Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
State’s Agriculture Hall of Fame ready to add five members
The Arkansas Agriculture Hall of Fame will induct five new members today — a retired soybean farmer, the founder of a poultry company, a rice researcher, a retired professor and a leader in the continued development of the state’s cooperative extension service.
With those five, the Hall of Fame will have 169 members from 32 classes since the first induction in 1987. The hall is sponsored by Arkansas Farm Bureau and the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce.
L.B. DANIELS
As a college student at Magnolia A&M (now Southern Arkansas University), L.B. “Bernie” Daniels took up residence at the edge of a hog farm operated by the college. “He came from humble beginnings, when working hard was required to survive,” his son, Michael, said this week.
Michael Daniels said his father, 78, struggles at times with Parkinson’s disease but intends to attend today’s ceremony.
Bernie Daniels had grown up on a farm that included a few hogs when he got to Magnolia, 65 miles southwest of his home in Thornton, in Calhoun County. “He had tuition money but not enough money for room and board,” Michael Daniels said.
Orval A. Childs, who led agri-education at the college, brokered a deal: room
and board for Bernie Daniels would be traded for his work.
Daniels moved to Fayetteville in 1969 to join the UA agriculture faculty where he taught animalscience classes to more than 5,000 students over the course of his career. He also served as associate director of the UA agriculture experiment station in Fayetteville.
“People like Dr. Childs helped him along the way, and he wanted to continue that when he became a teacher,” his son said. “A lot of people would come up [to Fayetteville] from small towns across the state and not know anybody. Both mom and dad wanted students to feel comfortable because they also had been through that.” Childs was among the 10 members of the agri hall of fame’s inaugural class, in 1987.
Daniels said he wanted to follow his father into agriculture, and did — with a career as a water-quality expert for the UA cooperative extension service. “Sometimes, in my own travels, I run into his former students. They tell me he had a reputation for being very tough, but they always knew he cared about them and wanted the best for them.”
ED FRYAR
Ed Fryar of Rogers founded Ozark Mountain Poultry in 2000, with a focus on offering consumers a line of products that were free of antibiotics and not genetically modified.
The company opened in April 2001, with 25 employees. “We deboned, I think, 32,000 pounds of finished product that first week,” Fryar said Thursday. “That was a terrible number, a number that could put you out of business rather quickly.”
Fryar said the company lost money the first year, broke even the second year and made enough money in the third year
to pay off the first year’s losses.
Ozark Mountain, in 2013, expanded into northeast Arkansas, where, among other ventures, it purchased two poultryprocessing plants in Batesville that had been set to close.
By the time the company was sold last fall to George’s Inc., a privately owned poultry processor in Springdale, at a price not disclosed, Ozark Mountain had more than 1,800 employees processing some 6 million pounds of chicken products a week. It last reported more than $280 million in annual sales.
“We had a really good run, we had a great team,” Fryar said. “The customers are the ones who did more than anybody for our success. We provided what they wanted.”
Fryar taught agriculture economics at the University of Arkansas for 13 years, from 1982 to 1995, and previously worked as an economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
His induction today into the agriculture hall of fame coincides with his first day as a member of the University of Arkansas System board of trustees.
DONNA L. GRAHAM
Donna L. Graham grew up in Damascus, the eldest of seven children to parents who ran a dairy farm. “We all had chores, we all had parts to play in making the farm viable,” Graham said this week. “That was my real introduction to agriculture.”
Graham has now spent nearly 50 years with the University of Arkansas system, starting with a job with the cooperative extension service in Pine Bluff in 1970. By 1985, Graham was in Fayetteville, a faculty member of the UA’s College of Agriculture, now called the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences. She served as an associate dean for 10 years.
She’s still teaching, with undergraduate and master’s degrees and a doctorate in hand.
“I probably wouldn’t be doing this were it not for a series of circumstances,” Graham said. “My father died when I was a freshman [at UA]. I wanted to quit, but my mother wouldn’t have any of that.
While working in Pine Bluff, my husband was killed. I had a 2-year-old son. There were still a lot of young brothers and sisters at home.
“Mom was making it OK, or she wasn’t complaining. I decided I was going back to school. I got a master’s, then a doctorate. So I guess the point of all that is, education gave me a lot of opportunities, so I try to encourage people to finish their degrees, because I know it will lead to a higher quality of life.”
“I do think about [retirement] from time to time,” Graham said. “But I still love coming to work. I get energized working with young people but, at some point, it will be time to move along. I’m just not quite there yet.”
TERRY SIEBENMORGEN
Terry Siebenmorgen, 61, grew up in Logan County, where he helped run his parents’ dairy farm and a few acres of row crops at Morrison Bluff.
“I got my undergraduate degree in ag engineering, so I guess was more inclined to engineering than to agriculture,” Siebenmorgen, who is founder and director of the University of Arkansas Rice Processing Program, said. “But life on the farm brought me close to ag, and I certainly loved it.”
After receiving a master’s degree from Purdue and a doctorate from the University of Nebraska, Siebenmorgen in 1984 landed a UA job in food engineering that was bolstered by a grant in rice processing.
Arkansas is the nation’s largest rice producer with annual production valued at $1 billion. Arkansas farmers planted 1.4 million acres of rice in 2018, according to federal statistics.
“I guess the hallmark of our rice processing program is the Industry Alliance meeting we host each year,” Siebenmorgen said. “That’s something the industry looks forward to, and our students look forward to as well.”
Companies such as Anheuser Busch, the Kellogg Co. and others that buy Arkansas rice for their products are essential to his program, Siebenmorgen said. “They’ve all come together to support to the program and
give advice. And, of course, there’s the growers, the rice dryers and the mills so important to Arkansas’ rice industry.”
DAVID WALT
David Walt, 78, is no stranger to awards, but the latest is the ultimate, he said.
“I’m very humbled to be included,”
Walt, a prominent farmer of soybeans, cotton and rice in
Desha County, said this week.
“I’ve never won anything that I didn’t have a lot of help on, and that goes for the ag hall of fame, too.”
His father first raised cotton on fields now swallowed up by industry near Fourche Dam Pike in Pulaski County before buying farmland near Dumas in 1952. The Walts are now in their fifth generation of farming.
Walt went into farming with his older brother, Martin, in 1962 after attending the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Walt said he retired from “full-time” farming in 2007 but returns to the fields at harvest.
He served more than 16 years on the Arkansas Soybean Promotion Board, with successive appointments by Govs. Bill Clinton, Jim Guy Tucker, Mike Huckabee and Mike Beebe. The Walts won Arkansas “farm family of the year” awards in 1993, for Desha County and the southeastern district.
Family farms, he said, can still be profitable. “I believe, overall, there’s still more acreage in family farms than in corporate farms,” Walt said. “If the family wants to do it [stay in farming], they probably should. It takes a lot of money. But if you don’t already have the family ties and you want to get into farming, it’s going to be even more expensive and difficult.”