At five years old, Dennis McGarrah was his grandfather, Ervin’s, shadow.
When the older McGarrah walked the strawberry rows on his Arkansas farm, Dennis trailed close behind, small boots sinking into rich soil still cool from the morning. His grandfather grew around thirty acres of strawberries and another fifteen acres of tomatoes each year. Because Dennis was closer to the ground than most, he was recruited early. He wasn’t there to play. From five until he was ten, he picked strawberries alongside the hired hands.
“If you’d asked me at five what I wanted to be,” Dennis says, “I would’ve told you I wanted to be a farmer. And if you’d asked me why, I’d have said, because my grandpa’s a farmer. It seems like in our family, every generation has one person who’s been born to farm. That was me.”
The McGarrahs came to Northwest Arkansas from Ireland in 1824 and began farming. Dennis’s father still owns a portion of that original land east of Springdale. Their homestead once stretched along the White River near what would become Beaver Lake. When the Corps of Engineers dammed the river in the 1960s, the water rose slowly, steadily taking the land, swallowing fences first, then barns, then entire fields. Most of the McGarrah property was lost, submerged beneath the reservoir.
“It’s all underwater now,” Dennis says.
For families whose stories are written in acreage, losing land is not simply a financial transaction. It is watching the ground that held your dreams disappear. It is knowing orchards planted by ancestors now rest beneath a still, dark surface. The shoreline may be beautiful, but it was once pasture. It once grew food.
Determined, the McGarrahs did what farmers have always done when the unexpected comes: they found new ground and planted again.
Today Dennis and his wife, Timothea, operate Rivercrest Orchard in Fayetteville and Arkansas Berry Company in Judsonia. They grow apples, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, sweet corn, tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, sunflowers, zinnias, and in the spring, hundreds of thousands of tulips that stretch in vibrant rows across the hills.
On a sunny spring day, Rivercrest feels almost cinematic. Tulips ripple in crimson, gold, and violet. Children run ahead of their parents toward playgrounds. Couples pause for photos between blooms shipped from Holland and planted bulb by bulb. It looks like celebration.
And it is. But it is also something more.
According to the USDA’s most recent Census of Agriculture, Arkansas is home to roughly 38,000 farms today. A century ago, that number was several times higher. As farms have disappeared, those that remain have grown larger, with the average Arkansas farm now spanning more than 360 acres. Across the state, small family farms have felt the pressure of development, rising equipment and fuel costs, labor shortages, and increasingly unpredictable weather.
For many, growing crops alone is no longer enough.
At first, Dennis resisted the idea of agritourism. His father had introduced pumpkin patches and hayrides when Dennis was a teenager, but Dennis considered himself a purist. He wanted to farm — to plant, to tend, to harvest. To let the land speak for itself.
“I grew to love it,” he says now. “We farm first, 365 days a year. That’s our passion. But the entertainment on the farm is definitely next. That’s why we grow all the fun stuff in the middle, so wherever you look, you’ll see agriculture.”
Agritourism, for Rivercrest, is not distraction. It is preservation. It provides steadier income when crops fail. It keeps the land agricultural instead of sold and subdivided. At the height of the season, the farm employs dozens of workers, many of them high school students earning their first paycheck, learning responsibility between rows of fruit and flowers.
In that way, the farm sustains more than its own family.
There is romance in farming. Rows of strawberries glistening with dew. Apple trees heavy in autumn. A field of tulips stretching toward the horizon. It is easy to photograph. Easy to admire. But romance does not pay the feed bill.
Dennis remembers the winters of his childhood. After harvest, when fields went quiet, his grandparents would trade the open air for fluorescent lights at the chicken plant in Springdale. They would work long shifts to bridge the months until planting season returned.
“My grandma and grandpa would farm through the season,” Dennis says. “Then in the winter, they’d work at the plant. When it was time to put crops in, my grandpa would quit to get them in the ground. My grandma would keep working so they’d have income. Once harvest started, she’d quit the plant to help in the field. They had five kids. On a good year, they didn’t have to work through the winter. Unfortunately, there were more bad years than good.”
Winter meant tight budgets and layered coats. It meant doing whatever it took so spring could come again.
The pattern is familiar to farmers across Arkansas: long days, narrow margins, and a livelihood tethered to forces beyond their control. Rain can be blessing or ruin. Heat can ripen fruit or scorch it. Pests can descend. Markets shift. Costs rise. Equipment breaks.
In 2025, heavy rains wiped out nearly 70 percent of Rivercrest’s strawberry crop, roughly 100,000 pounds of fruit. Months of labor disappeared in a season. The berries had been planted, weeded, watered, and watched. When the rain came and wouldn’t stop, the fields did not just flood, months of hope did, too.
There is no insurance policy for disappointment. And still, the next planting came.
Farmers make an oath to the land, not spoken aloud, but lived. They plant knowing storms may come. They invest in seeds and bulbs without guarantees. They rise before dawn and walk fields in the fading light, studying leaves for signs of trouble, scanning the sky for what may arrive next.
At Rivercrest, adaptation has become part of that oath. Tulip festivals in the spring. Strawberries when the berries ripen. Apples in the fall. Families welcomed onto the land that might otherwise feel closed off and unseen.
There are more Arkansans now who have never shucked an ear of corn or tasted fruit warm from the vine than there were in Dennis’s grandfather’s day. When children kneel between rows to pick their own strawberries, when they see dirt on their hands and juice on their fingers, something connects. Food is no longer abstract.
Long after the tulips fade and festival tents are folded away, the work continues. Before the sun rises, Dennis will be in the fields again — checking irrigation lines, walking rows, preparing for another season where there are no guarantees. It is the same promise his grandfather once kept. The same quiet oath, renewed each spring in Arkansas soil.
Spring & Fall at Rivercrest
Arkansas Tulip Festival (March–Early April)
700,000 tulips across eight acres
75 varieties imported from Holland
Easter celebrations and family activities
Strawberry Festival (Late April–May)
Pick-your-own strawberries (weather dependent)
Fresh strawberry pie made from Dennis’s grandmother’s recipe
Fall Festival (Dates TBD)
Apple picking (2,500 apple trees)
Pumpkins, sunflowers, zinnias
Family activities and seasonal market
Rivercrest Orchard is located in Fayetteville. Learn more at rivercrestorchard.com.
