The Growing Season

Join actor and musician, Ben Dickey, on The Growing Season, a new agricultural podcast from Arkansas PBS. The growing season is a monthly podcast that will follow the stories of six Arkansas farmers as they work through a year on their land.  We will focus on what it truly means to be a farmer today, and the stressors and struggles that come with the lifestyle.

Six Arkansas farmers look back at how their stories lead them to today. From a mother and daughter team running a small agritourist operation, to an East Arkansas row crop farmer starting his thirty-second season -- no two farms, and no two stories are ever exactly alike.

Arkansas April brought with it a violent storm system, who's tornadic activity left a valley of destruction across the state. As our farmers prepare for and cope with that destruction, we highlight the unpredictable demands of the farming lifestyle. We also speak with Dr. Teresa Hudson of the Psychiatric Research Institute at UAMS on the different types of stress and their effects on the body and mind. 

Farmers have an intimate relationship with the food they grow. From cabbage to cattle, Arkansas farmers dedicate their lives to raising quality food for their consumers and community. However, in the day-to-day , farmers struggle as much or more than the average family with maintaining a nutritious diet. This episode highlights the factors that stand in their way, and the impact this “fast diet” can have on their physical, mental and emotional health. 

The cost of farming has always been high and has only exploded with inflation.  There are the constants of seed, feed, chemicals, and fuel – the overhanging debt of land leases and the unforeseen bills of equipment maintenance and repairs. Almost all farmers take out yearly loans, betting on the hope that their harvest profits can pay the debts.  Everybody knows somebody who’s had a bad year and got “upside down” in their borrowing.  This “gamble” can greatly affect a farmer’s mental health.

2022 saw one of the hottest, driest summers on record. For crops and livestock, water becomes more valuable than gold – and for farmers, it can feel just as expensive. Rising global temperatures are making Arkansas winters more violent, and summers more parched.  This episode will highlight how a fickle climate is one more factor farmers can’t control, but always have to answer for. 

After a wet spring and a long summer, the growing season is ramping up before harvest, and Arkansas farmers are looking for relief from the work wherever they can find it. It might mean delivering cattle to Dodge City, KS or lazing on a beach in Aruba. Regardless, when you live where you work, like most farmers do, it is vitally important you take time for yourself and step away from the labor, even if only for a moment. 

Harvest comes for every farm -- regardless of the difficulties in that year's growing season. 2022 in Arkansas was no different.  As our farmers find a break in the heat and finally get a chance to bask in the fruits of their labor, they find that break is short-lived as the work of harvest sets in hard and fast.

With the season and the harvest finally behind us, the farmers have a fuller and clearer understanding of just what they accomplished this season. What worked? what didn’t? What energy and money was wasted? What was saved? We also speak, head-on about the suicide rates in farmers, understanding the larger reckoning within the industry. 

With the approaching holiday season, our farmers take a chance to look past the stress and disappointments of this growing season and consider what they are thankful for, and consider just what it is about their way of life that makes it worth living.