Lewis Farms:
Managing for Sustainability
By Deborah S. Wechsler (2004)

Ephron Lewis
Lewis Farms
1127 CR 1005
Earle, AR 72331

Though other black farmers have been going out of business all across the country, Ephron Lewis has been able to expand his farm and increase its sustainability. Born and raised on the farm he now works and owns, which is located in eastern Arkansas about 30 miles west of Memphis, Tennessee, Ephron has farmed most of his life, except for his college years and a stint in the military. While at first he had no intention of farming—his brothers were going to take over the family farm—when one of his brothers broke his back and Ephron was discharged from the Army, he came back to the farm to help the family. When his other brother retired, Ephron took over the farm.

Where his father raised cotton, Ephron now raises rice, which became the dominant crop in his area in the 1970s, as well as soybeans and wheat. Several choices have been key to the farm’s sustainability. “We had bought a lot of land early on,” he says, “but then for a time, it was very difficult to borrow money, so we learned to be efficient in what we do and managed our debt carefully.” He points out, “Money management is one of the most important parts of farming. You need to have a budget and stay within it. It’s important to invest in your crop at the beginning to give it a good start, but then you need to look at each potential expenditure and see if it is really going to make a difference to the profitability.” Ephron makes use of forward contracting and on-farm storage to get the best price for his grain and beans. And he and his wife, Nora, diversified the farm by building a rice milling operation.

Over the years, he has expanded his father’s original 350 acres to 3000, spread over several locations, by renting and leasing land from family and neighbors. His networks in the community run deep. In the past, he used to have a lot of people working for him—as many as ten tractor drivers, he says, and he would plant a lot of vegetables that these workers could tend and harvest. Now, with more efficient equipment, he only has 2-3 employees, plus a few others at planting time. The vegetables are gone, but the community relationships have created a flexible variety of land use arrangements that have increased his working acreage.

While he owns field implements such as disks, field cultivators, grain drills, and power units for irrigation, he leases larger machinery such as tractors and combines. By his calculations, leasing these for three or four years is a lot better than buying, since it frees up capital, reduces risk, and releases him from the responsibility for repair costs.

Use of off-farm inputs is also limited. He uses no cover crops, but he does a lot of minimum-tillage, breaking the land after harvest in the fall, spraying herbicides, disking in the straw, and planting his beans and rice into a “stale seed bed” in spring. To save trips over the field, he tries not to work the land again. His crops are grown in a one-year rotation, with rice followed by soybeans, or rice/wheat/soybeans. The only crop he fertilizes is rice, using a 45-0-0 urea product. Ephron notes that the acidity of this fertilizer and the alkalinity of the well water with which he irrigates tend to balance each other.

Ephron irrigates both his rice, grown in flooded fields, and his soybeans. “We try very hard to do a good job of water management,” he says. While many fields in the area are irrigated with simple flood irrigation, which is very wasteful of water, he is using newer methods that conserve water. Fields are surveyed to determine their lines of highest rise, and then water is pumped in along these slight ridges and allowed to trickle slowly to the ends of the fields. “We’ve been working with the Natural Resource Conservation Service on land leveling, though it is hard to get conservation funds for this,” he says. He scouts his fields as he irrigates, but he has never sprayed for pests, though occasionally stink bugs and grasshoppers are a problem in the rice.

In 1985, he and his wife built a rice mill. They shut down for a number of years during the 1990s to remodel and retool—and obtain the funding for this project—but the mill reopened in 2002 with an expanded facility and “state-of-the-art” machinery that can produce quality white rice. The mill produces brown rice, white rice, and enriched rice, packaged in 50 or 100-lb bags, which are sold through brokers. “I tried selling direct to the supermarket chains, but the cost of packaging and marketing is too high,” he comments.

His son, Ephron Lewis, Jr., now manages the rice mill, which employs seven people and is a separate corporation from the farm. The Lewis & Son Rice Processing Corporation processes the farm’s own rice and buys raw rice from local granaries. The mill adds value to the Lewises’ own rice crop and diversifies the family’s income sources. So far, however, profits are being returned to the mill as the newly re-opened business grows.

“To farm, you need to love it and it will make you an honest living,” says Ephron Lewis. “It doesn’t take much for me, I just want to live fairly decent. It’s no eight-to-five job--you have to put in the amount of time it takes to do the job.” Ephron plans to farm a few more years, then rent the farm to someone else and retire. With all the hard work Ephron has done to hold the farm together and improve its sustainability, that someone else will have a much easier time.

Location: Earle, Arkansas
Climate zone:  7 
Soil type: Heavy clay
Years in commercial production: 40-plus
Acreage: Approximately 3000
Crops/products: Rice, soybeans, wheat
Value-added products: Milled and bagged brown, white, and enriched rice
Notable facilities and equipment: Rice milling plant
Markets: Conventional wholesale
Labor: 2-3 fulltime employees on the farm, with extra part-time help at planting. 7-8 in rice mill.