I drove through the farm country of Northeast Arkansas earlier this month as I made the short trip from the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum at Tyronza to the Johnny Cash home at Dyess. As I turned right from Arkansas 77 onto Arkansas 14, there was the Rabbit Ridge Gin, one of the largest remaining cotton gins in Arkansas. If it's October, the Rabbit Ridge Gin is a busy place.
In an article last fall for the Delta Farm Press, David Bennett wrote: "As tufts of cottonseed debris swirl in the late October air, Tri Watkins walks across the Rabbit Ridge Gin yard warmly greeting employees. This is Northeast Arkansas--Lepanto is a few miles west of here and Dyess, where Johnny Cash was raised, is a few miles south--and the gin is one of a shrinking number. Watkins--who is the incoming president of the Southern Cotton Ginners Association--is in business with his cousin, Ernest Portis. The pair are distant cousins of acclaimed Arkansas writer Charles Portis, author of True Grit and The Dog of the South.''
Ernest Portis' father and Watkins' grandfather were brothers. Their father began the business in 1911. Watkins' great-grandfather had worked for Northeast Arkansas cotton king R.E.L. Wilson. Watkins explained that Rabbit Ridge is "the local name. Around here, a ridge can be two feet high running through a field." When operating 24 hours a day, Rabbit Ridge can gin 30 bales per hour. The record year was 36,000 bales ginned. These days, fewer than 10,000 bales are ginned most years. Watkins came back to farm with his grandfather after graduating from law school in 1986.
Back in Tyronza, the folks at the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, which is operated by Arkansas State University in the historic Mitchell-East Building, often cultivate a couple of rows of cotton to show visitors. It's a sign of the times as cotton, which once fueled the Arkansas economy, is becoming a museum piece. There was a time when cotton was grown in all 75 counties of the state. Even in the Ozarks and in the Ouachita Mountains, farmers attempted to scratch out a living with this cash crop. Aging, rusting gins, covered in vines, remain a common site across rural Arkansas. In fact, one cannot truly understand the history of Arkansas without first understanding the history of cotton cultivation in the American South.
"Profitable cotton prices, sometimes as high as 30 cents a pound, crashed along with the stock market at the beginning of the Great Depression," Van Hawkins writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. "There was a drought of financing as banks closed and 5-cent cotton devastated state producers. In 1933, the U.S. government devised a program to pay farmers for plowing up cotton acreage to reduce supply and, theoretically, create higher prices. The program made plow-up payments to landowners and directed them to share the money with tenants. However, some owners chose to evict tenants rather than share payments, which set in motion numerous conflicts between planters and tenants."
The widespread mechanization of agriculture after World War II caused tens of thousands of tenant farmers and sharecroppers to lose their jobs. In many Delta counties, the highest population ever recorded was in either the 1940 or 1950 census and has been dropping since then. Hawkins writes: "One driver and one machine cleaned rows that previously required many hands to pick. Just as machines replaced hand labor on Arkansas farms, soybeans captured a growing share of state farm acreage. In the early 1960s, cotton generated about 33 percent of Arkansas' agricultural income. By the 1980s, that percentage decreased to 20."
The 2015 cotton acreage was the lowest on record, with about 205,000 acres planted. Things improved this year as more than 360,000 acres of cotton were planted. Bill Robertson, the extension cotton agronomist for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, explained back in the spring as planting started: "People are looking at their bottom line and potential returns on different commodities, and cotton is looking very favorable compared to all the other crops for 2016. Grain sorghum isn't nearly as attractive now as it was this time last year. Some folks had a few issues. They incurred expenses they weren't expecting, so a lot of them didn't hit the home run with grain sorghum that they thought they were going to."
The United States remains the third-largest cotton producer in the world behind India and China. Arkansas usually ranks in the top six states when it comes to acres planted in cotton.
U.S. farmers have benefited as seed companies continue to develop varieties of cotton that produce higher yields and fiber quality. Robertson explained: "As acreage declines, the remaining cotton is on the better ground. Certainly some of our cotton-per-acre yield is increased because of the soil, but some of it is because of better genetics in our varieties."
Despite the record low number of acres planted last year, Arkansas farmers had their fourth-highest recorded annual yield at 1,112 pounds per acre. Watkins said that the price of cottonseed had kept a number of Arkansas gins open. His company has two seed houses with a capacity of almost 2,000 tons each. Much of the cottonseed is sold to the dairy market, where it's blended with rations to increase milk's butterfat content.
While cotton lives on as a cash crop in Arkansas, it will never play the role it once did in shaping the state's economy and history.
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate community relations for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 10/26/2016