Arkansas co-op's closing answers a prayer

Farms fade, church buys Warren site

Teresa Sandoval, owner of a bakery and grocery store and director of religious education at St. Luke’s Catholic Church in Warren, holds a fl oor plan for the new church and classrooms that will move into the building that housed the Bradley County Farmers Association co-op.
Teresa Sandoval, owner of a bakery and grocery store and director of religious education at St. Luke’s Catholic Church in Warren, holds a fl oor plan for the new church and classrooms that will move into the building that housed the Bradley County Farmers Association co-op.

WARREN -- A farmers cooperative in Bradley County is in the final steps of being dissolved, just three months shy of its 70th birthday.

Its likely end will come Tuesday night when the shareholder-members of the Bradley County Farmers Association meet at the First Baptist Church in Warren. They'll vote on the co-op's dissolution, with a 'yes' vote opening the way to its remaining assets being distributed among its eligible members.

"This will be a business meeting only. No refreshments will be served," read the matter-of-face legal notice placed by the association's board and attorney in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and other publications in early April.

"I don't expect anything but a vote to dissolve the co-op," Jack Gambill, its president for about the last 10 years, said last week. "There's really no other option."

The co-op's board closed the retail store and farm shop in 2016 and sold its nearly 8 acres near downtown to the Catholic Diocese of Little Rock late last year for $200,000.

The property will eventually be the next home of St. Luke's Catholic Church, which has outgrown its current church, a quaint but failing structure built in 1907. The L-shaped church, with its Gothic Revival styling, has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1998.

The co-op's decline began with changes in traditional farming and the rise of the forestry industry, Gambill said. The growth of St. Luke's, predominantly Hispanic, can be attributed to those new jobs in timber, the Rev. Eddie D'Almeida said.

Both entities are grateful for the other.

"I know they're going to work really hard to make a new home, and the co-op is happy that we were able to pay off all its debts and get some money to members," Gambill said.

Gambill said the board expects to disburse about $150,000 to about 1,000 members while keeping a small reserve of cash for final bills and for any eligible shareholders who failed to receive notice of the dissolution plans.

"St. Luke's has been looking for a new place for years, well before I got here," said D'Almeida, who is based in El Dorado at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church and says Mass in Warren every Sunday night. "Other people were looking at the co-op property to buy, but we were able to get it."

FADING FARMS

"The co-op was started when there were a lot more small farms here," said Gambill, who was Bradley County sheriff for 10 years, from 1983 through 1990 and from 1995 through 1996.

Bradley County had 1,298 farms totaling 415,360 acres in 1945, according to that year's Census of Agriculture, conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The average farm was 77 acres.

The 2012 census showed the county with 185 farms totaling 19,757 acres, with an average of 107 acres per farm.

"A farmer would have a few acres of cotton, a few acres of tomatoes and 10, 15, 20 cows, he said. " They were the co-op's bread and butter. The older generation started retiring, or dying off, and the younger generation had no interest in farming. That land got turned into pine forests."

Bradley County is best known for its tomatoes, remains the state's largest producer of the fruit and this year hosts its 62nd annual Pink Tomato Festival.

But the tomato industry, like other segments of agriculture, has changed, with consolidation into ever-larger farms with their own supply chains of seed and fertilizer.

"We lost the business of those small growers," Gambill said, adding that auction sheds at Warren and nearby Hermitage no longer bustle with the small-crop farmers looking for buyers, Gambill said.

"And you had a lot of people who'd drive 20 miles to a [big-box store] to save a quarter," Gambill said. "All that had an effect."

At one point several years ago, the co-op was $400,000 to $500,000 in debt, Gambill said.

"We had to pay our suppliers," he said. "They might not have been big bills, but they needed to be paid just the same."

The Bank of Warren loaned the co-op the money at a good interest rate. "We'll forever be thankful to the bank," he said. "We got those bills paid."

By 2016, the co-op was in debt again and its board didn't see any way it could afford another big loan, he said.

"We closed the shop, had a big sale on the clothes, the tires, the feed and seed, and then an auction of whatever was left," he said.

SECOND COLLECTIONS

St. Luke's was built as an Episcopalian church, St. Mary's, but services there ended in the late 1920s, according to a St. Luke's entry on Wikipedia. St. Luke's Catholic Church opened in 1948, the same year the Bradley County Farmers Association got its start.

Teresa Sandoval of nearby Woodlawn, along with her husband, Rogelio, owns Panaderia Morelia, a Mexican bakery and store less than a mile from St. Luke's, where she is director of religious education.

That means she's in charge of classes for every child at St. Luke's from age 7 up.

She's excited for the move, however long it takes, and so are the children, she said.

The plans for the new St. Luke's include nine classrooms, a sanctuary to seat 300 and a parish hall large enough for 30 cafeteria-style tables for the church's special events, many revolving around food and fellowship. The co-op has plenty of parking, unlike at St. Luke's, where parishioners use the parking lot of a strip mall across the street.

"We have prayed for a new place for so long, and we've worked so hard for it," Sandoval said.

For several years now, the families of St. Luke's have prepared a variety of food ahead of Sunday Mass and then sold the goods to one another after the service, to raise money for the building fund.

They've held raffles for items donated by businesses across town.

"We've also had second collections," D'Almeida said, referring to the passing of the offering plate a second time during the same service, specifically for the building fund.

For Mass every Sunday night, about 200 people crowd into St. Luke's.

"It might -- might -- seat 100 comfortably," D'Almeida said with a laugh. "People line the walls and even fill the sacristy, which normally is where the priest gets prepared. We have kids in the laps of their parents, kids in the laps of their siblings, kids in the laps of kids."

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The Bradley County Farmers Association co-op has closed after almost 70 years of operation and the property will become the new home for Saint Luke’s Catholic Church in Warren.

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The Catholic Diocese of Little Rock has purchased the Bradley County Farmers Association property in Warren to be the new home for Saint Luke’s Catholic Church. The old church has been the center of the parish since 1948.

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