George Dunklin has worked the land his whole life, and it’s culminated in one of the most impressive hunting and conservation centers in the country: Five Oaks Duck Lodge.
Since 1907, Dunklin’s family has called southeast Arkansas home; from his grandfather’s farm land in Jefferson and Arkansas counties to hunting in Stuttgart, the region made an impression on Dunklin and drew him back to the state after he earned a business degree at Memphis State University.
“I started farming rice, soybeans and wheat. I started in the fall of ‘80, and that was one of the worst weather years that we’ve ever had on record, from temperature to a lack of rainfall. When I got here, farmers were just giving up on watering their soybeans just to try to save the rice crop,” he recalls.
Over time, Dunklin started purchasing the land around his farm, including an impressive hunting lodge from Memphis Furniture Co.; that lodge became the foundation of what is now Five Oaks. As his land holdings grew, so did Dunklin’s focus on stewardship.
“When I got over here working in the dirt, farming, moving dirt — I just fell in love with the dirt, and it made me ask: ‘How can we make these farms better? How can we make them more efficient? How can we make them more habitat-friendly for waterfowl?’” Dunklin says.
Dunklin’s conservation efforts at Five Oaks in the last 40-plus years include continuous no-till rice farming, water management systems, tree planting programs and diverse habitat creation. Perhaps his biggest contribution to conservation in Arkansas is the Five Oaks Agriculture Research and Education Center.
“A biologist that works with me, Jody Pagan, and I were seeing kids coming out of these academic and wildlife programs, and even though they knew the science side, they know nothing about the duck hunting side. Or how to drive a tractor, or how to manage a duck lodge and those sorts of things, so we came up with this program to merge those two,” Dunklin says.
The program has graduated four cohorts, and Dunklin says these field conservationists-in-training will be the ones to carry environmental stewardship forward.
“You’ve got to actively manage these properties,” Dunklin says.
In the Hole
When did your conservation education begin?
“Dad really emphasized it to me. He never used the word; I never remember him using the word ‘conservation,’ but I do remember him using the word ‘stewardship.’ That’s when the seeds of my stewardship, or conservation, were planted. We don’t own the land, we’re just the caretaker. It’s a short time we’re on this Earth. Leave it better than we found it. Well, when you’re 12 years old, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but some place, that all matured in my head.”
