State Capitol Week in Review from Senator Terry Rice
The Senate passed legislation with far-reaching changes in how state-supported colleges and universities divide state aid, and how students qualify for scholarships.
One of the most noticeable changes will be in how much is awarded the first year to students who qualify for an Academic Challenge Scholarship. Now, students receive $1,000 during their first year, and that will go up to $2,000.
The scholarships are funded with revenue from the state lottery. Since Arkansas voters approved the lottery in 2008 in a statewide election, it has paid for more than 770,000 scholarships. Their value is about $1.4 billion.
Students at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville have received 147,000 scholarships valued at $262 million. At Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, almost 85,000 scholarships have been awarded. They’re valued at $155 million.
At Arkansas Tech, more than 74,000 scholarships worth $132 million have been awarded since the lottery began.
Students at Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia have received more than 26,000 scholarships since the beginning of the program. They’re valued at $44.8 million.
At the University of Arkansas at Monticello, more than 5,400 scholarships valued at $9.5 million have been awarded.
Senate Bill 246 also changes other and smaller scholarship programs. It will expand Workforce Challenge Scholarships by $9 million. This program helps students in workforce training who take classes in the high-demand areas of health care, information technology and industry. Students may take non-credit classes if they fit within those qualifying categories.
Access to higher education will become easier because the bill standardizes course numbering and will make application forms uniform for all state institutions.
It broadens the types of advanced placement courses that students may take in order to earn college credits while still in high school. It broadens the types of standardized tests that institutions will accept as admission tests.
The fiscal impact for colleges and universities will not be fully known for several years. The bill will change the state’s formula for distributing state aid to include a “return on investment” metric that aligns with the state’s economic and workforce needs.
The Senate also approved House Bill 1634 to allow colleges and universities to operate raffles, to raise money to pay players on their athletic teams. In recent seasons, college sports have changed dramatically because players are no longer amateurs. They can accept payment for the use of their name, image or likeness (NIL).
In other news, the Senate approved SB 307 to allow utilities greater flexibility to recover investments in new power plants. Supporters of the bill said that other states have similar laws, and Arkansas must become more competitive in energy production because demand is expected to increase steadily in the future.
Under current law, utilities incur finance charges during construction. SB 307 would allow utilities to begin recovering costs from ratepayers during construction, and thus avoid some finance charges. Those savings would then be passed along to customers. SB 307 now goes to the House of Representatives.
Division of Agriculture researchers to help investigate farmers’ attitudes toward risk and water
By the U of A System Division of Agriculture
Two researchers with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture will be part of a three-year study examining how farmers’ risk preferences impact water use during drought.
Mike Daniels, professor and extension soil and water conservation scientist, and John Pennington, extension water quality educator, are collaborating with co-principal investigators Kevin Befus, associate professor of geosciences at the University of Arkansas, and Kent Kovacs, associate professor of accounting, economics and finance at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
The National Science Foundation’s Division of Research, Innovation, Synergies, and Education awarded $745,594 to the four researchers.
“This grant is an incredible opportunity to address a complex societal challenge —ensuring sustainable water use in agriculture,” Kovacs said. “No single discipline can solve this problem alone. We need interdisciplinary teams that combine economic modeling with hydrological data to understand how farmers respond to risk and changing water availability.”
The three-year project will integrate economic, hydrological and social science models to examine farmers’ irrigation decisions, particularly in groundwater-dependent agricultural systems like the Lower Mississippi River Basin. The research findings will help policymakers and water resource managers develop strategies for sustainable water use amid increasing climate challenges.
The Division of Agriculture, a sister entity to UA-Little Rock within the University of Arkansas System, conducts the land-grant missions of outreach and research and brings those unique skills to this project.
Both Pennington and Daniels have lengthy experience dealing directly with landowners, farmers and other Arkansas stakeholders across the state. Pennington has facilitated a series of watershed cleanup efforts in the Buffalo River watershed, and Daniels is director of the Arkansas Discovery Farm program, which addressed soil and water health by reducing nutrient runoff, with an eye to water quality in the lower Mississippi.
“Our role in the project is to organize, coordinate, and conduct the public outreach meetings with the producers,” Pennington said. “We look forward to sharing information and gaining insight into their valuable and critically important perspectives regarding climate resiliency, their use of irrigation water and the related challenges and concerns.”
“We are excited to work with Dr. Kovacs and Dr. Befus to help protect the groundwater resources of our state and to ensure that agriculture remains sustainable,” Daniels said.
