Brent Clark has emerged from his big brother’s shadow.
Brent, a 17-year-old resident of El Paso, was named the new state 4-H president at the annual state O’Rama at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Brent’s brother, Travis, who is older by four years, was state 4-H president in 2015. That inspired Brent, but he was also a little green with envy over the state officers’ attire.
“Whenever I went to my district O-Rama at age 9, I saw the state officers, and they were up there in their green spiffy jackets, and I thought, ‘I want to do that.’ They seemed important.”
Brent was 14 when Travis was named state president.
“It was a very weird thing for 14-year-old me: ‘Yeah, my brother is so cool. Now everybody calls me Little Clark,’” he said.
Although Brent said he felt like he was in Travis’ shadow, “you start embracing it.”
“I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to take over his title when he leaves,’” Brent said.
Brent was a state 4-H officer at large last year. The officers campaigned throughout the summer at various events, including the Teen Leader Conference, the District O-Rama and the State O-Rama.
For his presidential campaign, “I went on the basis of Brent the mechanic — going off fixing a vehicle and fixing 4-H. It was not just all about fixing, but maintenance. It was just to correlate my name with something. One thing that is different this year than when my brother ran — there were no props allowed.”
“I don’t think I’ll get it,” Brent told his older brother.
“[Travis] was like, ‘You’re going to get it.’ He was totally optimistic,” Brent said.
Brent said he took a low-key approach to campaigning.
“I did have posters, but I only pulled out about two of them. I was always one to stray away from putting posters in people’s faces,” he said.
Whatever he did worked. And when he told his big brother that he’d won, Brent said Travis was nonchalant.
“He said, ‘Eh, I knew you’d get it,’” Brent said.
Tracy, Brent’s mom, wasn’t surprised that he won the election, either.
“He’s definitely a go-getter, always has been,” Tracy said.
Participating in 4-H runs deep in the Clark family. Tracy leads the Hooves, Spurs and Fur 4-H Show Team. She and her husband, Randal, were one of four other families who started the club, which was originally the Vilonia 4-H Club. Brent and Travis have two sisters: Emily Underwood, 24, was a 4-H member, and 14-year-old sister Kacie is active with the club.
Brent, a senior, is home-schooled. He said he enjoys it because of the flexibility with his schedule.
The Hooves, Spurs and Fur 4-H Show Team meets at Vilonia First United Methodist Church, which the Clarks attend.
The Clarks, who lived in Vilonia until 2008, have 100 chickens on their farm in El Paso, as well as market hogs. They sell the eggs through an online farmers market as Bar C Family Farm.
Brent has been partial to chickens all his life, while Travis was passionate for pigs, Tracy said. She said Brent was obsessed with dinosaurs, and “he liked chickens because he thought they were close to dinosaurs.”
Brent agreed that he was obsessed with dinosaurs and chickens. He recalled that when he was 4, his older siblings were getting rabbits, and he wanted a chicken. At 5 years old, he started showing chickens at the Faulkner County Fair — Blackie, a black Japanese bantam hen, and Spot, a black Japanese bantam rooster.
The Clarks live in White County, but their home is basically across the street from Faulkner County, Tracy said, so they have always participated in that fair, which was last week. Brent was showing three chickens, but at press time, he didn’t know how they placed.
Being in 4-H “taught me responsibility at a young age,” he said.
“Whenever I was 7, I was like, ‘I want to be an officer with the club. That would be cool.’ I did treasurer. Parents hand you a slip of paper and say, ‘Here’s what you tell them,’” Brent said with a laugh.
He’s given poultry talks at a countywide Faulkner County 4-H competition.
“After that first speech, I was like, ‘Hey, I can do this,’” Brent said.
And he spoke at different club meetings.
“It was definitely eye-opening for me at 9 and 10,” he said. “I was very outgoing, … but the speeches funneled me into a correct direction with my outgoingness.
“Going through those tween years, it’s great to be able to have leadership opportunities, camps and teaching kids. You’ve been taught responsibility, but now you’re getting your feet wet, being pushed to do speeches and talk to kids. Honestly, I’d say that’s the best thing.”
Brent is also a member of the Faulkner County 4-H Teen Leaders Club and helps run the 4-H program, organizing events and helping with camps, whatever Faulkner County 4-H agent Kami Green needs, he said.
Green said she’s excited that Brent is the state 4-H president.
“My biggest thing with him is he is so responsible, and he gives 110 percent, so if I asked him to help with a project, if he can’t give his heart and soul, he’ll say, ‘I can’t do that.’ He’s good to work with the younger kids,” Green said. “He just does an awesome, awesome job. He’s a good shining example of what a 4-H’er should be.”
Brent has several objectives for the year.
“My big goal of this year, and I’m only two months in, is to get the kids more involved in community service. What I see is they just show [animals] or just do their speaking,” he said. “One of the bigger parts of 4-H is community service, and a lot of people lose that.”
The object of Hooves, Spurs and Fur is to help youth improve their animal showmanship, he said.
“We’ve also started venturing into community service,” Brent said, including making cards for veterans and going to a residential veterans home in Vilonia for an evening.
Even outside of 4-H, he’s participated in community service. He’s been part of the Ozark Mission Project in Arkansas through his church. He recalled one project in which he helped the team build a wheelchair ramp and a deck for an elderly woman, as well as clean up her yard and create flower beds.
Through 4-H, he has helped put out mulch and weed the flower beds at Frank Mitchell Intermediate School in Vilonia.
“I helped a Master Gardener, and she’d been working [the flower beds],” Brent said, “and I went with her a few times.”
When the woman couldn’t work on one occasion, he beautified the beds.
“My idea was — we also have an Arkansas 4-H President Instagram Account — I posted it and put how many bags of grass I pulled out. I challenged 4-H’ers to do community service with their counties.”
He said that definitely, his favorite community service through 4-H was cooking a meal at the Ronald McDonald house for a family who had a loved one at Arkansas Children’s Hospital.
“It was really cool because we got to talk to some really cool people,” he said.
Another goal he has is just “to push [4-H members] to do more public speaking. A lot of them are super scared to do any of that. Yeah, it’s scary — I still get stressed — but once you do it, you’ll feel a lot better, and you’ll feel like you can go do it again.”
Clark said that this year, he will travel Arkansas and outside the state to represent 4-H.
The biggest project will be planning a Teen Leader Conference to take place in June at the C.A. Vines Arkansas 4-H Center in Ferndale. He said about 500 youth are expected to attend the conference.
Brent said his sister Kacie is determined to be a state 4-H officer someday, too.
He said his advice to her was, “Don’t do it just because you’re told to. I don’t mean that in don’t follow the law. I say that as in, people will encourage you: ‘Hey, you need to become an officer,’ … but if that’s not what you truly love, that’s not what you need to do.”
Brent said Kacie told him, “I don’t want to be in your shadow.”
He told her not to worry about that.
“I got out of [Travis’] shadow,” Brent said. “Nobody calls me Little Clark anymore.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-5671 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.