Laudies Dow Brantley III
Dow Brantley is a farmer — not with overalls and a pitchfork, but with computers and knowledge of politics, global markets and foreign governments. But underlying all that is family tradition and connection to the land.
Picture American Gothic, that iconic portrait of an old farming couple: solemn, bespectacled, bone-thin from years of marginal profits. It feels true, doesn’t it? Especially compared with other farmers and references in popular culture:
Tom Joad: The fictional Okie was better in a fight than on a farm.
Jimmy Carter: America’s peanut-farming president was artfully plainspoken, sure, but he was really a Naval Academy graduate and nuclear physicist by training.
“Farmer’s tan”: Ignominious two-tone look, one-part helio, one-part Hanes.
Clark Kent and Luke Skywalker: These scions of established farming families kept their heads in the clouds.
So consider a farmer. And in the midst of the rice-crop harvest, consider Dow Brantley.
With about 9,000 Lonoke County acres under rice, cotton, corn and soybeans, he’s lord of a modern plantation, but the bicentennial baby has a business degree from the University of Arkansas and was an advance man for President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. Plowman he is not.
The third-generation operator of Brantley Farming Co. has an iPad mounted in his pickup. He has given testimony before Congress on the world market for rice. He’s a planter, proud of it, but spend a morning with him, and he’ll eventually put farming this way: “Our business model is not any different [from] any small business.”
His wife, Amy, the daughter of a Dr Pepper bottler in Paragould, says, “People in general have no idea how advanced ag is right now, and how it is a small business. Sure, he’s in the field every day, and he works with his hands and runs combines, but he also sits behind a desk and has to make plans.”
And plans, and plans, and plans. Even at night, with his three girls bounding about the house, he’s checking the Chicago exchange on his iPhone’s KES Markets or DTN apps.
Earlier in their marriage, Amy Brantley and a co-worker from Arkansas Children’s Hospital met Dow for lunch at Charlotte’s Eats and Sweets in Keo, and the co-worker wondered why Dow wasn’t in overalls.
“The more people you meet in the agriculture community, everybody’s like we are. You know, they’re educated, they’ve been to college, they just love farming and that’s what they want to do,” she says.
AN ECONOMY OF SCALE
On a giant dry-erase board at his company offices in England, the staff has the entire operation gridded by plats. Next to each one are dates and “inputs” — fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, etc. “Trade secrets?” I ask. He laughs. “That’s one thing you’ll find out from us farmers pretty soon,” he says. “There are no secrets. It’s plain and simple what we do. We grow a commodity and sell it and our goal is to grow as much of it as we can.” Plain and simple, huh? In many ways farming has become so mechanical, digital, wireless even, that it is simpler. Three seasons ago Brantley invested in
IntelliAir, a digital cli-mate-monitoring system that measures temperature and moisture every four feet of his eight, 60-foot-tall grain bins, feeds the information to his iPad and runs the dryers. A few years ago they made the same measurements and adjustments by hand with a probe they plunged into the bins.
On the other hand, he has had to race to keep pace. More acreage, finer quality, more inputs. His competition isn’t other Arkansas rice growers, not really. It’s producers in Thailand, Vietnam and Brazil that’ll sink him.
As recently as a decade ago, Brantley’s company grew on half the land it does today. (Most of the 9,000 acres the company plants on today it sharecrops — 75 percent of the profits accruing to the Brantleys, 25 percent to the landowner, in most cases). Back then, the company didn’t have the grain bins. The rice harvest was immediately hauled to mills in Stuttgart.
Today, the family measures its assets in the millions, “millions of dollars that we didn’t [get] overnight. We’re talking about generations of building up equity over time,” he says.
“We’ve taken a chance to build this system, taken a chance that this will work. It might be a 10- to 15-year loan to pay this off, but [our prediction is] generations of knowledge and equity put together and we’ll continue to grow.”
‘SHOWING UP’
Brantley’s rice isn’t genetically modified, but the cotton, corn and soybeans are, and you might say he is, too.
As the latest generation of farming Brantleys, he never wanted to be anything else. One of his early memories is begging his dad to take him to work on Saturdays and tagging along with his mom when she carried lunch to the fields.
As a teenager, his first “job” was as a crop scout with the University of Arkansas Extension service, counting cotton “squares” (flower buds of a cotton plant) and bolls on plants in a 13-½-feet row (that’s of an acre) and logging insect varieties. He was 16. His peers were college agriculture majors with precious little real-world experience. He was a better crop scout.
All three of the Brantley boys were Eagle Scouts, a remarkable family achievement within an organization that has historically raised only 4 percent of all Scouts to the supreme rank of Eagle.
“I’d like to tell you I know these three rules for being a good [parent],” says father Laudies Brantley, 66. “I don’t know but that we fed them, we clothed them, we loved them.”
In Laudies’ corner office he has a photo from the mid1980s of the three boys (Dow is the oldest), bunched together like cubs, wide-eyed and ready for roughhousing, but completely bare save for their underpants. So, clothing was seasonal.
“This place, you take responsibility for your actions,” Dad says.
“My dad, he got us up on a tractor right away,” says the son. “We learned to drive early — 8 or 9 years old.”
“If you get in a situation you don’t know what you’re doing, turn the key off,” Dad says.
“‘Be here and be on time’ was another one.
‘‘I don’t care how good a person is if they’re not here. ‘Showing up’ — that’s responsibility,
“Dow and Laudies are really pretty big farmers in this county, and really, very smart businessmen. Dow’d make a good state representative for this area. Oh, he really would.And not only in the state of Arkansas, but he’d be good to have up there in Washington.And I tell you, I don’t even know what party he belongs to. I don’t. It doesn’t matter.”