Thomas Clifton, interim dean of the College of Business, Health and Human Services, said the study will address a critical challenge “for Arkansas and beyond,” and that the findings “will provide valuable insights that can help shape more sustainable agricultural practices and water conservation strategies.”
Agriculture requires enormous amounts of water in the United States and elsewhere, and drought can severely impact crop production. The study will use farmer surveys to measure their risk preferences and incorporate this data into economic and hydrological models. These models will simulate how irrigation decisions change over time, particularly during prolonged droughts, and predict whether farmers will adapt to drier conditions or overuse aquifers, potentially necessitating future public policy interventions.
“If our models suggest a rapid decline of aquifer resources, it may indicate the need for policy changes—whether through water use regulations, incentives, or conservation programs,” Kovacs said. “Billions of dollars are invested in irrigated crop agriculture in Arkansas, making it the state’s second-highest revenue-generating agricultural activity after poultry. Understanding how irrigated farming impacts our goods and services from water resources is crucial for the livelihoods of Arkansans and the future of our state’s economy.”
The project will include three stakeholder workshops with farmers, researchers, businesses, state and federal agencies and policymakers to ensure the research is grounded in real-world challenges and practical solutions.
The grant will also support education and outreach initiatives, including curriculum development and student training, with an emphasis on engaging non-traditional students in water resource management research.
“I’m thrilled to receive this grant,” Kovacs said. “This research will not only contribute to scientific understanding but also provide practical insights for farmers and policymakers, helping ensure long-term water sustainability for future generations.”
To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on X and Instagram at @AR_Extension. To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu/. Follow on X at @ArkAgResearch. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on X at @AgInArk.
About the Division of Agriculture
The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, the Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system.
The Division of Agriculture is one of 20 entities within the University of Arkansas System. It has offices in all 75 counties in Arkansas and faculty on three campuses.
The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs to all eligible persons without regard to race, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status, and is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.
Economists tackle estimating consumer effects following the loss of billions of birds and eggs lost to avian influenza
By Mary Hightower
U of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture
Fewer and more expensive eggs in 2024 put estimated $1.41 billion burden on consumers in 2024, according to study by a trio of researchers examining the impact of highly pathogenic avian influenza — HPAI — on the economy.
Expectations are for the price burden to continue through 2025 as producers work to repopulate laying hens lost to HPAI.
The study, “The Economic Impact of HPAI on U.S. Egg Consumers: Estimating a $1.41 Billion Loss in Consumer Surplus” was published last month by the Fryar Price Risk Management Center. It was conducted as an extension to an earlier paper, “Biological lags and market dynamics in vertically coordinated food supply chains: HPAI impacts on U.S. egg prices,” published in the journal Food Policy in 2024.
The Fryar Center is part of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences.
James Mitchell, assistant professor and extension economist for the Division of Agriculture, was the lead author on both papers, which were written with Jada Thompson, associate professor and Division of Agriculture economist and Trey Malone, an economist formerly at the University of Arkansas, but now at Purdue University.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, HPAI affected 38.4 million commercial egg laying birds and 29 flocks in 2024.
“As a result, we estimate an average week-to-week increase of 9 percent in retail egg prices, independent of other sources of egg price inflation,” the authors said. Using own-price elasticities — a measure of demand responsiveness to price changes — they estimated that price increases lowered demand for eggs by 2 percent on average.
“This reduction in consumption, coupled with higher prices, led to an estimated consumer surplus loss of $1.41 billion,” the researchers said. “This estimate reflects the economic burden on consumers due to reduced availability and affordability of eggs following HPAI outbreaks.
“The magnitude of these losses underscores the importance of understanding how disease outbreaks in the egg supply chain influence consumer welfare and market dynamics,” the three authors said.
The cost of eggs
While the cost of eggs may seem to be a simple supply vs. demand equation, determining the size of the economic loss is quite a bit more complex, say the economists.
“Someone not familiar with broiler or turkey or egg production might say, ‘oh, a bird died today because of bird flu and egg prices today are impacted by that’,” Mitchell said.
HPAI has been hitting broilers, egg layers and turkey production in the U.S. and globally hard since 2022, resulting in the loss of billions of commercial birds, not to mention birds and other animals in the wild.
“Our main thesis is that you have to consider a longer timeframe,” Mitchell said. “What’s happening today is a function of what happened six months ago.”
Because of the fierceness of the current strain of HPAI, which has a mortality rate of higher than 75 percent, whole flocks are destroyed once the disease is detected. Mitchell said if a flock has to be depopulated because of avian influenza or another cause, “you’re losing egg production from that flock.
