemical-intensive operations. The ponds have caused considerable environmental damage, including deformities to waterfowl. Despite years of effort, Boswell has yet to devise a permanent solution.

Boswell’s history makes environmentalists edgy about its proposal to sell sites for five big dairies.