Arkansas Delta

We're reducing runoff.

And in turn, that's reducing duck holes and changing the way the delta is acting in some places where we've put so many acres of trees out

there.

What about evapotranspiration? Now, bear with me because quick, quick.

We're talking about a massive landscape that in 20 or 30 years could be much drier.

than it's ever been

so so what really clued me into this was years ago and i'm talking about 25 years ago probably i was at a meeting and a a uh hydrologist spoke really about groundwater in the delta and wells and those kind of things but anyway i i was asking him a question afterwards and and he asked me what i did and i told him what my job was and he said i could spend my next career i could spend the next 30 years proving that all this crp and wrp that y'all are putting on the landscape is going to change hydrology and i said and i thought he was talking about us building duck holes right and i said yeah you know we're putting a lot of hydrology out there he said no not what you're putting out there he said what's going to change naturally I said, OK, what are you talking about? You know, and he explained to me what I just explained, kind of, you know, and I'm no soil scientist, so I probably didn't explain it that well.

But but anyway, I always had that in the back of my mind and I knew enough about soils.

If you've seen the news lately or if you've been to the diesel pump, those diesel prices have reached a record of $6.23 per gallon, more than double where future prices stood a year ago.

With temperatures expected to remain in the upper 90s and lower rain in the forecast across the Arkansas Delta, harvest should continue moving quickly.

but farmers will be hoping that faster pace can help offset some of those rising costs so we'll see uh just kind of some takeaways here dry weather has created an ex excellent window for getting crops out of the field but uh harvest does not necessarily mean a profitable one yield and quality will ultimately matter more than how quickly the combines move There's a wide variation in yields.

There's another reminder that statewide averages do not always reflect.

Implemented.

And that's where the extension side comes in.

And then, you know, from an education standpoint, the opportunity that we have here for young people to come in throughout the region, to come in and really learn from the farm to the fork where the food is coming from, gives us an opportunity for that generation of young people to have a better understanding about, one, rice production in northeast Arkansas and throughout the Arkansas Delta, but also just row crop.

Agriculture is our number one industry in the state of Arkansas.

And these are like, you know, K-12 permanent school closures, mostly in rural communities, although now given the pervasiveness of school closure, I've been doing a lot more work in other settings too.

But I've got a long-term ethnographic project looking at the effects of rural school closures in predominantly black communities in the Arkansas Delta and what these closures mean for communities.

And so I'm moving into the writing phase there.

So that will likely be my next book, hopefully a few years down the road.

I think the tariffs are the ice cream on the cake of a perfect storm.

After a horrible year last year where most farmers in Arkansas Delta lost money, this year is going to be worse.

We

made a decision to go out this year in the spring.

A few days later, someone did.

A traveling phonograph salesman named F.K. Marks was in the Arkansas Delta when he spotted a farmhand who looked remarkably like the photograph of the murdered man he'd seen in the newspaper.

Marks approached him, and the farmhand said he was Connie Franklin.

Marks told him that back in Stone County, five men had been indicted for murdering him.

and according to Rogers, he was still very much alive the following day.

He said Tiller told him she wanted to postpone their wedding until fall, but he didn't want to wait, so he gave her an ultimatum, marry him then, or he was leaving town and wouldn't come back.

Tiller refused, so according to Rogers, that's why he left Stone County and never looked back, at least not until someone found him in the Delta and told him he'd been murdered.

Defense attorney Ben Williamson eventually asked Rogers the question that was odd but had to be on the record.

Yeah, I like that philosophy.

I know in the Arkansas Delta right now, it's death outside.

I mean, it'd kill you, buddy.

Yeah, I know, I know.