I don’t know about you all, but 2025 truly went by in a blur. And if you agree with that, I bet you will also agree that the year did not fly by because we were just having so much fun. I feel like I was smacked over the head with the news the entire year. Sure, the year certainly had its bright spots, but overall, I’m very in favor of leaving it behind.

The year 2025 was the first I ever wrote about as a journalist from start to finish. As I sit in the Arkansas Times office before the holiday break and reflect on what happened this year and how we journalists did our darndest to capture the whirlwind with clarity, accuracy, and at least a little humor, I feel accomplished. And worried. Half accomplished and maybe half worried.

As your very own Report for America corps member, I present to you, dear reader, the most notable farm and environment stories of 2025, in no particular order.

The long battle to protect and preserve the jewel of the Ozark Mountains seemingly had no end until this year, when after state legislators tried to pass a bill that would put the industrial hog farming moratorium in the Buffalo River watershed into question, Gov. Sanders stepped in. Of course, Arkansas’ favorite river is probably not saved forever, but at least for now, it’s saved from industrial hog farms.

For context, while the C&H hog farm was bought out by the state in 2019 when Asa Hutchinson was governor, many environmentalists were still concerned that another industrial hog farm could be permitted near the Buffalo River without a permanent moratorium on the permits they need from the state in the watershed. Those industrial farms, called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), produce an immense amount of waste and have a proven track record of polluting waterways in other states. Arkansas has many chicken CAFOs, especially in Northwest Arkansas, but few for hogs. Any hog CAFO needs to acquire a “liquid animal waste permit” from the state department of agriculture to begin operation. But in 2020 state legislators approved a moratorium on such operations near the Buffalo River.

Sen. Blake Johnson (R- Corning) and Rep. DeAnn Vaught (R- Horatio) proposed a bill that would allow a committee of state legislators to review all current permit moratoriums in watersheds, a first step in potentially allowing private land owners near the national river to start livestock operations. The proposal revived the debate and sending environmentalists driving down weekly from the Ozarks to testify against the bill.

In one of the most befuddling turns in one of the most befuddling sagas of this year’s legislative session, Johnson and Vaught passed their bill through both the House and Senate with large amounts of support. But in last-minute negotiations with the governor’s office, they proposed an amended version that kept permit moratoriums in place on the Buffalo River and Lake Maumelle, but gave the Legislature additional say over future permit moratoriums. For the record, the Legislature already had that say because the Arkansas Legislative Council has to approve rules proposed by state agencies. But whatever.

What happened in the backrooms with Sanders, Johnson, and Vaught may never be known by those of us on the outside, but clearly some kind of deal was made.

Utilities in Arkansas have long been projecting energy shortages, now cue the arrival of the data centers. Electricity rates will be going up over the next few years, and the devil will likely be in the details.

Entergy, the largest utility in Arkansas which serves over 700,000 customers throughout the state, is making some major moves on developing new power sources as they prepare to take two coal plants offline due to a settlement agreement with the Sierra Club. Now with data centers coming to Arkansas as part of the national artificial intelligence infrastructure build out, Arkansas’s electricity grid will see all the more strain from the energy-hungry developments.

Entergy is trying to get approval from state regulators to build a new natural gas-powered plant near Redfield called Jefferson Power Station which would add 745 megawatts of electricity generating capacity to the grid. That project has drawn some criticism from groups like the Southern Renewable Energy Association, which argues Entergy should have considered clean energy alternatives. 

In the first example of how new data centers may impact the Arkansas grid, Entergy is proposing a gigantic new solar array called Cypress Solar that will be partially paid for by Google to serve their new West Memphis data center, along with Entergy customers. A special rate contract between Google and Entergy was already approved by regulators, though regulators still need to make a decision on whether Entergy can build Cypress Solar. The solar array, coupled with a utility-scale battery storage development, will add 600 megawatts of capacity to the grid and 350 megawatts of battery storage to the grid.

Four more data centers are reportedly in development in Clarksville, Little Rock, Conway, and Sheridan.

Intrepid Democrat-Gazette reporter Sydney Sasser read the filings, crunched the numbers, and estimated that Entergy customers could see average monthly rate increases of up to $20 within five years. And that isn’t considering other projects Entergy teased coming down the pipeline including retrofitting the White Bluff coal plant to burn natural gas and renewing their license for the Arkansas Nuclear One power plant near Russellville.
Southwestern Electric Power Company (SWEPCO), also came under massive criticism this year from customers for pushing a large rate increase to recoup their costs for keeping the Flint Creek coal-powered plant on the grid longer, rather than swapping to greener alternatives to meet growing electricity demand in NWA.

A good old fashioned hillbilly slugfest is playing out in the Ozarks over the construction of Arkansas’s second commercial-scale wind farm in Carroll County called Nimbus by a Colorado-based clean energy company. The Ozarks have long been a region where residents have resisted industrial developments, but rarely has the region seen a conflict where both sides can plausibly claim to be environmentalists.

A sweeping wave of anti-wind mill rage roiled over a half dozen counties in the Ozarks as anti-wind activists convinced many county governments to place a building moratorium on commercial scale wind farms, and in some cases, solar farms as well. I know I’m young, but those were some of the most contentious local government meetings I’ve ever seen, as anti-wind activists spewed a torrent of misinformation about wind farms, along with a few good points about where wind energy developments should go.

