Experience may indeed be the best teacher as beginning farmer Brett Stewart of Brett Stewart Farms has grown his farming operation from 147 acres to over 2,000 acres in six years. Located south of Grider Field Road in Pine Bluff and chosen as the 2022 Farm Bureau Jefferson County Farm Family of the Year, Brett shares this honor with his wife Juli Stewart and their three children, Darla, 5; Heidi, 3 and Teddy, 2.

“We are a first-generation farm family. We started farming because we had a desire to be farmers,” said Brett, who began farming part-time before going full-time in 2017. “We literally started with a pick-up truck and a 4-wheeler.” Brett, who is in his early 30s, knew early on that he wanted to be a farmer. With admiration for the farmers he frequently spent time with growing up, he wanted to follow in their footsteps. “I didn’t know anything about the farming lifestyle because my family or Juli’s isn’t into farming,” said Brett, who believed that farmers were the jack of all trades. “They can fix anything and they are knowledgeable in several different aspects of life.” Wanting to achieve what he said he feels is the American dream, Brett said he and his wife took a leap of faith when they quit their jobs in corporate America to begin farming full-time. Juli worked as a dietitian for UAMS before working for WIC, and Brett was a farmhand before working for the UA Cooperative Extension Service in Monticello.

Pregnant with their oldest child, Darla, Juli said she decided to be a stay-at-home mom when Brett decided to farm full-time. “It was a joke, but we call it career suicide because I was quitting work and he was changing to a completely different job that was not guaranteed income,” said Juli. “We just had faith that God was going to take care of us at that time and he did.” But it wasn’t easy for the family. Though farming seemed cool and the love of operating big machinery was exciting, Brett said his first couple of years were challenging. His first hurdle was that, with no experience, finding someone who would take a chance on him was difficult.

From borrowing and renting equipment, Brett said he had to establish relationships that eventually led to the opportunity to farm full time.

“Our landlord has had to say to themselves, alright I’m going to let this guy who probably doesn’t know what he’s doing farm my land. When we started we were very new,” said Brett. “Most of the farms that we started off with we still have, but those landlords had to take a real chance on us. Our banker did, too.” Making money right away was also a challenge for Brett, who said they experienced hard times hitting rock bottom and being “broke as a joke with less than zero money.” Brett recounted back to the 2018 planting and harvest season as one of the worst. “We didn’t know if we were going to make it through,” he said.

With their second child on the way Brett said he felt like a failure. Due to some bad farming decisions on his part, he said he lost a lot of money that year but wasn’t going to blame the weather for his costly mistakes.

“There are so many decisions that can be made as a farmer that are not weather-related that mitigate stress for your crops,” said Brett, who noted that he found out all about that the hard way. “Now weather plays a huge part in farming, but that’s the one thing I cannot control. We were having trouble with certain diseases that I wasn’t prepared for, with certain pests that I wasn’t prepared for.” In harvesting major crops such as soybeans, corn, rice and wheat, Brett said that, in the beginning, he was not emphasizing variety selection among all crops. Once he made that a priority in each field, many of his management problems and overall yield problems were solved.

He also said seed costs were a major hurdle.

“We found, with a more detailed approach to seed placement, we were able to lower our seeding rates in many scenarios, thus lowering the seed costs,” said Brett. “Identifying priorities was a challenge in the beginning. We struggled separating the most important things from the not-so-important things as it relates to timing of applications. With some experience, it is easier to keep the big things big and the small things small.” Still in the honeymoon stages of farming, as Brett likes to call it, he is looking to increase acres and a fleet of equipment — especially his harvesting equipment.

“Improving our harvest efficiency is one of our next big undertakings. We would like to implement soil moisture probes and weather stations to help us make management decisions for irrigation,” he said. “We would like to improve our soil sampling techniques to include grid sampling.” Currently, Brett operates no-till row rice to save irrigation and fuel. He also utilizes surface water irrigation and tail-water recovery on some fields that are equipped to do so.

“It has been a good practice for us. We added spray nozzles to our soybean planter in order to eliminate an extra tractor pass across the field. With this system, we plant and apply residual herbicide in one pass. This saves fuel and soil compaction,” he said. “We also use Pipe-Planner, which generates our hole sizes for our poly pipe. This dramatically decreases water waste and makes irrigation more efficient.” With several hurdles cleared such as increasing acreage, instituting no-till, and exceeding the 100-bushel mark for wheat and soybeans to name a few, Brett is looking forward to achieving new goals.

“I would like to increase no-till from 30% to 75% and achieve a 1:1 ratio of pounds of nitrogen to bushels of yield corn,” he said. “I want to also achieve a 1-bushel yield per 1,000 plants in soybeans.” One of his biggest goals, however, is to increase efficiency during harvest, covering as much acreage as possible in a day.

Since 1947, the Arkansas Farm Family of the Year Program has served as a vehicle to recognize outstanding farm families throughout the state, according to Jefferson County Farm Bureau spokesperson.

The objectives of the Farm Family of the Year program are: to give recognition and encouragement to the farm family who are doing an outstanding job on their farm and in their community.

to recognize the importance of agriculture in the community and state.

to disseminate information on improved farm practices and management.

Selections are based on efficiency or production, conservation of energy and resources, leadership in agricultural and community affairs, home and farm improvement and home and farm management.

“We can be looked at as the epitome of someone who wants to achieve the American dream because we did not start with a big operation and with a lot of money, but in America, we still live in a great country to where if you want to do something unique, special or big, you can,” Brett said.

“You have to want to and that’s what happened with us. We wanted to. We wanted to start farming,” said Brett, who added that the hard work will eventually pay off. “In America, we still live in a place where if you want to do something cool with your life all you have to do is want to and that’s what we’ve done so far and I hope we can continue to do it.”

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