Morgan Crain
1
Agriculture Profile
11/7/11
999 Words
“It’s All I Know”
The alarm chirps on an iPhone 3GS. It is around 5:30 a.m., which means it is time for
Matt Kingston to start his day.
He rolls out of bed and gets dressed, most likely in one of his many cut off tee shirts,
light wash blue jeans and beaten tan work boots. His dog, Molly, barks from her cage in the
laundry room as Kingston grabs for a clean cut off. She is big and rambunctious, with a shiny
black coat—stunning for a mutt he found on the road about a year ago. She is wagging her tail
with furor, and it is beating against the metal of her roomy cage. Kingston gently calms her and
lets her into the backyard.
The backyard view from his two-bedroom home is lovely as the sun is preparing to peer
across the field Kingston has lived by himself on for about five years.
Kingston admires the view before drinking two cups of coffee and eating a bowl of
Captain Crunch. His favorite.
Unlike many 24-year-olds, Kingston does not check his Facebook or Twitter account at
the beginning of his day. He does not even have a Facebook account—once his fiancé Meaghan
made an account for him, but he didn’t like it and insisted she delete it. He has a Twitter
account, created July 1, 2011, but has 0 tweets. He only follows his two best friends, which in
Morgan Crain
2
Agriculture Profile
11/7/11
999 Words
return are his only followers, and he uses it to keep up-to-date with them. Technology isn’t
something that interests him. He loves the outdoors.
In fact, Kingston, a senior general agriculture major of Brookland, says his favorite thing
about agriculture is just getting to be outdoors, and that he doesn’t like being inside because he
gets “stir crazy bored.”
Kingston first became interested in agriculture when he was five or six years old.
“I grew up around agriculture, it’s all I know,” he said.
Mark Kingston, a junior biology major of Brookland, is Matt’s younger brother, and
recalled spending time on the farm with Matt when they were children.
“One time we were at the barn and he fell off a fence and broke his collar bone,”
Kingston, 21, said. “While he was crying I asked my parents if he was dead, and they said ‘no,’ I
said ‘darn it’.”
Kingston said his father influenced him to enter the field of agriculture.
“He’s loaned money to farmers for I don’t know how long, probably 25 to 30 years.
When I was younger I’d ride around with him and we would go see his farmers,” he said.
Morgan Crain
3
Agriculture Profile
11/7/11
999 Words
His father, Randy, has worked at Farm Credit Midsouth for decades and is the current
branch manager of the Jonesboro location. He and his father have a close relationship, and
Kingston believes his father has not only influenced him in the field of agriculture but has also
shaped his caring personality and outspoken sense of humor.
Much of this close relationship was built when Kingston was very young when he would
go hunting with his father, grandfather and brother.
“I learned everything I know about hunting from my dad and grandpa,” he said. “I mostly
went deer hunting when I was younger, my grandpa took me to hunt in Drasco a lot.”
Kingston still enjoys hunting and fishing. He likes to go fishing in the Black River and he
likes to go duck hunting.
Kingston’s friend Clay Jones, a sophomore physical education major of Trumann,
recalled a time the two went duck hunting together.
“Matt and I were duck hunting one time, sitting on a ditch, about five or six feet up from
our boat, where you’d have to kind of shimmy down the ditch to get back into the boat,” Jones
said. “Well, Matt decided he wasn’t going to shimmy, so he just jumped into the boat. He slipped
and lost his balance and then he did the best Shaggy from “Scooby-Doo” run-in-place I have
ever seen. He got everything but his gun wet.”
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Agriculture Profile
11/7/11
999 Words
Also in his spare time, he watches the Outdoors Channel and “How It’s Made,” or war
documentaries on the History Channel, while kicked back in his recliner.
However, spare time is not something Kingston has a lot of. Most days he works, goes to
class, then returns to work, and once work is done, he likes to spend time with his fiancé before
she leaves to pull a long shift at St. Bernards Hospital and he goes to bed around 9:30 p.m.
Kingston has worked as a groundskeeper at the Jonesboro Country Club for over a year,
tending to the greens. Before that, he worked multiple odds and ends jobs such as making levees
and chopping cotton for farmers. His most memorable job was keeping beehives with his
brother, which they did for seven years.
“We started off with 10 beehives, it was a 4H project,” he said. “We ended up with like
200 beehives and we sold the honey. There was a guy who bought 55 gallon drums of it out of
Michigan. There was a guy in Missouri, too. They would buy all of our honey and mix it with
other honeys and sell it to markets.”
All the years of meticulously watching golf greens, cultivating bee hives and chopping
cotton will pay off in December when Kingston graduates. He plans on working at Union Pacific
and spending his life with Meaghan Crockett, who he has been dating for three years and is
marrying on New Year’s Eve in the Bahamas.
Morgan Crain
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Agriculture Profile
11/7/11
999 Words
“I’m excited, but ain’t nothing really going to change except her last name,” Kingston
said.
Crockett intends to move in to Kingston’s two-bedroom home with his dog Molly.
Crockett is enthusiastic about finally being Mrs. Kingston, but has a major issue with the huge
deer heads Kingston currently has displayed on the living room walls.
“He told me taking those down is grounds for a divorce,” Crockett said, then laughed.
“It’s the one thing he says he can’t compromise.”
#
Source List
1. Matt Kingston, a senior general agriculture major of Brookland
870-930-4206
2. Meaghan Crockett, Kingston’s fiancé
Meaghan.crockett@smail.astate.edu
3. Mark Kingston, a junior biology major of Brookland, Kingston’s brother
870-275-0988
4. Clay Jones, a sophomore physical education major of Trumann, Kingston’s close friend
870-219-4080
Art:
A picture of Kingston, or pictures from he and Mark’s childhood, or his engagement pictures