The Agricultural Council of Arkansas' Twitter article last Friday night characterized Dick Bell rather respectfully:"excellent
man, fantastic intelligence, good leader"
Dick's passing a week brought to a detailed a life of accomplishment, not only for the rice market -- where for three decades he
also led Riceland Foods while the entire world's biggest rice miller plus one of those spot's largest processors of soybeans -- in
the broader arena of international and national agricultural plan to dried fruit for sale.
Even though he worked for many decades in provincial circles as a agricultural economist with the USDA's Foreign Agricultural
Service, as an assistant agricultural attaché at Ottawa and Brussels, as ag attaché for its American Embassy at Dublin, as
Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for International Affairs and Commodity Programs -- that was un-bureaucratic as you can
request.
He had a knowledge of agricultural policy and economics that appeared on encyclopedic, and could hold their or her own with
members of Congress or Capitol Hill leaders, but he'd a marvelous (and enviable) talent for distilling the brain-numbing minutiae
of administration policy and programs into language exactly the typical man may grasp.
Even though Dick was a"Yankee" by arrival (Illinois), also he never really lost his emphasis during his years in Arkansas, he had
been the only real southern gentle man: gracious, softspoken, always showing an interest in people with whom he interacted.
I crossed paths with him often through time, at one meeting or some other, also he invariably would make it a point ahead and talk
with me and other members of their networking, and no matter that of our Farm Press editors was covering his commentshe would, a
twinkle in his eyes, and be capable of work at a mention during his conversation with something we had created, as if he followed
our scribblings religiously. He endeared himself into all those of the media by always making himse wholesale dried fruit suppliers readily available once we
wanted information or plagiarize remarks about ag policy or markets.
Much was written regarding Dick's livelihood with USDA/FAS, together with Riceland Foods, also later, immediately after his
retirementas Arkansas' earliest Agri Culture Secretary. Previous Gov. Mike Huckabee, who made him to that post, explained after
his death,"Together with his vast knowledge of the whole agricultural arena, and the at the
agri-world,'' there was no one I really could consider that was suited to your job. He had been a very hard-working,
conscientious, and effective public servant"
In a age when government and administration service in many cases are reviled, Dick might,
organic nuts and dried fruit I think, have liked that label:
effective community servant.
U.S. rice along with U.S. farming will be the better due to his life of support, and also on his departure might remember with
gratitude his most gifts.
