5 Generations — Johnson County
Photo provided by Mark Morgan
Describing the history of his family’s turkey, cattle and peach-growing operation near Clarksville and Lamar, Mark Morgan shared a tidbit of family lore that is exceptional on several levels.
“We’ve got a receipt in the family Bible that goes back to 1890, when they first bought peach trees,” he said. “Commercially, it started in the early 1900s, around 1910 or so.”
The tidbit is telling not only of the family’s longevity but of its faith, given the history recorded in the Good Book. Farming is daunting enough, as Morgan is quick to agree; farming without faith is damn near impossible.
“I’ve always been one that’s like, ‘Hey, deal the cards, and I’ll play however they’re dealt,’” he said. “It’s like, here, you’ve got these circumstances. Make the best of it. That’s the way I was wired.”
In fact, had Morgan’s original hand played the way he had envisioned, he likely would not have come home to the family operation at all.
“When I went to college, I went to U of A, and my major was ag business, animal science. I did not want to come back to the farm,” he said. “Even when I graduated with my undergrad degree and it was coming up time to look for a job I didn’t want to come back to the farm then. I got a master’s degree, and I traveled a lot, working in animal science, and during that job, that’s really when I realized, you know, the pathway to the farm was still there.
“The way my personality is, I had to go do something else before I realized what I missed, and you know what? It drew me back. I came back to the farm in 2009.”
When Morgan returned, he joined forces with his father, Steve. That arrangement does not work in all father-son relationships, but the duo found a mutual respect that allowed the wisdom of the elder to blend with the new ideas of the junior. The combination worked so well that in 2016, they were honored as Arkansas Farm Bureau’s Farm Family of the Year.
“I was very fortunate,” Mark Morgan said. “My dad and my grandpa ran this operation for a long time, and it really takes two or more people to manage it. When my grandpa got sick and passed away in the late ’90s, Dad held on to all three things, peaches, cattle and turkey, so it was there for me to come back to and be very useful.
“Dad was always great in that anytime I had an idea or wanted to try something, he was open to that. I know a lot of people that grew up in the, ‘We’ve always done it this way; that’s how we’re going to do it,’ mentality. You know, a lot of the things we still do like we have been doing forever because that’s the best way to do it, but he was always open to new ideas, which is a credit to him.”
