Veteran, wife follow instincts to start farm, store

Damon and Jana Helton visit with U.S. Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., during his visit Tuesday to the Olde Crow General Store, which the couple operate in the Crows community in Saline County. The Heltons have utilized several programs to help educate them about farming, including Armed to Farm, which provides sustainable agriculture training for veterans, and about operating their own business, where they sell fresh meat, produce and products from other local vendors.
Damon and Jana Helton visit with U.S. Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., during his visit Tuesday to the Olde Crow General Store, which the couple operate in the Crows community in Saline County. The Heltons have utilized several programs to help educate them about farming, including Armed to Farm, which provides sustainable agriculture training for veterans, and about operating their own business, where they sell fresh meat, produce and products from other local vendors.

— Damon and Jana Helton seem to trust their instincts — their feelings, if you will. Those instincts have led them to where they are today — married with four children, raising grass-fed animals on their own farm and operating the Olde Crow General Store in the Crows community, which U.S. Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., visited Tuesday while in Saline County to discuss veteran and military issues.

Damon, 36, said he listened to his instincts when he joined the Army in 2001.

He grew up in Little Rock, the son of Ron and Linda Helton, who now live in Benton.

“I grew up in southwest Little Rock. I’m an 09’er (referring to the ZIP code 72209). We were in the McClellan High School district, but my brothers started at J.A. Fair High School, so they let us all go there. I graduated from J.A. Fair High School in 1997,” Damon said.

“I attended the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for two years, but I quit and enlisted in the Army in February 2001 — right before 9/11,” he said.

“All the males in my family served in the military, and I was beginning to think I was going to be the only one who did not,” Damon said, laughing. “I enlisted. … It just felt like a calling for me, something that I knew I wanted to do.

“I enlisted in February 2001, and then came Sept. 11. I was in special operations. … We knew as soon as that went down that our lives would change forever.”

Damon served eight years as an Army Ranger in the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Special Operations Command. His service included five deployments — one to Iraq and four to Afghanistan.

He completed his basic, Airborne and Ranger training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, near Tacoma.

“I arrived at Fort Lewis on Aug. 28 or 29, 2001,” he said. “Then 9/11 hit.”

Fort Lewis remained his base post until he separated from the Army in February 2009.

It was while he was home on leave after his first deployment that he met Jana Hogue of

Bryant, the daughter of Ed Hogue and Lee Ann Hogue and a 1987 graduate of Bryant High School. Damon said he listened to his instincts once again.

“It was love at first sight. There was no doubt about it, … and we both knew it,” Damon said.

“I had been back home for a few days, and some of my friends took me out to eat at Cajun’s Wharf in Little Rock. Jana was there, too, with a group of her friends. A friend of Jana’s turned out to be a girl I went to high school with, and she introduced us,” Damon said.

“As Jana listened to us talk, she heard that I was an Army Ranger,” he said. “She said, ‘I didn’t know there were park rangers in the Army.’

“I just looked at her and smiled. I thought that was pretty awesome that she had never heard of the Army Rangers.

“It was love at first sight.”

Jana, 37, agreed: “The minute I saw him, I knew he was the man I was going to marry.

“There wasn’t a chair at the table, but I was afraid he was going to leave before I could talk to him, so I pulled a chair up to that table and sat right down. It was definitely love at first sight.”

Damon said they courted for about a year.

“She wrote me letters every day,” he said, adding that the letters often came to him in stacks when he was in combat zones. “And in every letter, there was a little piece of cloth that she had sprayed with Love Spell perfume.”

The couple eloped when he came home on leave again in 2003.

“We eloped to Hot Springs,” Damon said. “We got married by a [justice of the peace]. We had been planning a proper wedding but just got busy and decided to elope. We didn’t tell anyone.”

Jana said, “We ran off to Hot Springs. … We spent less than $200 on our wedding. I wouldn’t change that for a minute.”

Jana returned with Damon to Fort Lewis, where they would remain until he was discharged from the Army. While there, Jana, who had graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and psychology, obtained her master’s degree in health care administration through Chapman University, which had a satellite campus at Fort Lewis. Jana worked for a wealth-management consulting firm in Tacoma.

The Heltons finally returned to Arkansas and settled near Benton to be close to their families.

Out for a Sunday drive, they found an abandoned farm in Saline County that seemed to call to them.

“But we weren’t ready to move to the country just yet,”

Jana said. “I did some research on it. … I research everything before we make any decisions — and it remained on our minds.

“Then about a year later, the real estate agent called us and said that farm was still available. This time, we listened to our instincts and developed a plan to buy it.”

They obtained the financing to buy the 160-acre farm and bought it in 2012.

“Now we had the land, but what were we going to do with it?” Jana said, laughing. “All that was on that land was an old red metal building that had been abandoned for five years. We gutted it, remodeled it, and now we all live in it.”

The Helton family now includes four young children — Luke, 10, Olivia, 7, Violet, 3, and Elena, 2.

“Love,” Jana said, smiling. “Look at the first letters in the names of our kids and see what they spell — LOVE.”

Damon added: “We love the old-fashioned names. After we had Violet, Jana’s mother said we had to have another baby and give it a name that started with E. If it had been a boy, we would have named him Eli, … but we had Elena.”

As the young couple tried to figure out what they were going to do with the land they had just purchased, Jana did her research once again. She found various programs that might help them develop the farm, which they named The Farm at Barefoot Bend. They found the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group Inc., sponsored by Farm Credit nationally, which in turn led them to Armed to Farm: Sustainable Agriculture Training for Military Veterans, which is a program of the National Center for Appropriate Technology.

“We were the only Arkansas couple at the Armed to Farm program, which was held at the University of Arkansas,” Jana said. “It was the first year they offered it. It was awesome.

“They talked about anything and everything you needed to know about sustainable farming. It included classroom training and hands-on farm experience.”

The Heltons began farming in 2014 and now raise grass-fed cattle and hogs and, sometimes, chickens.

“We just got 36 piglets that roam around in the woods,” Jana said. “We have 20 steers and are about to buy 20 more. We raise the animals to a certain weight, butcher them and process the meat, which goes into our freezers at the Olde Crow General Store, where we sell it to our customers.”

The couple opened the Olde Crow General Store in October 2015.

Jana said she listened to her instincts once again and investigated the old abandoned store on Arkansas 5 that she saw every day as she drove back and forth to work in Little Rock. She is the director of financial operations at GastroArkansas, a medical facility that specializes in gastrointestinal medicine.

The Heltons were able to secure the old building, remodel it and open it as a general store. The store features not only the Heltons’ fresh meats, but also fresh produce and products from other local vendors.

In addition to help received from the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group and the Armed to Farm program, the Heltons have found additional support through the Homegrown By Heroes program, sponsored by the Farmer Veteran Coalition; AR Grown/Homegrown By Heroes, sponsored by the Arkansas Agriculture Department; and the Grass Roots Farmers’ Cooperative, supported by Heifer International.

“We want other veterans to know our story,” Jana said. “It’s all about networking. There are people out there willing to help. … You just have to know where to find them.”

Damon can be found at the Olde Crow General Store most every day and is more than willing to share the couple’s story. For more information, visit the Olde Crow General Store’s Facebook page.

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