Stuttgart

Stuttgart sits at the flat center of the Grand Prairie, and from the moment you leave the highway the world becomes rice — thousands of acres of it, flooded and green in summer, gold and rattling in early fall when the combines finally move in. We came through in September, harvest in full swing, dust and rice hulls hanging in the air over county roads, and it was obvious within an hour why this unassuming town of about eight thousand calls itself the Rice and Duck Capital of the World without a trace of irony.

The Grand Prairie and the rice harvest

We pulled over more than once just to watch combines work a field, grain trucks idling at the turnrow, a process that’s been repeated here since German and Dutch immigrant farmers first realized the prairie’s clay-pan soil, useless for most crops, was perfect for holding floodwater for rice. Arkansas grows nearly half the rice in the United States, and much of it starts right here on the Grand Prairie. At the Arkansas County Historical Museum downtown, a whole wing is devoted to the crop, including a working scale model of an old rice mill that a retired farmer running the front desk was clearly delighted to explain to us in detail.

Duck calling and Wings Over the Prairie

Every Thanksgiving week, Stuttgart hosts the World’s Championship Duck Calling Contest downtown, drawing callers and hunters from across the country to a town that swells well beyond its normal population. We missed the contest itself but visited the small duck-hunting museum on Main Street, walls lined with hand-carved calls going back generations, and understood why: the flooded rice fields left fallow after harvest become some of the best duck habitat in North America, and this whole region reorganizes itself around the Mississippi Flyway every winter.

Getting There

The nearest commercial airport is Little Rock’s Bill and Hillary Clinton National, about seventy miles west via US-70 and US-165, roughly ninety minutes by car. A car is essential in Stuttgart — the rice fields and hunting flats that define the area stretch for miles beyond the small walkable downtown.