Damon and Terri’s farm is in the southern part of the county. It includes two poultry houses, to raise broilers up to a little over seven weeks of age then sell them to Tyson Foods. About 50 head of cattle roam the 240 acres, drinking from two ponds and eating the grass. 

Their son Jeremy helps out during the week. He was not present at our interview, but today his sons tagged along on our tour, which took us briefly by one of the two houses that had just been stocked that day with about 25,000 tiny, fluffy, yellow birds. 

The little chicks mostly gathered around their feed trays, a few sipped water from the little dispensers that hang from one of several grey pipes hovering about an inch above the sawdust floor and fewer still slept, their blue eyelids closed. The Williams have to keep the interior of these houses at 90 degrees until the birds grow for a couple weeks. By the time they are seven weeks old, the birds are comfortable with temperatures as low as 70. 

The farmland has been in the Williams family since 1973 when Damon’s father Don moved the family from Houston onto land he bought in Bodcaw. Damon said it wasn’t very much of a culture shock at the time, moving from a metropolis to the deep country because he and his father had always enjoyed prior trips to Arkansas to visit one of Damon’s uncle in Laneburg. “Next thing we knew, we were packing up a U-Haul and headed to Bodcaw, Arkansas,” Damon said. 

After his father died, Damon’s mother sold the land his father had bought in Bodcaw, but he got it back twenty years later.  During those years, Damon built a career, mostly in girls’ basketball coaching for Arkansas public schools. 

Damon began coaching at Cale in 1983, then Nevada for two years and Wickes, Arkansas for 23. “I was blessed very much there, had a lot of success, won a state championship, numerous regionals and district,” he said. He was also coach of the high school boys at Nashville for his last seven years, retiring in 2020 after 37 years in the profession. 

Terri’s career has been in education, too. She worked for 29 years for the DeQueen-Mena Educational Service Cooperative in Gilham, Arkansas. Then for the past eight years she was the director of the Foster Grandparent program, which places senior citizens in schools to tutor and mentor kids deemed at-risk. 

The couple now live in a spacious, tall home on land once owned by Terri’s father with a wood and stone exterior and stained plywood walls inside. There’s an upstairs loft where the grandsons can try their hand shooting a basketball. From the kitchen, you can look out the big panel window across the deck and see deer coming out from the back woods to drink from a blue-grey pond. Behind the home is an acre or so of tilled soil, black and thick from a Monday night rain. Growing there are corn, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, pinto beans, okra and peppers. 

A typical day at the farm, Damon said, involves being watchful. “[I] go to the chicken houses, run them, just basically make sure everything is working. If there’s any mortality, get them out of the way. Check the cows while I’m over there. Like the storm we had last night. I’ll take my side-by-side and drive around the fences, make sure there’s not a tree on them,” he said. 

The summers are for the growing and harvesting of hay. Damon said his lands produce Bermuda and Bahia. In addition to supplying their own animals, the Williams also provide hay to the cattle farm owned by Terri’s brother. “It keeps us busy through the summer, but it’s been kind of itchy this summer, because we can’t get a four-day window in there to get it up,” Damon said, referring to the rains that have fallen pretty often this late spring. 

Asked their reactions to being notified by Farm Bureau they had made Nevada County Farm Family of the Year, Terri seemed to speak for both. “We were surprised,” she said. “We never really thought about it.” The Williams learned they were this year’s choice on May 14th. Farm Bureau announced its list that day. 

The program has been in existence since 1947. Judges will visit the Williams’ farm and meet the family in about a week, then on June 17th announce the Farm Family of the Year for the district that includes several southwest Arkansas counties. In December, the state Farm Family of the Year will be announced, and that family will compete for the Sunbelt Expo Southeastern Farmer of the Year. 

According to Farm Bureau’s website, the family chosen for Arkansas Farm Family of the Year will be chosen based on “efficiency of production, conservation of energy and resources, leadership in agricultural and community affairs, home and farm improvement, and home and farm management.” 

(Photos by Ethan Houk)