When Lynn Baxter of Cabot started flying agricultural planes in 2004, she had no idea she would earn a national award.
In early December, she received the National Agricultural Aviation Association’s Most Active Woman Award, which recognizes an outstanding contribution by a woman who is active in the affairs of the industry or the association.
The award was presented to her at the National Agricultural Aviation Association’s National Conference in Reno, Nev.
She works at WRK of Arkansas LLC. in Lonoke, where she is an engineering technician. She didn’t begin her career actually flying planes.
“I got a degree in agricultural business with an emphasis in plant science from [Arkansas State University-Beebe],” Baxter said. “Then I went to work at the
Arkansas State Plant Board in the pesticide division, and that’s where I met my boss, [Dennis Gardisser].”
Baxter said Gardisser conducted training for the plant board, and he offered her some part-time work with the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service, where he was the head of the biological and agricultural engineering department.
“Then I worked for him full time at the University of Arkansas Extension Service in the biology and engineering department,” Baxter said. “When I was working for him, I always wanted to fly.”
Baxter said Gardisser did two tours of duty in Vietnam and flew helicopters while he was there.
“He’s a very smart man,” she said.
Gardisser trained Baxter to become a pilot, and she was his first student.
At WRK of Arkansas, Baxter said, the company holds clinics for pilots and planes from across the state and around the world.
“We work in eight countries,” she said. “We just picked up our eighth country, Egypt. We are going to Egypt to work for a couple of weeks, and they grow a lot of rice.”
There are only four agricultural planes in Egypt, Baxter said.
“[Our company] does aerial spraying and fertilizer application,” she said. “We measure the droplet size [of pesticides].”
The company measures the height, speed and pesticide droplet size a plane needs to use to penetrate the canopy of a crop, Baxter said.
“We do a lot of work in Costa Rica with the banana growers like Dole and Del Monte, but we don’t just do work for agricultural planes.”
She said she got to assist on a mission where her company worked on the Gulf oil spill.
“We went to Miami to put nozzles on a Douglas DC-6 [plane] for oil-spill recovery,” she said.
Baxter said she enjoys her job flying planes because she’s not stuck at a desk all day.
“I can be in so many different places in one day,” she said.
Staff writer Lisa Burnett can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or lburnett@arkansasonline.com.