Agriculture is the Heart of Crittenden County

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I grew up around here, and one of the things I understood very early on was that this is farming country. When I was three years old, I apparently wandered off from my yard into a soybean field behind the house and got lost enough that there was a pretty large search party looking for me for a little while. When we would make the “long” journey from our house in Marion to my grandmother’s house in West Memphis, we kids always wanted to go what we called “the Country Way” down Highway 77, and when we were bored, we’d pile into my mother’s 50-foot-long station wagon and go ride out by Martha’s Bridge and cruise all the dirt roads.

Well, the field behind our house has a mini-storage and a Dollar General “growing” in it now. The good old “Country Way” is now lined with subdivisions, office buildings and retail stores. And Martha’s bridge in basically in a neighborhood now. As far as dirt roads nowadays, if you’re on one, you’d better have permission because you’re probably on private property.

But if you look around, you’ll still see plenty of farm land. In fact, the house I live in now is the last house on the left of a dead-end street and at the end of that street is a field that is full of what appears to be a nice crop of developing soybeans. I’ll try not to get lost in them.

If you’re like me and you’ve been around these parts, you know all the local farming names – Fogleman, Marconi, Gammon, Sharp, Bramucci, Morrison, and, of course, this year’s Farm Family of the Year, Pirani. Many of the streets, subdivisions and buildings in this area are named after some of these farmers from days gone by, so even as progress takes its long, slow but never-ending stroll across the fields of this county and paves over the ground that has produced cotton, corn, rice and more for generations, we’ll at least have a reminder of the families and the farmers that have played a pivotal role in growing not only crops, but a community and its people.

Farming has changed a lot over the years. Margaret Woolfolk’s awesome book “A History of Crittenden County, Arkansas” is a great testament to that. I happen to own a copy. The Marion Library (named, fittingly enough, after Ms. Woolfolk) has a few too, if you’d like to read it. The whole volume is just an amazing look at how we got from a swampy piece of land that was part of a Spanish land grant to where we are today (well, where we were in 1991 when the book was published).

There’s a lot to read, but there’s a whole section devoted exclusively to agriculture, including cotton being hand-picked and a photo of the Thompson Cotton Gin in West Memphis, the city’s first gin. According to the book, in 1982, of the 389,184 acres that make up Crittenden County, 371,634 of them were made up of farmland. While that number has decreased dramatically (and allowed for exponential growth in the

See HEART, page B5

Just a look at some of the many farming plots that make up Crittenden County’s agricultural acreage.

Photo courtesy of Crittenden County Cooperative Exchange HEART

From page B4

county’s population in those 38 years), there are still thousands and thousands of acres being planted every year. There’s too much history to include here, but the one takeaway Woolfolk’s book want to instill in the reader is that since the early 1800s when the swamps were drained, farming was, and I would argue remains, the backbone of Crittenden County.

Today, the mule and plow have been replaced by the tractor. The combine has largely taken over for the team of cotton pickers with their sacks. You can program a harvester with a GPS navigation system that almost doesn’t even need a driver in the seat.

The levees protect the fields from seasonal flooding and high-tech irrigation systems keep crops watered when the temperamental seasonal rains refuse to fall.

But still, at the heart of Crittenden County is farming. And at the heart of farming is the farmer. And in the heart of every farmer is his family.

This year, Sam Pirani and his family are being honored as the 2020 Crittenden County Farm Family of the Year. As you’ll read in these pages, Sam is a fourth-generation farmer, doing his part to keep that heart of Crittenden County beating for years to come.

Congratulations, Sam!