Scout's field of experience: Area farmers use rice expert

Amy Beth Dowdy can tell what a rice field needs just by looking at the colors.

Dark green spots mean the water isn't holding well, she says, and light green spots mean too much grass is growing in with the crops. When a field has shiny patches, it has to be nutsedge, a pesky weed. For many of the fields she checks on, Dowdy knows exactly what to recommend for whatever ills, mostly because she knows the land so well.

"I get to know the problem areas," she explained, steering her mud-spattered Jeep down a bumpy field road toward this day's first task, a 53-acre rice field just north of Advance, Mo. "It's kind of like I have my own built-in GPS system."

An independent rice scout and owner of ABD Crop Consulting, her one-woman business, Dowdy makes a living advising area farmers about the ins and outs of a complicated crop. Every week, she travels from farm to farm, preaching the gospel of herbicide, fungicide, fertilizer and water management over nine Southeast Missouri counties.

One clear morning, Dowdy parked her Jeep at the edge of the field, but before she climbed out she consulted her laptop computer, mounted on a stand next to the console. She visits all of her 392 fields every week and keeps a computer record of every recommendation she makes to each farmer. Her Jeep, a collision of farming gear and high-tech gadgetry, also has a dusty printer strapped to a set of drawers in the back seat. Later on that morning, after she finished her four stops, she printed out her recommendations for the farmer who owns the fields.

But Dowdy doesn't just do her work from the road, or even from the fringes of the field. At every stop, she plunges through the heart of the crops, armed only with a pair of hip-wader boots, a floppy straw hat and her trusty pocketknife.

It's no easy trip, because rice is grown for about three months of the season in two to four inches of standing water. The muck makes it difficult to move, but if you walk like a duck, she said, high-stepping with feet pointed out, the chances of falling, drowning or becoming hopelessly stuck in the mud are a lot smaller.

"It looks funny, but you get used to it," she said.

Dowdy checks a different section of every field each week. Once she got to the day's chosen spot she reached into the water and yanked out a rice plant. Using her pocketknife, she sliced the root in half and examines what's inside -- a row of tiny white dots. She eyed the distance between the two specks closest to the top and explained that once they are separated by about a half-inch, it's time for midseason fertilizer. This field needed another 10 days.

Back in the Jeep, Dowdy made an entry on her laptop and explained that most of the time farmers take her recommendations seriously. Because of the complexity of some crops and the range of chemicals available, consultants are becoming fairly commonplace, and exist for nearly every imaginable crop -- from cotton to cantaloupe, beans to blueberries. The National Alliance of Independent Crop Consultants, founded in 1978, boasts a membership of more than 500 agricultural scouts, Dowdy included.

Although most farmers listen to Dowdy, farming is still a fickle business, and sometimes, especially toward the end of the season, money gets too tight to pay for extra chemicals. In these situations, Dowdy says she does all she can.

"I can keep an eye on it and tell them how bad it's getting, so at least they know what to expect come harvest," she said.

A few farmers, however, have a hard time believing what she recommends. Dowdy saiid this could stem from the fact that she's a woman in a man's business -- in fact, she's the only female rice scout she knows of in the state. Surprisingly, the younger farmers are the most skeptical, said Dowdy, who has a bachelor's degree in agronomy from Mississippi State University.

Dowdy said that when she was growing up, her mother used to help her father all the time on their family farm south of Dexter, Mo. Those memories have been an inspiration throughout her 15 years as a rice scout, she said.

"That's what made me never doubt that I could be out here doing this," she said.

Dowdy's father now farms some rice, and she joked that it provides them with something to argue about. Her younger brother also works the farm full time, but she said the land isn't big enough to support everyone. That's one reason she found her own route.

"I tell my dad this is my way of farming without risking any money by farming more acres," she said.

In college, Dowdy worked as an intern at Terra, an agricultural chemical company. After graduation she went to work full time for Terra as a crop consultant, and later ran one of the company's locations. But office work didn't suit her, so one summer she decided to finish the year and then break out on her own.

She only had about 10 or 11 farmers starting out, but soon the business began to grow, mostly by word of mouth. Now ABD Crop Consulting has expanded to 44 farmers.

"I say I have 44 husbands, and that's why I'm not married," she said, laughing.

At this point, Dowdy said, she'll either have to stop taking new clients or start working with a partner to keep up with the growing number of rice farms in the region. Missouri has about 200,000 acres of farmland in rice, but Dowdy said the crop is becoming more popular, especially in the southeast part of the state where the ground is well-suited for it.

Dowdy's job has some hazards. She never works the first day of dove season -- those hunters will shoot at anything, she said. Also, the bugs are bad, but Dowdy says she's so used to them she doesn't even swat them anymore.

But despite the long hours, often staggering heat and accidental tumbles into the mud, Dowdy says she's never regretted her career choice.

"It has good days and bad days just like any other job," she said. "But I like it for the most part because I'm outside, and I can make my own hours, which just happens to be about 12 hours a day."

wmcferron@semissourian.com