The farmers

This chapter tells the story of Floyd “Speed” Nolta, a Willows mechanic who learned to fly and is credited as the first crop duster to seed rice from the air.

A mechanic from Willows

Floyd Harrison Nolta was born on February 24, 1900, in Oakland, Oregon, the second of ten children. The family moved around Oregon for his father’s work, and Floyd finished three years of high school. By 1918 they had settled in Willows, where he worked as a garage mechanic.

How he got into flying

Nolta enlisted in the Army in November 1918 and was sent to the aviation school at Rockwell Field in Coronado, California. The Army put his mechanic skills to use keeping Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” trainers running. One of the instructor pilots there was Second Lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle.

Family lore says Doolittle gave Nolta his first airplane ride, and maybe his first flying lesson. The two became lifelong friends, and Doolittle often came back to Willows to hunt with Floyd and his brother Dale.

Nolta left the Army in March 1919 and went back to work as a mechanic in Willows. He finished his own flying lessons in the early 1920s.

Willows Flying Service

In 1927 Floyd and Dale started Willows Flying Service and began spraying crops in Glenn County. Floyd built his own canvas hopper that held 350 pounds and fitted it to a Travel Air biplane. Travel Air was built in Wichita, Kansas, by a company founded by Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech, and Lloyd Stearman. Floyd also raced cars, which is where the nickname “Speed” came from.

Seeding rice from the air

Rice has been grown in the Sacramento Valley since 1912, and it quickly became a major crop. Planting it was slow, hard work. Rice fields are flooded with about five inches of water, which helps the plants compete with weeds, and the seed was soaked in irrigation ditches before it went in.

Nolta’s idea was to plant it from the air. He put a hopper in the front cockpit of his biplane and rigged a way to release the seed below the fuselage, where the propeller wash spread it in a swath about 50 feet wide. A knob controlled how much came out. A flagman stood on the levee at each end of the field, and Nolta flew a straight line about 25 feet off the ground. When the hopper ran low, he could land on any flat road to refill it.

No one knows exactly when he first did it. His nephew George Nolta wrote that Floyd seeded the Garnett Black property south of Willows in 1928, flying the same kind of Jenny he had kept running in the Army, and that he sowed 8,000 acres that season. The earliest proof is a photograph marked “Rice Planter #1, April 1, 1929,” showing Nolta beside his Travel Air with “Willows Flying Service” painted on the fuselage.

The idea spread fast. By 1931, 50,000 acres of rice in the Sacramento Valley were planted by airplane, and ag pilots still use the seed-release mechanism Nolta devised. His work drew national attention, with inquiries arriving from around the world.

The Nolta brothers

Willows Flying Service was a family business. A 1927 photograph shows Floyd, Dale, and Vance Nolta together outside the flying service’s airstrip north of Willows, near the Blue Gum Lodge. Floyd also put his brothers Dale and Loyal to work in the flying business and at his Union 76 gas station.

More than a crop duster

The flying service did a bit of everything a small airfield could sell: flight instruction, charter flights, freight hauling, aircraft maintenance, and agricultural work. Its ads offered a complete solo course for as little as $60.

The fleet changed with the times. Floyd owned a Curtiss Jenny in 1928, then added Travel Airs with Hispano-Suiza and Wright engines, a Curtiss-Wright Junior, and a Waco YOC for passenger charters. His Hisso Travel Air, converted into a rice seeder in about two weeks, is described as the first seeding aircraft in Northern California. Photographs from the era show Stearman biplanes sowing rice and dusting crops.

After the 1920s

1932

Willows Flying Service moves into the first hangar built at the Willows airport, after local leaders buy the field.

The 1930s

Floyd manages the airport and stages the annual air shows, while the flying service keeps seeding and spraying the valley’s fields.

1942

The Army Air Forces takes over the airport, and the flying service moves to its own land about four miles north of town, near Artois.

1956

Willows Flying Service has 18 planes, seven of them for seeding.

The 1960s

The business carries on, but it slows as the older Noltas can no longer fly, and ownership passes among family members.

2004

The company is dissolved. Dale’s son Gregg still owns the name.

Ag aviation at Willows today

County airport planning documents describe the Willows airport as the first site of major use of aircraft in agriculture, including rice sowing, fertilizer application, and aerial pest control. Several operators still serve local farmers from the field. Rice was Glenn County’s highest-valued crop in 2000, at $102.5 million.

The family tradition continues. Dale’s grandson Chris Nolta, a third-generation ag pilot, flies a modern turbine-powered ag airplane out of Corcoran, California.

Drawn from Floyd H. Nolta on Wikipedia, which draws on George Nolta’s family biography, the Nolta pages on the Early Aviators website (including its Willows Flying Service page), the Willows-Glenn County Airport master plan from Glenn County, and published accounts of early crop dusting.