Arkansas has a rich agricultural heritage, for sure. We’re basically famous for our rice and poultry these days, but the advancements in agriculture have certainly changed what that industry looks like today. Below you’ll find fifteen pictures taken in the 1930s that show the faces, landscapes, and technologies of Arkansas’s agriculture way back in the day. These pictures will have today’s farmers thanking the good Lord for how far we’ve come.
- In 1935 the practice of sharecropping was still ongoing, and families struggled.
Yale/Arthur Rothstein
- Plantations were still in existence in the 1930s too, like the Stortz Cotton Plantation in Pulaski County. Pictured here is the lunch break of the field workers on that plantation.
Yale Photogrammer/Arthur Rothstein
- Arkansas is primarily known for its rice production these days, but in the 1930s cotton was still an important cash crop.
Yale Photogrammer/Ben Shahn
- We use huge trucks to move things around now, but bringing in the cotton back then meant hitching up a wagon.
Yale Photogrammer/Ben Shahn
- Thankfully, child labor laws mean children no longer work our fields.
Yale Photogrammer/Ben Shahn
- The youngest cotton chopper in this image was only eight.
Yale Photogrammer/Dorothea Lange
- Most of our harvesting processes are helped along by machines now, so homemade knee pads are no longer a necessity for those in the agricultural industry.
Yale Photogrammer/Russell Lee
Moving crops around no longer requires the use of mules.
Harvesting equipment today doesn’t require a farrier.
Yale Photogrammer/Marion Post Walcott
- Old barns are seen as quaint these days, but it used to be those wooden monoliths served a very important function.
Yale Photogrammer/Russell Lee
- Cutting hay no longer looks like this image from 1938:
Yale Photogrammer/Russell Lee
- The landscape of the Delta is no longer dotted with shacks where hardworking families live.
Yale Photogrammer/Carl Mydans
- Today the Delta doesn’t have to worry so much about devastating floods, either.
Yale Photogrammer/Edwin Locke
- Some things haven’t changed all that much. The need for storm cellars, for example.
Yale Photogrammer/Carl Mydans
- The endless look of the Delta fields also remains virtually the same.
Yale Photogrammer/Dorothea Lange
Flickr/uacescomm
For more cool historic pictures from Arkansas’s past, click here. To read all about why the Delta is one of the coolest places in the Natural State, try this one.
Yale/Arthur Rothstein
Yale Photogrammer/Arthur Rothstein
Yale Photogrammer/Ben Shahn
Yale Photogrammer/Dorothea Lange
Yale Photogrammer/Russell Lee
Yale Photogrammer/Marion Post Walcott
Yale Photogrammer/Carl Mydans
Yale Photogrammer/Edwin Locke
Flickr/uacescomm
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