— District 14 state Rep.Walls McCrary
and that’s how you do it.”
Dow Brantley showed up at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in the fall of 1994 with one explicit goal, to graduate from the School of Agriculture. Finding a wife was something of an unstated preference; Fayetteville is where he met Amy.
After graduating, he took his father’s advice and tried to do something else. He got on with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency as a legislative liaison, finding answers to agriculture-related questions for legislative staff members. The Farm Service Agency, one of the department’s seven agencies, primarily deals with “program crops,” such as rice, cotton, corn and soybeans, that get federal farm subsidies (most edible fruits and vegetables are “nonprogram”). He also served six months as Clinton’s “advance man,” traveling in advance of the president to organize publicity and arrange meetings and security.
But for Brantley, Washington was almost an internship to prove that he could succeed at something else if he wished to.
Some years Brantley makes “a very good profit,” he says, but most years the margins are “very, very small.”
“Because we’re producing a bulk commodity, everybody knows what our costs are and where we need to sell it.”
Earlier this year Foreign Policy magazine ran a story subtitled “How American tax dollars are keeping Arkansas rice growers fat on the farm and starving millions of Haitians.” Where did reporter Maura O’Connor go for a first-hand look at America’s profligate rice farm subsidies? Brantley’s operation.
“Rice is Brantley’s highest-growing crop,” she writes, “and a third of the farm’s acreage is dedicated to paddy that he harvests and delivers to Riceland Foods, Stuttgart’s largest mill.
“Brantley’s farm is a marvel of modern farming technology. Thirteen satellite-guided tractors level his
INPUTS
All three of the Brantley boys fields to pancake flatness, extensive irrigation pipes stream water from aquifers deep in the ground and crop-dusting planes drop fertilizer and pesticides throughout the growing season.”
It’s all true (though the crop-dusting planes belong to Tommy Anderson). It’s also true, as the story notes, that U.S. government subsidies give domestic rice farms artificial supports where another industry might expatriate or vanish entirely.
Just ahead of the federal debt ceiling debate last year (or facing the specter of severe cuts to farm subsidies), Brantley told the House Agriculture Committee that U.S. farm subsidies hew closely to World Trade Organization guidelines for marketplace fairness while foreign countries are busy fixing prices. He said Brazil’s government pays its farmers $60 per ton of rice shipped to Central America, Haiti, Nigeria and the United States, traditional U.S. markets; Thailand buys rice from its own farmers for $10 a bushel (the U.S. market price is about $6-$7); and India gives its farmers the fertilizers and other inputs it needs.
To him, U.S. farm subsidies — a fixed formula based on past yields — are at best a reckoning, not a reward, and anyway, it’s the reason Americans spend about an eighth of their income on food whereas in Japan it’s about one-fourth.
Brantley has gotten close with the state’s members of Congress — closer than the average constituent by a country mile, you might say. Today it’s 1st District U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford and senior U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, where three years ago it would have been Marion Berry and Blanche Lincoln (then chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee).
“We’re seeing now the evidence of [how contentious farm subsidies have become] just trying to pass the farm bill,” Crawford says. “We need people who … can help legislators really adequately articulate their positions and advocate for them,” and Brantley’s one of the “up and coming young leaders in the industry.”
“Dow fits the image of the future of farming,” Pryor says, “because you have to be smart, you have to work hard, you have to be high-tech and you have to be very committed to it. When I think about farmers in Arkansas who’ve invested their entire life’s savings, these guys are in it for the long haul.”
Has anybody ever suggested to Brantley that he seek public office? “Yes,” he says, right away. The asker is state Rep. Walls McCrary, who’s term-limited in District 14. McCrary inherited farmland, but he rents it out. To Brantley? No, he says, but “he’d be a good one to have.”
“Dow and Laudies are really pretty big farmers in this county, and really, very smart businessmen,” McCrary says. “Dow’d make a good state representative for this area. Oh, he really would. And not only in the state of Arkansas, but he’d be good to have up there in Washington. And I tell you, I don’t even know what party he belongs to. I don’t. It doesn’t matter.”
“You a Democrat?” I ask Brantley. “No!” he says, as excited as ever. And then, earnestly, “I’m for all of them.”
With three school-age girls, chairmanships of Arkansas Rice Farmers and the Arkansas Rice Federation and a farm that eats roughly 2,600 hours per annum of his time, he just can’t imagine adding politics.
“We have so many people and so many moving parts. Someone’s got to be out ahead, asking, ‘What do we need to have in place for next week? Next season?’ But that’s what’s different in farming, too. Even though I’m in a management role, there’s nothing on this farm I can’t do, I won’t do.”
Brantley’s vision is, not surprisingly, generational — he’s in it strong for another 20 or 30 more years. He must position not just his own farm but rice farming in the area for long-term profits. With the science and abundance of inputs, he doesn’t foresee the land turning against seed, and the roughly $90 million Bayou Meto Basin Irrigation Project expected to go online in three years is expected to ensure a ready supply (and timely drainage) of Arkansas River water over the fields. Fellow farmer Jennifer James in Newport gives him evidence that a woman can run a farm as well as a man.
So the three Brantley girls may perhaps face the same fateful decision as the three Brantley boys did a generation earlier. “My girls, they can do this — if they want to. I want them to choose like my parents gave me a choice,” he says.
“Of the three,” wife Amy reflects, “the middle one does not like to be outside. She likes to be in the air conditioning. She doesn’t like to be dirty. Our third one, any time he says, ‘Who wants to go to the farm?,’ she says, ‘I do. I do.’ She can spot corn, and she knows soybeans, but she knows the rice fields. She definitely enjoys being out there, and so does the older one.”