Farm marketings in Arkansas were over $5.13 billion in 2001 (13th in the US), with crops and livestock accounting for about 32% and 68%, respectively. The state is the nation's leading producer of rice and is among the leaders in cotton, soybeans, and grain sorghum.
Cotton was first grown in the state about 1800, along the river valleys. Confined mainly to slaveholding plantations before the Civil War (1861–65), cotton farming became more widespread in the postwar period, expanding into the hill country of the northwest and eventually into the deforested areas of the northeast, which proved to be some of the most fertile farmland in the nation. As elsewhere in the postbellum South, sharecropping by tenant farmers predominated well into the 20th century, until mechanization and diversification gradually brought an end to the system. Rice was first grown commercially in the early 1900s; by 1920, Arkansas had emerged as a poultry and soybean producer.
During 2002, Arkansas produced 96,480,000 bushels of soybeans, valued at $545,112,000; 38,640,000 bushels of wheat, worth $112,056,000; 3,595,000 tons of hay, worth $198,835,000; and 17,710 bushels of sorghum for grain, valued at $43,637,000. The rice harvest in 2002 was 96,752,000 hundredweight (4,388,574,000 kg), worth $348,307,000. The cotton crop in 2002, 1,650,000 bales, was worth $332,640,000.