I'm riding with Tim Ralston through the rice fields at Ralston Family Farms. We're in the Arkansas River bottoms near Atkins on a clear day. Petit Jean Mountain is to my left on the other side of the river. Crow Mountain is to my right. Straight ahead, far in the distance, I can see Mount Nebo. I'm surrounded by rice that's turning gold in the late-summer heat.

If it weren't for the three mountains, I could swear I was in east Arkansas. We generally associate rice with the eastern half of the state. After all, it was William Fuller of Carlisle who became known as the father of the Arkansas rice industry after moving to Arkansas from Nebraska.

Fuller was on a hunting trip with friends in Louisiana in 1896 when he first saw rice being grown commercially. He decided to try growing the crop on the Grand Prairie of Arkansas.

Fuller wasn't pleased with the three acres he planted as an experiment in 1897. He went back to Louisiana for several years and learned the techniques used there. A group of business owners in Hazen offered to pay him $1,000 if he could raise 35 bushels of rice per acre in Arkansas in 1904 or 1905. Fuller planted 70 acres in 1904 and more than doubled the output required to win the $1,000.

Rice production took off on the Grand Prairie. The state's first rice mill opened at Stuttgart in 1906. Cities such as Stuttgart (now known as the Rice Capital of the World), Des Arc and DeWitt began to grow. Through the decades, rice production spread north into northeast Arkansas and became a major sector of that region's economy. Arkansas now raises almost half of the nation's rice.

While we normally associate rice with east Arkansas, there are other pockets of the state where rice is grown. For example, the bottomlands on the other side of the Ouachita River from my hometown of Arkadelphia in southwest Arkansas are filled with rice fields. Here near Atkins, Tim Ralston and his wife Robin have an operation that has received international media attention for the........

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