A Step in the Rice Direction
Design by Alex Povis. Illustration by Tyler Gross.
April 2, 2006 started out like any other Sunday for Steve and Kaye McKaskle.
Although balmy, the afternoon stretched out quietly: Kaye reading a book and Steve writing an agricultural newsletter in their home in Braggadocio, Missouri. Steve had the news on in the background, but he soon took notice: A tornado was heading due east across Pemiscot County, in the extreme southeastern part of the Missouri Bootheel.
Steve went out to the front yard and saw the EF4 twister less than a mile away. Dirt and debris were everywhere, so they jumped into their car to drive just next door to the home of Gary Coppage, Kaye’s cousin. When they got there, the wind bent one car door in half and tore the other clean off.
“We ran in their house screaming, ‘Get in the basement!’” Steve recalls. “They didn’t even know there was a tornado. So we got in the basement, and a minute or two later we heard this, bang, bang, bang, bang, noise.
It didn’t last long at all. We came up and the whole top part of the house was gone.”
The devastation was total. More than 700 homes in nearby Caruthersville were destroyed; two people in Braggadocio were dead. McKaskle Family Farm, then an organic cotton and soybean operation, was almost entirely gone: The tornado ripped out a century-old barn and two 100-year-old pecan trees and destroyed tractors, farming equipment and the cotton gin – not to mention half of the McKaskles' home.
The den was pretty much the only room left intact in the couple’s house; Steve and Kaye slept on a mattress there for a few months while they rebuilt. That first night, though, they slept in their adult kids’ old bedroom, with no roof.
“We slept in their beds – it was a dry tornado – and you could see the stars,” Steve says, shaking his head. “All you could hear were chainsaws [from people working on debris] all night long.”
Because their cotton operation was decimated, the McKaskles had to rebuild from scratch. Steve had switched over to organic cotton in early 1993 and was selling his crop to Patagonia, and later, Levi’s and Nike. But after the tornado, he had the chance to make a change. He’d been talking to a rice mill in Arkansas about possibly getting into organic rice and decided to roll the dice.
“I called him and said, ‘We’re wiped out,’” Steve says. “‘And I would like to grow 80 acres of organic rice this year.’ And he said, ‘Let’s do it.’”