Gwen Moritz

THIS IS AN OPINION We'd also like to hear yours. Tweet us @ArkBusiness or So — as my son starts every sentence — this is my last full week before officially retiring on June 30. I started my previous job as editor of Arkansas Business on Aug. 2, 1999, so I’m cutting out a few weeks shy of 27 years at this company. And I had been in the full-time workforce 17 years before I landed here. Forty-four years feels like a long time, and even longer when I think about the changes that I have navigated.

Gwen Moritz, hard at work on the next list for Arkansas Business. (Sophie Baker) THIS IS AN OPINION We'd also like to hear yours. Tweet us @ArkBusiness or Hunter Field, the editor who normally fills this space with bright thoughts, welcomed a new baby girl last week, so he asked me if I’d write columns this week and next.

Mountaire Corp., headquartered in Little Rock, has now topped the list for the second year in a row. (Google Maps) The 75 companies on this year’s list of Arkansas’ largest private companies collected combined revenue of about $60.3 billion last year. And two-thirds of that flowed to 20 companies that each reported sales exceeding $1 billion, starting with Little Rock-based poultry giant Mountaire Corp. with record revenue of $3.9 billion. Another poultry company, Simmons Foods Inc.