The USDA says the hungriest people in America live in Arkansas. On any given day almost 30% of our families don’t have enough food to eat.
The problem is we don’t grow food; we grow cotton, corn and soybeans, meaning fiber, bio-fuel and poultry feed. And while our people are going hungry, our farmers are going broke.
The USDA, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has created a perverse set of incentives encouraging Arkansas farmers to plant export-based row crops that are subject to international competition, geopolitical machinations and prices that farmers have no control over. Even our rice farmers, the only producers growing food, face competition from low-wage countries, heavy foreign subsidies, high input and interest rates and a projected loss of $300 for every acre they plant. In hopes of maybe breaking even, many rice farmers are converting to soybeans, which is like running into a burning house to escape a wildfire.
What we need is a new system that incentivizes farmers to grow food for local people instead of fiber, fuel and feed. We need to rewrite the rules of farming.
Growing food carries its own risks with insects, soil disease and a host of other problems. But fresh fruits and vegetables are less vulnerable to international competition, can generate more profits per acre and are needed locally. Prices are through the roof at the grocery store, forcing low income Arkansans to eat cheaper, calorie-dense, highly processed foods. A greater supply of whole foods would lower food costs and put a healthy diet back in the reach of more Arkansans.
Asking row crop farmers to wander off into the wilds of specialty crop farming is a heavy lift. At present, row crop farmers receive much more federal support than fruit and vegetable farmers. For example, if prices fall below congressionally set levels, row crop farmers are paid much of the difference, but the same is not true for specialty crop farmers. And heavily subsidized crop insurance is designed for row crop farmers, not specialty crop producers. A row crop farmer, in some instances, can even see his subsidized insurance coverage reduced if he tries to transition and dedicates too much of his land to specialty crop production. This needs to change.
Equipment is another obstacle. Row crops need expensive combines and tractors; vegetables need plastic mulch layers, special seeders and lots of labor. Row crops need grain elevators to store the harvest. Vegetables need coolers, washing stations and packing sheds.
Actually the infrastructure already exists to make these transitions possible. The USDA has a program called EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) that helps vegetable farmers pay for hoop houses, wells, fencing and other improvements. If that program was expanded to include the cost of specialized vegetable equipment, the transition becomes more possible.
Specialty crop farming needs workers – lots of them. In 1936 the Rust Mechanical Cotton Picker was successfully demonstrated at the Delta Experiment Station in Stoneville, Mississippi. Thus began the depopulation of the Delta, turning much of its population into surplus labor.
I once met a highly mechanized Arkansas rice farmer who cultivated 10,000 acres with only three employees. Tomatoes, cucumbers and melons, on the other hand, require any number of workers. Labor-intensive vegetable farms would repopulate the Delta and turn the local economies around, but it would mean rethinking our current immigration policy.
The California fruit and vegetable industry has kept California’s rural economy thriving, thanks to its many Latino farm workers. The lack of people in the Delta not only discourages a transition to produce farming, it discourages other economic development because there are few workers. President Trump said that opponents of data centers must want to be poor and backward. That’s how I see opposition to immigrant farm workers. The minimum wage in Mexico is $17 a day versus $88 in Arkansas. A rational, welcoming immigration policy combined with a strong fruit and vegetable industry could turn the Delta around almost overnight. We should think of specialty crop farming as economic development.
In a sense, Arkansas row crop farmers are trapped. In 2026 Arkansas soybean farmers lost $80 for every acre they planted. Cotton lost $342 per acre. A banker told me that more than a quarter of the agricultural loans in Arkansas are non-performing. It’s no surprise that Arkansas led the nation in farm bankruptcies in 2025.
In contrast, farmers growing bulk tomatoes are making an average $2,000 profit per acre, and organic farmers who are direct-marketing their tomatoes can make as much as $15,000 an acre. It is a similar story with beets, sweet potatoes, zucchini and most other specialty crops.
The challenge is to remove the obstacles, a few of which I have described. Some of it is USDA policy that favors money-losing row crops over profitable fruits and vegetables. Expanding the EQIP program to include farm machinery would make a transition to specialty crop farming much easier. Some of these changes would be a temporary burden on the taxpayer, but constantly bailing out farmers, some of them big and rich, is even more expensive. We should make that road from row crop to specialty crop farming as smooth and as wide as possible. It would truly be a new day in the Delta.
Alan Leveritt is founder, owner and publisher of the Arkansas Times. For 40 years he has lived on his family’s old homeplace where he grows fruits and vegetables.
