Arkansas Farmer Adam Chappell: ‘It’s Bad Out There’

Adam Chappell heard his father’s warnings when he was growing up.  He should get a college degree and do something else rather than farming. Chappell watched his brother, Seth, leave the farm recently. He worries that he will be next…along with many of his neighbors.

Chappell farms about one third of the 8,000 acres he once had with his brother in rural Cotton Plant, Arkansas, a town that now has about one third as many residents as the 1,600 who lived there a century ago.

“It’s bad out there. It’s bad,” Chappell told American Farmland Owner after a 16-hour day that included an 8-hour round trip to Mississippi to deliver his side hustle: cover crop seeds to another producer.

“We’re talking about 30 to 40 percent of the farmers in Arkansas going belly up this year. That’s from bankers’ mouths, not just coffee shop talk,” he lamented as he laid out his economic angst for his fellow farmers.

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Family Farm Faces Uncertain Financial Future

Chappell is not a newbie with rookie jitters. He is 46 and a fourth-generation farmer with family expertise on maximizing yields on corn, cotton, soybeans, and rice. He has embraced new ways of farming, something that had given him hope.

But things have been changing quickly, especially compared to his grandfather’s time.

“Cotton was a real big thing in ‘Papaw’s’ day,” he recalled. “The town we farm in is called ‘Cotton Plant’ for a reason. Now, these days, there’s less cotton than any other crop. It’s just a sign of the times.”

Flooding this spring kept Chappell from planting rice altogether. “I decided not to risk it,” he said. “I just used that opportunity to spread some compost and plant some cover crops. Just wait till next year on the rice.”

But he fears that for many, there may be no “next year.” Chappell described a recent emergency meeting of farmers in northeast Arkansas that exposed the scale of the crisis.

“I was thinking we’d have maybe 30 or 40 people,” he said.

At least that was what he expected when he agreed to make the nearly four-hour round trip on a Tuesday, a day that he had originally planned to work in the fields.

“There were between 500 and 600 farmers in there, and other industry people…pilots, suppliers, bankers. The desperation I saw in that room said more to me than anything anybody said,” Chappell said.

That desperation followed three especially lean years. But for Chappell, it represented the decades-long fall that so many family farmers experienced as consolidation made it increasingly difficult to survive economically.

Consolidation in Agriculture

Chappell didn’t shy away from naming the root causes.

“This problem’s been building for 50 years,” he said. “Big Ag monopolies are the source of all this trouble.”

He pointed to the market domination by a handful of companies controlling seed, fertilizer, and equipment. “Four companies control all the seed genetics. Two or three control all the fertilizer. Two, maybe three, control the machinery. That’s not capitalism. That’s an oligopoly,” Chappell said as his frustration grew evident.

In Chappell’s view, these corporations have used their lobbying power not to support farmers, but to preserve profit margins, even when the market crumbles.

“Big Ag started lobbying Congress for ad hoc payments last summer. Farmers weren’t asking for those payments; Big Ag was. They knew what was coming, and they wanted subsidies to keep the profits rolling.”

With prices down, input costs high, and profit margins razor-thin, Chappell said that farmers are quitting, and few are stepping in to replace them.

Chappell thinks about his younger brother. “He saw things happening and said, ‘I can’t make a go of this.’ He was smart enough to know it wasn’t good,” Chappell said.

The barriers to entry are steep. “The debt you’d have to take on to buy tractors, combines—there’s no way you could cash flow that,” he worried as he thought about the challenges of younger Americans who would like to get into farming.

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The Future of Farming

Many farmers are pinning their hopes on government intervention, but they’re not holding their breath.

“We haven’t had a farm bill in years,” Chappell said. “They’re (Congress) going to have to provide an ad hoc payment. I hate that. I’d love to be a tax-paying citizen, not barely squeaking by every year and depending on taxpayer dollars.”

Even recent efforts to get Washington’s attention have fallen flat. At that packed meeting in Jonesboro, no elected officials showed up—only staff.

“They listened from 8:30 to 9:30 and wrapped it up. You had 600 desperate people in the room, and they were there for an hour.”

Years ago, his father warned him: farming isn’t a 9-to-5 job. “My head is hard as a rock, buddy…I didn’t listen,” Chappell said as he turned his thoughts to the stress so many are facing.

Today, the joy of farming is gone. “Farming used to be fun. It started not being fun about 10 years ago. It’s damn sure not fun right now,” he said.

His concerns for what is ahead go much further than the borders of Arkansas. “If farmers go under, entire communities go with them. This affects everybody.”