The pro-wind farm side argues that the developments will produce more energy (which the country needs), and generate tax revenue and jobs for largely rural counties with slow economies. Plus, wind energy is renewable and doesn’t contribute to climate change and air pollution, and wind turbines have minimal environmental impacts compared to fossil fuel projects like a natural gas or coal-fired power plant. They also say that private property owners should be allowed to lease their land to wind companies to build turbines if they want to, plain and simple.

On the other hand, the Ozarks are scenic and beautiful, and the anti-wind people are drawing on a long tradition of opposing massive industrial developments that alter the landscape and make the region a little less wild. And they are correct that the overwhelming beneficiaries of putting a wind farm anywhere are the companies that own it and profit off the power.

The whole thing is a microcosm of a much broader conversation over whether sustainable development is possible, where it should go, and who should and will ultimately benefit from it. Some of the old heads at the Sierra Club tell me we need to reduce development and consumption to finagle our way out of the most destructive impacts of climate change. Maybe we shouldn’t have wind farms everywhere, but who should decide? In the case of many Ozark mountain counties, the county governments have definitively decided that they’ll pass on more wind turbines in coming years.

If Trump’s 2025 trade war revealed anything, it’s that America needs minerals and soybean farmers need a new business plan. Let’s take the first point first, we’ll get to the soybean farmers later. Through all of the trade saber rattling between Trump and China, the latter cut off exports of many “critical minerals” to America in response to Trump’s very high tariffs. Many of these minerals are critical because they are essential for goods like phones, cars, military equipment, clean energy, and more. 

And you guessed it, lithium is one of those critical minerals. China has a stranglehold on the production and refining of lithium– which is a critical component of nearly everything with a battery. And there happens to be a lot of it in South Arkansas.

The Arkansas lithium rush is blazing full speed ahead with major bipartisan support and messaging that promotes the industry as essential to America’s national security interests. Standard Lithium, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Albemarle, Chevron, and probably others all want in, with the startup Standard Lithium cruising forward on financing the buildout of their southwest Arkansas project near Lewisville, with construction likely to begin in 2026. We wrote extensively about debates over fair and equitable royalty rates for mineral rights owners. With the largest regulatory burden cleared by Standard Lithium and ExxonMobil, it looks like it’s full speed ahead.

While the companies want to try an extraction method that is novel, they are counting on it working because America, frankly, needs it to work to reduce dependency on China.

Standard Lithium hopes to be in production in 2028. The other energy behemoths are sure to follow.

Like many of you born in Arkansas, I grew up with a healthy fear of twisters. But I certainly thought we were better off than those suckers over in Oklahoma and Kansas, the heart of “Tornado Alley,” who really had it rough. It turns out we might be the suckers in the heart of Tornado Alley. There is some evidence that the “Heartland,” also known as us, may be experiencing more tornadoes on average than we used to. And now the Trump Administration is making some controversial reforms to FEMA, the federal agency responsible for aiding communities with disaster relief.

Heading up to Cave City, Cushman, and Diaz to survey the damage some strong twisters caused the little towns in March and April was one of the most difficult and rewarding reporting trips I’ve taken so far. Dozens of families lost their homes and livelihoods, and at the time, it seemed like the Trump Administration was more than willing to use them as guinea pigs for how the new FEMA policies would work. The Trump administration’s FEMA initially denied Sanders’ request for individual and state funding to aid the recovery.

Eventually, Trump came around and granted individual funding to help homeowners, but did not grant funding for city and county governments. That left Cave City seeing tornado recovery efforts eating up 15% of the town’s budget. Sanders stepped in with some state funding to help, but the Trump administration is deadset on shifting responsibility for disaster recovery to state and local governments, and little places with little budgets like Cave City might bear the biggest burden of the shift.

Another tornado season is just around the corner, and Trump’s steamroll of FEMA continues.

Probably the biggest headline in Arkansas agriculture this year was the constant screaming from nearly every news outlet that Delta row crops farms are one more bad year away from going completely out of business after three years of revenue from crops just not penciling out with the costs of producing. Given the crisis, we wrote a very long article detailing how the current financial crisis faced by farmers is really just the latest plot point in a decades-long story about farming increasingly consolidating and farmers becoming more and more dependent on export markets.

As rural historian Jared Phillips eloquently put it, “The farm crisis of the ’80s never really went away – we just got better at not talking about it.”

Another federal bailout for soybean, rice, cotton and corn growers in the Delta is on the way, but longer conversations about how the agricultural economy can better prioritize the farmers themselves are just getting started. And Hallie Shoffner– who sold her family farm earlier this year because of dire economic conditions– wants to ride those conversations, liberal anger at Trump, and disillusioned farmers and rural folks into a stunning upset victory over Sen. Tom Cotton in 2026. She’s raised a bunch of money so far, but Arkansas hasn’t elected a Democrat in a statewide race since 2010.

 Arkansas Times development director Bob Edwards thinks she’s great. So do I. We’ll see if she wins.