We grow stuff in Arkansas — most of it legal. And we grow it real good.
Agriculture is one of the things we do best.
Football and basketball are not on the list of things we do well right now, although track and gymnastics are.
Actually, we had a pretty good football harvest out of Jonesboro this year, landing Arkansas State in the Go Daddy Bowl for the third consecutive year.
But mostly what we do is, we grow rice and cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans. We grow strawberries and peaches up around Cabot, blueberries in the Northwest and cows anywhere we can grow grass. We grow chickens and turkeys in places that don’t get too hot, and hogs if we can find a pristine national river to threaten.
We grow tomatoes around Warren — but not the Warren Pink Tomato anymore. We grow grapes around Altus and we turn them into wine at any of several local wineries.
We grow purple hull peas and melons around Gould.
We grow loblolly pine really well in south Arkansas — we don’t cut trees anymore, we plant them in rows and we harvest them with large machines and turn them into building materials and jobs. We grow hardwoods in the Ozark Mountains, where the terrain is inhospitable to giant tree harvesting machines, and cut the big oak and hickory and ash, gum and walnut, skid them to the road—some places by mule—and take them to little pecker-wood sawmills, where they are turned into wood for flooring, or railroad ties.
We grow — or grew — catfish in the southern part of the state, and minnows, goldfish and catfish for pond stocking in the Lonoke County area.
We grow healthy deer and elk through careful population management by the often unpopular state Game and Fish Commission, and thanks to additional habitat management by Ducks Unlimited, the Army Corps of Engineers and farmers, gaggles of geese and flocks of ducks come to Arkansas, with out-of-state hunters and and their tourist dollars in hot pursuit.
An estimated one-in-six jobs in Arkansas is agriculture related. That’s about a quarter of a million agriculture-related jobs. It’s a livelihood, and it’s a way of life.
So when it comes time to craft and pass the 2014 farm bill, what’s not to like?
Well, you’ll have to ask Tom Cotton, the first-term congressman from Dardanelle. Cotton is challenging Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.). Pryor’s voting for the farm bill, just like every congressman and senator in the state except Cotton.
He can’t be too bad a fella, his mom endorsed him in a TV ad, and she seems like good people and he seems to be the darling of billionaire coal and oil barons and their political action committees.
But tourism and agriculture are the lynchpins of Arkansas’ economy, and it just seems like good sense to support your neighbors and constituents.
Here’s part of what this farm bill does—it provides a safety net and a road map for farmers trying to navigate the rough waters of drought and hail, flood and insect pest, overproduction, and expensive seed and chemicals.
It provides money for small community water projects and food stamps for people who for any number of reasons can’t afford to feed their families.
It does all that while cutting $23 billion out of the budget over the next 10 years.
This comprehensive bill includes provisions that will benefit Arkansas’ agriculture industry—and its $17 billion of economic activity annually. It provides strong protections for southern farmers and continuation of the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program. It makes the Livestock Disaster Assistance Program permanent and keeps the Rural Development Funding for waste water management to farmers and ranchers and has provisions in the bill to conserve land for hunting, fishing and enjoying the outdoors.
Arkansas was well served on this bill by congressmen Tim Griffin, Steve Womack and Rick Crawford, all Republicans, and senators John Boozman (R-Ark.) and Pryor, all of whom support this bipartisan bill at a time when opposing lawmakers in the nation’s capital can hardly agree on dinner.
We were particularly well represented by Crawford and Boozman, who served on the bill’s joint conference committee, bridging gaps and smoothing a hard, rough road until they came up with a bill any Arkansan could be proud of.
Well, almost any.