“But you don’t just replace that flock tomorrow. It takes about six months for the new birds to reach maturity and start laying eggs,” he said.
Mitchell said that when they started their initial analysis looking at 2022 data, the challenge was “how much consideration had to be given to disentangling the impacts of bird flu from other things that were happening in 2022.”
Economic aftershocks from the COVID pandemic and the Ukraine war and resulting higher grain prices “were something we had to be careful about,” he said.
Price rollercoaster
When egg prices rise, so do the number of media interview requests for Thompson.
“The questions that are asked right now are, ‘Why are prices are high?’ And ‘when are they coming back down?’” Thompson said. She noted that in 2022, HPAI led to some 43 million laying hens being taken out of egg production” in the U.S.
That was possibly the largest loss of layers in one quarter, at least until 2024-25.
“In the fourth quarter of 2024, there was a loss of 20 million birds,” Thompson said. “And in the first two months of this year, some 30 million birds. That’s an astronomical number of birds being affected by HPAI.”
Much of the nation’s commercial egg production is concentrated in a fairly small area, including Minnesota and Iowa, Mitchell said.
There have been proposals within the industry to bring broiler eggs to the market, but both Thompson and Mitchell say that’s not an easy fix because the broiler and egg production systems don’t interact.
“It’s not the first time we’ve had this conversation,” Thompson said. “There are limitations on what can be done when dealing with a different system. How do we collect these eggs? How are we going to store and clean them? This will mean additional transportation costs.
“And egg prices are really high already,” she said. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics retail egg prices reached $4.95 per dozen in January 2025, an increase of 96 percent compared to January 2024.
The research comes with a few important caveats. First, the estimate assumes that consumer preferences and purchasing behavior remained stable, meaning that consumers responded to price increases in the same way as they have in the past.
Second, the analysis focuses on the direct impact of HPAI on egg prices and consumer surplus, meaning it does not account for any indirect effects, such as potential changes in producer behavior or government policy responses.
“Despite these considerations, this estimate provides a clear and useful benchmark for understanding how HPAI affected egg prices and consumer spending in 2024,” the authors said.
To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on X and Instagram at @AR_Extension. To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu. Follow on X at @ArkAgResearch. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on X at @AgInArk.
About the Division of Agriculture
The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, the Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system.
The Division of Agriculture is one of 20 entities within the University of Arkansas System. It has offices in all 75 counties in Arkansas and faculty on three campuses.
The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs to all eligible persons without regard to race, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status, and is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.
Obituary: Aubrey Allen Fields (1958-2025)
Aubrey Allen Fields of Waldron, Arkansas (formerly of Texas) went to be with his Lord and Savior, Sunday, March 9, 2025 at his home with his loving family by his side. Aubrey was born March 7, 1958 to Rodney and Barbara Fields in Elko, Nevada. He was 67 years old. Aubrey was a Godly man and very strong in his faith and belief. He lived each day as an example to those he knew.
Aubrey was a man who had traveled alot over his years with the love of his life, his wife Louise. They have riden motorcycles, enjoyed many diverse opportunities and fell in love with Arkansas. Currently making Waldron their home, being surrounded by family daily and enjoying their dogs, Aubrey was building their retirement home. Being a master carpenter his attention to detail was unmatched. He loved to be creative and custom build things. However, Aubrey’s greatest joy in life was when his large and generational family would all be together. The memories that were made, the stories and laughter shared will be treasured by all.
Aubrey leaves behind to cherish his memory, his loving wife of 38 years, Louise of the home, and children: Jimbo (Camille) Beverly of Waldron, Arkansas, Tina (Michael) London of Texas, Wayne (Marquita) Beverly, Randy (Cindy) Beverly all of Waldron, Arkansas and Mark (Linda) Beverly of Indiana. Grandpa will forever remain in the hearts of 11 grandchildren and 17 great grandchildren. Aubrey will be missed by all that knew him and the many whose lives he impacted including a host of nieces, nephews and many friends dear to his heart.
Aubrey was preceded in death by his father.
Aubrey’s family will host a private celebration of life at a later date. Arrangements and cremation are being entrusted to the Heritage Memorial Funeral Home & Crematory in Waldron, Arkansas.
