Curtis Lorance Haynes

Brent Smith will officiate the service. Curtis Haynes of Trenton, TN, a widely known career employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service (USDA-SCS) and its successor agency, the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), died on December 19 at his home in Trenton. He was 82. Haynes died of complications from lung cancer. Haynes was well known by those in agriculture and conservation throughout West Tennessee and across the state. He served for 34 years as a soil conservation technician helping farmers and landowners implement soil conservation practices and cropping methods. He helped train a number of agency engineers and conservationists in Tennessee during his tenure as they began their professional careers with the agency. Although Haynes never attended college, he was self-taught in the engineering standards, fundamentals and concepts of hydrology as well as erosion and flood control structures often implemented by natural resource agencies such as the USDA SCS, the Tennessee Valley Authority and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "I do not know of another person that severed the people and the agency as well as Mr. Haynes. He was a true conservationist," said Kevin Brown, Tennessee's State Conservationist for NRCS. Haynes started his career in Benton County, Tennessee, in 1958 as a part time employee of the Soil Conservation Service, and transferred to Gibson County in 1961 where he would spend the remainder of his career. He saw the agency undergo a number of transformations -- from providing technical assistance on basic conservation practices and floodplain drainage, to a more compliance-driven entity charged with implementing requirements of later national Farm Bills and the Clean Water Act. He was known as a friend to the farmer. A farmer himself, Haynes searched for ways to better adapt agency-designed conservation structures and systems to better meet rapidly changing agricultural equipment sizes and practices. This was not always well received by some within the agency. Haynes maintained that if farmers were to be expected to adopt and embrace conservation requirements, the agency should develop approaches that worked with ever-changing cropping systems and farm economics. During his early career in Gibson County, Haynes became friends with local farmer and agriculture leader Ed Jones, who would later be elected to Congress and serve as Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives' Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit and Rural Development. As Chairman, Jones would often consult Haynes on how conservation proposals under consideration in Washington would affect or be accepted by West Tennessee farmers. Over the years, Haynes worked on a number of major conservation projects throughout West Tennessee, including the West Tennessee Tributaries Project, Reelfoot Lake Erosion Survey, and Operation Save Our Soil, which was visited by U.S Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland. Near the end of his career, Haynes was affectionately nicknamed by his professional colleagues "The King," short for "The Terrace King" due to the number of miles of field terracing systems he designed and put into place, and for his unique approach for engaging farmers in a way that led them to adopt conservation practices. In 1994 Haynes retired after 34 years with the agency. Upon Haynes' retirement, then Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy said that his "service to USDA and the people of Gibson County would be remembered for decades to come." Haynes was born in northern Decatur County, TN and was educated in a one-room schoolhouse in the Hydro community. He was the only son of the late J.C. "Dutch" and Lois Haynes. Later his family moved to Holladay, TN where he attended high school, farmed and raised Herford cattle. He married the former Reba Barnes of Holladay in 1961. The two made their home in Trenton, TN, where he was a member of Bethany Church of Christ and later the Trenton Church of Christ. During his career, Haynes was an active member of the Soil and Water Conservation Society of America. Haynes is survived by his wife, his son Anthony Haynes, and daughter-in-law Katherine Taylor Haynes, and two grandsons, Alexander and Christopher Haynes of Nashville.