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CENTER RIDGE — Six-year-old Isabella DeSalvo wants to be a rancher when she grows up.
This past year, she got her first animals to care for, show at the fair and then to the final destination that animals bred for meat come to, learning the farming facts of life from her parents who learned it from theirs. She’s completely bought in to continuing the family business — provided there’s enough room on this spread for her and her brother.
“Mom, I told you I was going to be the rancher,” protests 8-year-old Benjamin DeSalvo, drawing smiles from parents Phillip and Beth. In a time when agriculture is running dry of young people to carry on the work of feeding the world, such passion is refreshing.
“The only time you didn’t work was when you went to church. That was always number one,” Tony DeSalvo remembers.
Welcome to the Big D Ranch, 130 years deep into the DeSalvo family, named Arkansas Farm Bureau’s 2012 Farm Family of the Year. It’s the first time in the history of the award a cattle operation won, and the first Conway County family to boot. The DeSalvos topped a field of seven district winners and will represent Arkansas in the 2013 Southeastern Farmer of the Year competition this fall.
“I don’t look at the award on a personal level,” Phillip said. “I look at it as something for the county, for the beef industry in Arkansas and as an accomplishment of the people who came here 130 years ago and started all of this.”
Phillip and Beth DeSalvo and Phillip’s father Tony own and work 1,300 acres on several plots of ground carved out of the haunches of a looming mountain ridge. Ranch operations include 150 head of registered Ultrablack cattle, including about 40 registered bulls, the largest such herd in Arkansas. Another 350-head commercial cow-calf operation and 900 acres of wheat, sorghum and hay round out the spread.
Both men have been ranching since before they were Isabella’s age and represent fourth and fifth generation of ownership. Their forebears arrived from Naples, Italy, in the late 1800s and subsequent marriages into other prominent immigrant families created a tight-knit enclave of Catholic agriculturalists, marking the history of the area by their successes and setbacks.
“Working on the farm is built into us,” Tony said, recalling his first chore was milking cows at age 3. “I’ve never had second thoughts about it. It just runs in the blood.”
Work ran in parallel strides with faith. Family members built St. Joseph Church, literally and figuratively, hauling sand from the river bottom to fashion bricks for church walls, mortaring them with lives of faith and devotion. They filled pews as regularly as grain bins, and the church picnic, still held every year, brought farm work to a standstill. They lived, worked, worshipped and died in such numbers that today it’s difficult even for Tony to remember exactly where everyone resides on the family tree.
“The only time you didn’t work was when you went to church. That was always number one,” he remembers.
The intertwining of farm and faith didn’t end with Sunday Mass, either. Evening prayers included a rosary prayed on their knees. Such daily devotion along with his parents’ insistence on their children’s education — unique for the time — led a number of Tony’s relatives into religious vocations.
Phillip and Beth carry on religious traditions with as much fervor as with the family business. Beth, who grew up similarly devout in Morrilton, is a religious education teacher at St. Joseph Church, where she stresses pride in the faith.
“I feel really lucky. I was blessed to be brought into a community which supports me raising my kids the way I was raised,” she said. “I have so much respect for parents who try to raise a child Catholic basically by themselves with no support from their family.”
Religion aside, Phillip’s career has been marked by progressive thinking. Moving into the then-lesser-known Ultrablack breed was his idea, as was working with specialists in animal nutrition and husbandry to help improve the success of the herd. In an industry where most knowledge is handed down, new practices adopted from outside aren’t always well received. For Phillip, new ideas equal survival.
“It’s one of the things that sets us apart,” he said. “I wanted to see how different people did things and little by little, I’d learn by asking questions. In the old days, they just raised enough to feed the family, but these days it’s not that simple.
Phillip expects his children to bring more fresh thinking when their time comes, specifically in the area of marketing. He sees potential for agriculture’s future, based on the simple math of fewer producers feeding a growing population equals higher demand. He sees knowledge and work ethic as instrumental to the sixth generation’s future, infused with a generous dose of what he considers the family’s trademark.
“Stubbornness,” he said. “You want to know what’s kept this in the family all these years, it’s stubbornness. I don’t believe in quitting.”
