Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84 Page 85 Page 86 Page 87 Page 8820 • Between Turnrows in Poinsett County, Arkansas. “My family first came to the Fisher area in 1911,” he says. “My grandfather and his brother left their dad’s farm in Western Illinois and came to Arkansas to escape the cold winters. My great-grandfather had a patent on a drill bit that would drill a square hole for a wooden peg. He traded that patent for 160 acres of land just north of Fisher. When they first started growing rice it was mostly done by hand. They would use a team of horses to plow and work down the land and then they would sow the rice by hand. They surveyed their levees with a long saw- horse, maybe twenty feet long, and a carpenter’s level. They would put the sawhorse down with the level on it and move one end until it was level then mark where the levee was going to go. Then they would take a plow and follow the line one direction throwing the dirt in, and turn around and come back down the other side throwing the dirt in. After that, they would take shovels and finish building up the levee. They had a steam-engine-driven irrigation pump to flood the fields. “The worst part was going out into the woods where there was no breeze. One brother would cut timber all day and haul it to the well and the other would stoke the fire all night to keep the water pumping. In about 1945 there was a grain elevator built in Fisher, and then later a commercial rice dryer. Before that, it was thrashed and bagged in the field. Well, my father and grandfather couldn’t find seed that didn’t have red rice in it, so they started planting some special fields for seed and cleaning it for themselves. People began to come from all over the country to buy seed rice because we were one of the only sources that didn’t have red rice in our seed.” The Ziegenhorn Seed reputation for high-quality, clean seed spread across the area, and the company grew apace with Arkansas’ steadily increasing rice acres in the mid-twentieth century. Sherman Cullum was born into this fast-changing environment on June 26, 1937. His future wife and lifelong business partner Linda was born on April 8, 1940. A rare, mid-twentieth century Big Z Soybeans seed bag dating between 1945 and 1975.