Bobby A. Huey

Newport man inducted into hall of fame

Bobby A. Huey was the first rice specialist with the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture. Huey, 81, retired in 1990 and was inducted into the Arkansas Farm Bureau Agriculture Hall of Fame this year.
Bobby A. Huey was the first rice specialist with the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture. Huey, 81, retired in 1990 and was inducted into the Arkansas Farm Bureau Agriculture Hall of Fame this year.

“This is what an old rice specialist does to keep out of trouble,” said Bobby A. Huey, 81, as he pointed to a cluster of pecan trees while navigating his SUV through Newport farmland. “I don’t sit in a chair all the time.”

Huey retired from his 30-plus years with the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture in 1990, but he was inducted into the Arkansas Farm Bureau’s Arkansas Agriculture Hall of Fame this year. He will also accept a hall-of-fame induction from Newport High School, his alma mater, in August.

The land where Huey now grafts pecans isn’t far from the site he called home as a child. Huey was born in Remmel in Jackson County, where he spent the first 17 years of his life, in a home that no longer exists and is now a rice farm. His family members were cotton farmers, and Huey grew up familiar with cotton and liking cotton, but he didn’t enjoy chopping it.

“I remember my daddy telling me one time, when I was standing on a hoe handle when I shouldn’t have been, he said, ‘Son, you need to go get you an education because if you have to work for a living, you’re going to starve to death,’” Huey said.

At the time, Huey didn’t know where Fayetteville was, but he received a scholarship to the U of A to study agronomy-soils and left the Newport area for 40 years.

“I had no idea that when I started school, I’d end up a rice specialist,” he said.

His first job was as the Cross County assistant county agent through the UA Cooperative Extension Service in 1956, and he was based in Wynne.

“It had its perks. I could hunt ducks over at Fair Oaks,” he said. “I had two bird dogs. I could hunt quail, and I could play baseball in the Delta league, semipro. But I didn’t like the job.”

He transferred out of the job, but to keep his role, he had to return to the U of A for an advanced degree in agronomy-soils, which took him 10 years to finish. He was staff-chairman county agent in Lonoke County from 1965-70.

“The county agent works locally within his territory to help farmers and others,” he said. “He was the generalist. He worked with farmers and the people in that county to do a lot of different things.”

In 1970, the extension service’s first rice-specialist position was created, and Huey took the job “without even asking what the money was,” he said. He spent 20 years in that role at the Rice Branch Experiment Station, now called Rice Research & Extension Services, in Stuttgart. Huey said rice farmers were very receptive to receiving information on new rice varieties, the use of pesticides and new programs being developed.

“The researchers at the experiment station were getting a lot of direct requests from farmers, and that was interfering with their primary job, which was to do research,” he said. “So I took that on. I was the contact.”

Huey said he was never much of a people person, but his career brought out his inner extrovert.

“You wouldn’t believe that I never said a word in high school or college unless called upon, because I had the idea that if I kept my mouth shut, I wouldn’t show my ignorance,” he said. “Then I found out, somewhere down the line, you have to talk to make a living. And I’ve been talking ever since.”

Through a partnership with the National Weather Service, the UA Extension Service created the DD50 program, which was developed in the late 1970s and is still in use today. The DD50 program used a formula to measure temperature and predict rice growth.

“We could predict growth stages in the rice without having to go out in the field,” he said. “This took a lot of the field work out of walking the field and slicing the plant and figuring [it] out. It helped both millers as well as farmers to plan what’s their next step.”

Varieties were also developed at the experiment station and were quickly grown, Huey said.

“We were trouble shooters. If someone had rice dying and they didn’t know why, I was supposed to find out. If I didn’t know, then I went to researchers, and they were supposed to find out.”

Huey had a rice variety named after him — called “Alan,” which is his middle name — in the early 1980s. He said the variety lasted three or four years and was temperamental.

In the early 1950s, he said, the amount of rice produced was limited because of acreage controls, and when the controls ceased in 1974, rice production peaked.

“It was the whole industry’s help that converted the one-time rice industry, which was a Grand Prairie industry primarily, to an Arkansas industry,” he said. “It was kind of what I like to think as the footprint of where we are today, which is the No. 1 rice-producing state in the Union.”

As rice specialist, Huey traveled to Egypt to review a rice project, and to Puerto Rico to establish a rice-production program. He said Arkansas’ conditions make it a unique locale for rice-growing.

“One of the things that’s unique about rice is you can control the water. It’s an aquatic,” he said. “In Arkansas, we have either too much rain or not enough, and it’s never at the right time. But in case of rice, if you can get it up, then you control the water, and you can make a good yield.”

Huey said Americans don’t consume as much rice as the rest of the world. His nephew farms acres and acres of rice but doesn’t eat it, Huey noted. He said what we’re raised to eat affects our relationship with rice.

“Guess what we’re programmed to eat? Potatoes. You can’t french-fry rice,” he said. “In our schools, our introduction to rice was rice pudding only, or rice cooked up in a glob that you could serve it with an ice cream dipper. People don’t like it. Whereas in Asian countries, that is their diet.”

When he retired in 1990, Huey and his first wife, Jo Ann — who was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and died in 1998 — traveled to 38 states in an RV, and he’s spent every winter, except one, in Florida.

“I had a plan: We would go north in the summer and south in the winter, just like the ducks,” he said.

In the early 1990s, he spent two years building the home in which he and his wife, Julia, live. The home is located on property that used to house a school and is a short drive from his pecan trees and his nephew’s rice farmland.

These days, Huey offers consulting to his nephew.

“I tell him what I know, what I think. I do not make decisions for him, and we get along real well,” Huey said.

Huey also writes and has researched genealogy. He wrote a 40-page history of his hometown community and the history of the Hueys for his grandchildren.

Over his career, Huey has received awards, including the Extension Specialist of the Year Award, the Riceland Friend of Farmer Award, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Superior Service Award and others. Huey said he thought his agricultural recognition was all over with and was surprised when the Farm Bureau inducted him into the Arkansas Agriculture Hall of Fame.

“I told them when they approached me, ‘I don’t need these awards. It’s all over with. I’m out of it,’” he said.

There were about 650 people at the induction, and many people he didn’t remember by name recognized him at the event. After 26 years of retirement, Huey didn’t expect people to remember who he was.

“It was the friends that after so long, people that I couldn’t remember their names or didn’t know their names, but we had a history of working together — that was probably the highlight of it,” he said.

Staff writer Syd Hayman can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or shayman@arkansasonline.com.

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