Both Tyson Foods and Walmart have made Northwest Arkansas one of the most consequential regions for America’s food system. Springdale-based Tyson Foods is the nation’s largest meat company and has completely transformed the way animals are processed, especially poultry.

About 20 miles north on Interstate 49 in Bentonville is the headquarters of Walmart, the nation’s largest grocery chain, with an annual revenue that topped $648 billion last year. With more than 4,600 stores in the U.S., 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart.

However, over the past several decades, Walmart’s corporate presence — which includes more than 1,300 vendors that sell to the retail giant and maintain a local presence — has ushered in a surge of urban development, shifting the region from a farming hub into a major metropolitan area. That transformation appears to be accelerating with the construction of a new Walmart headquarters near downtown Bentonville.

“Once Walmart decided that all of its vendors were going to move here [in the ’90s], they were committed to making this an urban place — which is not what it has been, right?” said Olivia Paschal, a journalist and historian who has written extensively about the company and its roots in Northwest Arkansas.

Paschal said there’s been a push toward attracting high-quality talent — and providing the quasi-urban amenities that such employees would desire — while also trying to preserve the veneer of “being smaller, more authentic, more rural, more outdoorsy.”

From 2002 to 2022, farmland in Benton County decreased by nearly a third to around 217,000 acres, according to the USDA’s most recent Census of Agriculture. In the same time period, the price of that remaining farmland increased by nearly 500%, averaging $13,105 an acre in 2023, according to the Iowa Farmland Value Surveys. Land immediately west of Bentonville sometimes sold for 10 times that figure, according to sales records.

The loss of farmland to urban development can be found across the country.

Between 2001 and 2016, 11 million acres of the nation’s farmland were converted to urban or low-density residential land use, according to an American Farmland Trust report.

In that same report, each state is scored for how well it has responded with policies and programs to preserve farmland. Arkansas ranked last.

In Northwest Arkansas, Walmart’s philanthropic arm, the Walton Family Foundation, has made efforts to preserve the region’s agricultural identity through initiatives focusing on local food, including the soon-to-open Market Center of the Ozarks. However, many local farmers believe the transition away from agriculture is too far along.

“Up into the mid-90s, we did agriculture — that’s what we did; this was a farming community,” said Jared Phillips, a professor at the University of Arkansas who also farms in Washington County’s Prairie Grove. “There was cattle, chickens, turkeys, and then out on the western side of the county is more row crop and forage crops. But that’s what we were — we were a farm economy. We’re a farm economy in transition right now.”

Much of that farmland loss comes when developers offer huge payouts to build subdivisions and strip malls. The offers often leave farmers faced with the decision between preserving generations of farming or providing for their families.

“We can’t afford to keep the land when it’s so valuable,” said Douglas, who ultimately decided to sell 70 of his family’s original 80-acre farm for $45,000 per acre in 2004. “Now I’m holding on to some because I don’t need the money. But whenever I’m dead and gone, I hope to hell my daughter sells it and does something with the money. You know, it’s sad that we’ve been here 170 years and now, you can’t afford to stay. You can — I am — but you’re stupid for doing it.”

Strawberries, skeletons and subdivisions: Benton County’s urban growth

On a warm October afternoon in Pea Ridge, about 10 miles northeast of Walmart’s Bentonville headquarters, Dennis McGarrah drove his tractor alongside a sprawling pumpkin patch with roughly a dozen people in tow.

“I’m Farmer McGarrah,” he said for the seventh time that day, having already given the same spiel to roughly 220 school-age children who’d visited his 30-acre farm that morning. “I’m boss around here sometimes when the wife ain’t around. Most of the time, just another spoke in the wheel. Married men know what I’m talking about.”

The McGarrah family has been in Northwest Arkansas since 1824, originally settling in what became the city of Fayetteville, experiencing the region’s shifting agricultural fortunes firsthand: By 1960, commercial row crop production of products like grapes, apples and tomatoes had declined to insignificance, and more than half of the income for a typical farming household in the region came from off the farm.

McGarrah’s father operated a 60-acre tomato and strawberry farm while also working at a nearby processing plant. McGarrah himself farmed part-time while working a full-time manufacturing job for 32 years. When he was laid off in 2009, he took the opportunity to start farming full-time.

