See the future of the Arkansas Delta through the eyes of a fifth generation Birdeye resident

Chickens roam free at Birdeye Farms.

Martin Smith is a son of the Delta. Growing up surrounded by family and farmland in Birdeye, an unincorporated community in Cross County, he experienced a bit of culture shock when he moved away for college, a path that ultimately led to a landscape architecture degree. After he and his wife, Kara, started to build their lives in Texas, she had a job opportunity in Little Rock—and Martin found himself back in The Natural State. Here, he began pondering an old property back home in Birdeye. “My great-grandfather’s 1903 house was 5 miles from where I grew up. It was in disrepair, and our family was told it needed to be torn down,” he says. Having recently traveled to Scotland where he cycled among centuries-old relics, something about the history of the home started to tug at Martin, and he felt compelled to save it. “We were following this path that society had set up for us, and we just kind of put all that aside and said, Let’s do this,” he says of their decision to uproot their life and move to Birdeye. A year after relocating, Martin and his partner, Tanner Weeks, opened their firm, Ecological Design Group, with Martin officing out of the Delta. The firm also has branches in Little Rock and Rogers.…

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