Minutes from the Waldron School Board Meeting
The regular monthly meeting of the Waldron School Board was held in the Central Office Building Monday, March 10, 2025, at 6:30 p.m. Board members present were Clay Woodall, Mac Davis, Stan Cottrell, Angela Hunsucker and Konnor McKay. Others present were Superintendent Daniel Fielding, Misty Owens, Kim Solomon, Chris Lipham, Kristi Sigman, Josh Atchley, Mike Galinato, Darla Jeffery, Zack Taylor, Toni Dozier, Cheyenne Smith, Chelsea Ridenhour, Tonya Cluck, Misty Mitchell, Keith Brigance, Brittany Maine and Alex Maine.
President Woodall called the meeting to order at 6:30p.m. and welcomed everyone to the meeting.
Mr. Konnor McKay began the meeting with a word of prayer.
Angela Hunsucker led the Pledge of Allegiance.
A motion was made by Mac Davis and seconded by Angela Hunsucker to approve the Consent Agenda items: A) Approval of the February 10th Minutes; B) Approve Financial Reports and Expenditures; C) Approve Purchase Orders to ProMAS, LLC (eRate); D) Approve Purchase Orders to Safari Micro; E) Approve Agreement for Speech and Language Services Jana Pschier, SLP; F) Approve Contract for Occupational and Physical Therapy Services with Building Blocks Pediatric Therapy. Motion carried 5-0.
A motion was made by Angela Hunsucker and seconded by Konnor McKay to add Item A) Approve Purchase Order to American First Response to New Business. Motion carried 5-0.
A motion was made by Konnor McKay and seconded by Mac Davis to approve the purchase order to America First Response. Motion carried 5-0.
A motion was made by Stan Cottrell and seconded by Angela Hunsucker to approve the Resolution Adopting the Scott County Hazard Mitigation Plan. Motion carried 5-0.
A motion was made by Angela Hunsucker and seconded by Mac Davis to approve entering into to a business agreement with Lewis Architects Engineers for the elementary school roof. Motion carried 5-0.
Each of the principals reported on the happenings at their buildings. Mrs. Solomon stated that Read Across America Week was a success at Pre-K. She also informed the board that there will be a family picnic coming up the first part of April. Mrs. Jeffery also stated that Literacy Week was a success and they had many activities for the students, she expressed her gratitude for all those that donated their time to come and read to the students. The GT program is working on an Art Walk this year and also have parent night scheduled for this Thursday night at 5:00. All buildings are gearing up for testing in the coming weeks. Mr. Taylor stated that the 8th graders will be completing their CAP Conferences soon, the 8th graders will also be touring some
college campuses. Archery teams competed at State, FBLA State is coming up soon. Mr. Taylor had a long list of 8th grade students that made 1st Division Superior rating and 2nd Division Excellent rating in the band competition. Mr. Atchley announced that “Be Pro Be Proud” truck has invited Mrs. Atchley to be a liaison for them when visiting other schools. The CNA program visited UARM. Juniors will take the ACT on March 11th. Mr. Lipham stated that Sr. High Track Boys are the 4A State Indoor Champions.
Superintendent Fielding informed the school board members that he is planning an open house for the Eddie Harrison house as it will soon be put on the market to sell. Communities Unlimited has come and did an interview for a magazine article featuring the Harrison House. Mr. Fielding also let the board members know that the school received a $125,000 Safety Grant to pay for AED’s.
A motion was made by Angela Hunsucker seconded by Mac Davis to accept the resignations of Amy Huffmaster as ES Sped Paraprofessional effective May 19, 2025. Motion carried 5-0.
A motion was made by Mac Davis and seconded by Konnor McKay to accept the resignation from Julie Biggs as MS Secretary as of May 1, 2025. Motion carried 5-0.
A motion was made by Angela Hunsucker and seconded by Konnor McKay to make Joe Powers a contract from July1, 2025, to August 29, 2025, for the 2025/26 SY at which time he will then retire as Maintenance Foreman. Motion carried 5-0.
A motion was made by Mac Davis and seconded by Konnor McKay to accept the resignation from Tracie Adams as Bus Driver as of the end of the 2024/25 SY. Motion carried 5-0.
A motion was made by Angela Hunsucker and seconded by Konnor McKay to accept the resignation from Darla Jeffery as ES Principal as of June 30, 2025. Motion carried 4-1.
A motion was made by Konnor McKay and seconded by Angela Hunsucker to promote Cheyenne Smith to ES Principal from Assistant Principal for the 2025/26 SY. Motion carried 5-0.
A motion was made by Konnor McKay and seconded by Stan Cottrell to adjourn. Motion carried 5-0.
Meeting adjourned at 7:28 p.m.