The changing landscape

Ted Huneycutt Jr. is an anomaly in southwest Arkansas. He still raises row crops in an area that’s dominated by poultry, beef cattle and pine plantations.

I’m riding around Clark and Dallas counties in Huneycutt’s truck on a recent Friday, looking at the places where my father and I hunted quail when I was growing up in Arkadelphia. Those family farms, which had small fields of soybeans, corn and cotton surrounded by weedy borders, are now pine forests and cattle pastures. The quail are gone.

Huneycutt has about 3,500 acres of row crops. He brought cotton back to Clark County for the first time in decades. His 300 acres of cotton were visible to those traveling Interstate 30 between the Caddo Valley and Arkadelphia exits. A Huneycutt family farm near Dalark had grown cotton decades ago.

“I started farming with my father in 1987 and then got into commodities trading,” Huneycutt tells me as we leave Arkadelphia, cross the Ouachita River and head toward Sparkman in Dallas County. “I became a securities broker, and we eventually had 17 brokers in our company.

I sold the company five years ago. I still sell a little crop insurance, but farming is mainly what I do.”

Huneycutt’s father, who died at age 74 in

2019, was one of 14 children. His grandfather was one of 10 children. The family came to Arkansas in 1882 from North Carolina. The farm near Dalark, where Huneycutt’s brother raises cattle, was purchased in the 1940s.

We drive through Sparkman, which still has three sawmills in operation, and past places I remember from half a century ago like the spot where a juke joint known as the Silver Dollar Club was located near Dalark. On this trip back in time, we talk about Huneycutt’s crops (he raises soybeans, wheat and corn in addition to cotton) and his efforts at diversification.

The Barn at Richwoods is a 6,300-square-foot wedding and special occasion venue operated by the Huneycutt family. It’s a few miles south of Arkadelphia. The family will soon open Ouachita Valley Meats in Arkadelphia to sell premium cuts of beef, pork and poultry. Locally raised produce also will be sold there as the farm-to-table approach continues to increase in popularity.

Huneycutt’s hope is that Ouachita Valley Meats will gain a regional following and draw travelers off the nearby interstate.

When soybean prices soared in the early 1970s, investors from Clay County in far northeast Arkansas bought vast tracts of hardwoods in the Ouachita River bottoms south of Arkadelphia and cleared them. The open fields made me feel as if I were in the Delta rather than southwest Arkansas.

These days, one of the few big row-crop farmers in the area is Larry Ferguson of Hot Springs, who has a sophisticated farming operation east of Arkadelphia. He had a successful career at Schreiber Foods, the world’s largest employeeowned dairy company, following his graduation from Oklahoma State University in 1975. He was living in Green Bay, Wis., when he retired as Schreiber’s chief executive officer in 2007.

In 2015, the Ferguson Family Foundation announced a large gift to OSU for the Ferguson Family Dairy Center. Last year, the foundation topped that gift with a $50 million donation, among the largest in school history. The OSU College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources became the Ferguson College of Agriculture.

Ferguson obviously has the means to operate a model farm. But most of what I see as Huneycutt and I travel the backroads is the decline of small row-crop operations. Those fields of cotton and corn have been replaced by timber, beef cattle and chicken houses.

That’s the story across the western half of a state where cotton once dominated the economy. There were even cotton gins in mountain counties before World War II since it was often the lone cash crop.

Forests now cover almost 19 million acres in Arkansas. That 56 percent of the state. During the 1950s and 1960s, Arkansas lost 20 percent of its forestland. That began changing in the 1970s as landowners in the hill country gave up on row crops and began tree farms. Forestland in Arkansas has increased by 1.6 million acres since I graduated from high school in 1978.

Almost 90 percent of the state’s forestland is in southwest Arkansas, the Ouachita Mountains and the Ozarks. The most heavily forested county is Dallas County (92 percent), and the least forested county is Mississippi County in northeast Arkansas (6 percent).

Arkansas’ economy is the most forestry-dependent of all Southern states, with 5 percent of the state’s gross domestic product depending on forest industries. The addition of that 1.6 million acres of timber the past 43 years coincided with the explosion of the poultry sector of the state’s economy.

“While the 1970s were rough for the industry as prices fluctuated due to increased international competition and high domestic production, the 1980s witnessed unabated growth in the state’s poultry industry,” writes Brent Riffel for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Tyson Foods continued buying competing firms while also securing lucrative contracts to supply chicken to restaurants such as fast-food giant McDonald’s.

“The industry changed dramatically during these years. As companies continued to consolidate, independent growers found their negotiating power with large firms gradually diminishing. Attempts at increasing their leverage through the formation of associations and co-ops did little to stem this tide.”

Growers entered into contracts with the poultry giants. In 1982, Tyson Foods made the Fortune 500 list for the first time. “By the early 21st century, poultry production had become an essential component of Arkansas’ economy, and Tyson Foods—with plants and products in more than 80 countries—became one of the largest producers of food in the world,” Riffel writes.

Poultry had become the state’s second-largest source of agricultural income, trailing only cotton, by the late 1950s.

“Leading the way was Tyson, which by the 1960s was fully integrated,” Riffel writes. “Companies like Tyson controlled virtually every aspect of production from hatchery to retail sales of broilers. Tyson built its first processing plant in 1958. John Tyson’s son Don quit his studies at the University of Arkansas in the early 1950s in order to learn the business firsthand.

“In 1963, the company made an initial public offering of its stock. Later that year, it made its first major acquisition, buying Garrett Poultry of Rogers.”

The beef cattle industry also grew during these years as the dairy sector steadily declined. Industry historian C.J. Brown writes of the western half of the state: “The beef enterprise lends itself well to being combined with the poultry operations that have developed in those areas.”

At least 30,000 farms across the state produce beef cattle, and more than 95 percent of those farms are family owned. Arkansas is considered a cow-calf state, which means that farmers raise calves for sale to buyers who, in turn, grow them until they’re ready to enter a feedlot for slaughter.

There are numerous breeds raised in the state. The Arkansas Hereford Association was organized in 1918 and reorganized in the 1970s. The Arkansas Polled Hereford Association and Arkansas Angus Association followed shortly after World War II.

Those organizations were followed by the Arkansas Charolais Association in 1963, the Arkansas Simmental Association in 1970, the Arkansas Brahman Breeders Association in 1976 and the Arkansas Texas Longhorn Breeders Association in 1992. The Arkansas Cattlemen’s Association has published a monthly magazine that serves to unite the industry since 1965.

Huneycutt and I continue our trip down the country roads of my youth. The small fields of crops are history. There are more pine forests, cattle farms and chicken houses at every turn.