by Bill Lavender
The ag-aviation business is challenging enough without adding any extra factors that make it more difficult. When we think about this, typically it is in the male gender terms. Many people see ag-aviation as a male dominated profession. There are mostly male pilots and owners. However, in the small east central Arkansas town of Watson, there is one operation that is owned by a female, Mrs. Brenda Watts of K & P Flying Service. Being a woman has not deterred her in any way from running a successful flying service, if anything, it has helped.

At K & P the men do the flying and most of the loading. Pilot Don Glasscock flies the AT-602, while Julio Benito Maya and brother Alexandro handle the ground ops. But it’s Brenda who has the final responsibility as K & P’s owner and hands-on manager. Brenda is literally “chief cook and bottle washer”. She cooks lunch for her pilot and ground crew from the airstrip’s kitchen, takes the farmers’ calls, schedules the work, oversees the bookkeeping and makes sure the day-to-day requirements of running an ag-operation are done.

Brenda took over K & P in 1999. Since then, she has brought the business back from disarray to a company that her customers know will get the job done professionally and on-time. K & P’s season starts working rice at the end of April and goes through cotton defoliation in the fall at first frost, usually in October.

Although some urea fertilization of wheat and burn down of other crop acres will start in February and carry on through April, it is the rice and cotton applications that make up the bulk of the flying for this Arkansas Delta ag-operation.
With two-thirds of the flying on about 12,000 acres of rice, the AT-602 goes into high gear in late April with a dry application of ammonium sulfate or di-ammonium phosphate (DAP) at the rate of 150# per acre. Within a few weeks, after the farmers have determined that they have an adequate stand of rice, another dry application of fertilizer is made, with urea appliced at 200 pounds per acre. Immediately after this application, often before pilot Don Glasscock returns to the airstrip, the farmer is contacted so that he can start the water onto the rice field. Another two applications of urea at 100 pounds per acre are made amd those applications are within 7-10 days of each other to finish fertilizing on the Arkansas rice.

Quick-change ability from dry to wet is essential for K & P. Often times the ground crew has to make the change three times or more in a given day, depending on weather and the work schedule. The wet work is herbicide applications on the rice. There are sometimes as many as three and four applications with products like Stam, Blazer, Command and Clincher to help control weeds in the rice, particularly grasses. Because rice is from the grass family of plants, selective control of grasses can be challenging and must be done early before the unwanted grasses have time to establish.

Aerial applicators in Arkansas are the only ones in the U.S. with a Command label. They have been able to take this experimental label and successfully apply it by air and experience no drift claims. The Command product replaces Stam in most instances, which is a much more volatile herbicide. Now, a new product called Clincher is being used to back up the Command application with better results and less applications than with Stam alone. Also, Command can be applied with five gallons of water per acre compared to the ten gallons per acre required for Stam.

Pumps are running, the dust is flying from so many takeoffs and landing, everyone is busy and each person knows his/her job come July, the busiest month of the season for K & P. This is when the rice work overlaps the cotton work. With about 6,000 acres of cotton on schedule, K & P has little time to spare. The cotton work starts off in Ferbruary through March with burn down applications using Roundup as a pre-plant treatment. It’s not long before the cotton starts emerging and becomes the target for an array of insects. By now, the rice work is over and K & P can focus on insect control in the cotton. Most of the cotton insecticide and defoliation applications are at five gallons per acre with a few exceptions of defoliation at ten gallons per acre. Cotton scouts provide reports to the farmers that determine when and what to spray, just like the crop advisor does for the rice applications. Each farmer provides his own chemicals that K & P helps to inventory at the airstrip as it is used.

Working from the base airstrip and two satellite strips, the AT-602 rarely ferries more than 15 miles, most of the work within a 10-mile radius. K & P evolved from its first aircraft, an AT-301, then an AT-502 to today’s AT-602 bought in 1997 from Frost Flying Service in Marianna, Arkansas. Brenda believes in taking care of her equipment, especially her airplane. She notes that Don is a good pilot that is easy on the AT-602. Don joined K & P mid-season last year and is pushing 1,000 hours since then.

You’ll never know it to look at it, with its new this spring paint job, N602KP has over 6,200 hours logged. Does the registration N602KP look familiar? It should since it was the AT-602 that Air Tractor used in its promotion of the AT-602 series. Also, Ag-Nav GPS has used the same picture of N602KP in its sales literature. Now, over seven seasons later, including five winter seasons working timber, N602KP is proving the longevity of an Air Tractor. It still has many more seasons to go at its happy home with K & P Flying Service.



Brenda Watts of K & P Flying Service.

Brenda got lucky at a dove shoot in Alymra, AR, four years ago. There she met Rick Watts who is now her husband. Rick works with the forestry industry and has applied his expertise helping K & P generate color-coded field maps with landmarks from ERSI ArtView GIS software. With 1” = 1/4 mile scale, the accuracy of the maps helps provide both the farmers and K & P with a resource to improve applications.

Not often seen is an AT-602 with a crew seat.

N602KP’s pilot, Don Glasscock, came over from Mississippi last summer to fly for K & P Flying Service. Here, Don is pointing out the nozzle arrangement on the AT-602 using CP nozzles with a 6-inch J-tube drop to further lower the nozzle from the wings’ air disturbance.