“People don’t realize that a lot of the farmers that we have actually had to have a job off the farm to even make a living,” McGarrah said. “That’s just the way it works. And that’s just one of them things that we do to survive.”

What’s allowed the McGarrahs to survive — in Pea Ridge, the original homestead in nearby Lowell, and Rivercrest Orchard, the family’s other, larger farm in nearby Fayetteville, which is run by Dennis’s son Buddy — is agritourism. In addition to being regular vendors at most of the local farmers’ markets, the McGarrahs allow visitors a chance to pick their own produce, including strawberries in the spring and pumpkins in the fall. McGarrah also offers hayrides and Buddy hosts seasonal festivals at Rivercrest Orchard.

Still, they’re not immune to the forces changing the surrounding area.

As McGarrah piloted his tractor along the property’s “spooky woods,” the property’s northern border decorated with skeletons and yetis for Halloween, he could see several newly built and under-construction homes through the tree line.

Five years ago, McGarrah said he tried to purchase the neighboring property, a 28-acre cattle ranch, to keep it as farmland. He offered the owner $12,000 an acre but was told they couldn’t go lower than $18,000 an acre. No deal was made. A few years later, someone else bought it for $22,000 an acre, cut it into five-acre parcels, and sold those for $50,000 an acre.

“(When you used to) drive down my road in July, where I live, everybody along that road had a tomato patch or a strawberry field,” McGarrah said. “And now it’s just houses.”

While the growth of Walmart has spurred much of the development, the retail giant has attempted to help some farmers survive.

In March 2022, the Walton Family Foundation announced the Market Center of the Ozarks (MCO), a 45,000-square-foot facility that, as Tom Walton said in a press release, marked “another bold step to position Northwest Arkansas as a national model for locally grown food.”

Scheduled to open this spring, the $31 million MCO will offer farmers technical and educational assistance to help them scale up their businesses. It will largely operate through two separate organizations with different missions: the Spring Creek Food Hub, which focuses mostly on produce, and the Arkansas Food Innovation Center at Market Center of the Ozarks, which focuses on value-added products.

Since beginning operations in mid-2023, the Spring Creek Food Hub has partnered with more than 60 farmers — the majority of them in Northwest Arkansas — with more farmers reaching out, said Anthony Mirisciotta, the organization’s executive director. Although McGarrah is among those farmers, most are relatively small operations. Mirisciotta estimated just over half operate on less than one acre of land.

“It’s not something that is going to be able to, you know, support the entire community and the food system,” Mirisciotta said, noting that food hubs tend to be small relative to conventional wholesale models. “But hopefully, optimistically moving in the right direction, building upon that momentum and helping to conserve farmland and rural communities while feeding community members.”

Darryl L. Holliday, executive director of the Arkansas Food Innovation Center at Market Center of the Ozarks, said such a shift represents not just a move away from larger industrial agricultural operations to smaller farms but a changing idea of what a farm actually looks like.

“There is a demand for local food — I don’t think that will ever go away,” Holliday said. “It’s really just more of a modifying from the old McDonald’s storybook farm into, ‘What does farming look like?’”

The evolving Ozarks: From farming backbone to suburban sprawl

The collision of suburban development and agriculture is on full display at the intersection of Southwest Juneberry Street and Vaughn Road. On one side, a sign announces the coming of McKissic Springs, a subdivision marketed as having a “country-charm-meets-city-convenience style of living,” with prices “from the $400’s.” On the other side of the fence, just steps from a future backyard, stands an industrial poultry farm.

Along with Walmart, Tyson Foods and its large network of poultry farms have significantly shaped the region.

“Almost every crucial development of the past half-century (including the rise of Walmart) … traces at least a few of its roots back to the meat-producing empire brought about through the efforts of Tyson Foods and other corporations birthed in the region,” wrote historian Brooks Blevins in his book, “A History of the Ozarks, Volume 3.”

Between 1940 and 1960, the number of chickens raised in the Ozarks region increased by 1,500%. Among the most significant developments, however, came when Congress passed the Poultry Products Inspection Act in 1957, mandating federal inspection of all processing plants, the same year that John Tyson began constructing his first processing plant in Springdale.

“The increased costs associated with inspections drove many small operators out of the industry,” Blevins wrote, “but more than anything, it was poultry’s volatile market that spurred consolidation.”

By the 1980s and 1990s, it was no longer profitable to raise birds anymore, which required massive debt to enter the market. Rather, money was made by flipping farms. “Between 2002 and 2017,” Blevins wrote, “the number of farms in the Ozarks classified as poultry operations declined by 22%. Sales more than doubled to $3.5 billion.”

Don Mayer, a longtime dairy farmer who recently switched to beef cattle, lives across the street from the McKissic Springs subdivision.

“I’m sure they’re gonna make his life miserable, but I don’t know what the guy’s supposed to do,” said Mayer, noting the distance between his neighbor’s chicken houses and the new subdivision. “I think we still matter, but a lot of people just come out here and just expect you to leave.”

Sam Walton’s vision: The airport that changed everything

While much of Northwest Arkansas’ development during the 20th century was the product of external market forces, the direction, shape and speed of that development since the mid-1990s has been a result of deliberate actions taken by Northwest Arkansas’ corporate leaders — the roots of which can be traced to the airport just two miles south of Mayer’s farm.

On Sept. 8, 1990, when Springdale hosted the U.S. House Public Works and Transportation Committee, the Northwest Arkansas Council, a newly formed area economic organization headed by Walmart founder Sam Walton, announced further development of the region hinged on the expansion of area highway systems, infrastructure, and a new airport that could handle jetliners ferrying in vendors for meetings with Walmart.

Walmart’s sales of $32 billion annually could quadruple to $130 billion by 2000. “But we need the airport and the roads to do it,” Walton said then, according to an Arkansas newspaper.

Not quite a decade later, in November 1998, President Bill Clinton touched down in Air Force One for the dedication of the new airport. During his remarks, according to an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article, Clinton praised the airport’s “particular squeaky wheels,” including Alice Walton, the billionaire daughter of Sam Walton, “who wore me out with lobbying for the new airport.”

An article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from August 1999 was more direct: “There might not be a Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport without Alice Walton. Her company also personally anted up the final and vital $5 million in matching money, and her [investment firm, the Llama Co.,] bought the $79 million in airport bonds.” This was in addition to the $15 million seed money that Alice Walton and her family had raised in 1994 and 1995.

Following the airport’s opening, Mayer started to hear from real estate agents on a regular basis asking whether he’d be interested in selling his land. At one point, while visiting his 98-year-old mother at her nursing facility, he found an agent there asking whether she’d be open to selling the family land. He still receives offers on a regular basis, at least once or twice a week, asking if the “Don Mayer Family Trust” is now ready to sell.

He is not.

“You just don’t get pieces of land like that in Benton County anymore,” Mayer said. “To drive around a circle of a couple 100 acres — it’s just not going to happen anymore. You just either have it or you don’t.”

But for all the headaches that development brings, Douglas, the cattle and hay farmer in Benton County, believes there are worse problems to have. As a former legislator — a career move that was only possible, he said, from selling some of his land — he saw areas of the state that weren’t so fortunate.

“You go to some of those places that are dying instead of growing, and it will make you appreciate this,” he said. “We have our problems and our issues, and we’re growing too fast. We’re outgrowing our infrastructure, and we will have problems because of it.”

Still, Douglas said, not every problem is one of infrastructure.

As he drove west of Bentonville, he pointed at future subdivisions with empty lots and told the stories about the people who’d once lived there. The Eggers. The Hendersons. The Grimsleys. Hundreds of years of history had been reduced to names on street signs.

Coming up to another subdivision, Douglas started talking about his uncle, Glen Featherston, and how “he’d worked his tail off,” eventually buying 80 acres in 1965 at $200 per acre.

“(Uncle) Glen passed away in 2010, I believe, and his wife passed away, oh, five or six years ago. And (his son) Sam sold this 80 acres,” said Douglas, as he rounded the corner of Chance Street in a subdivision whose street names are taken from the Monopoly board game.

“Look at this shit. What the hell are these?” he said about the new homes. “I won’t drive through all of it, but by God, I’ve chased cows all over this place. I’ve baled hay off of it. And look what the hell we have here. I don’t know what you call this.”

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