Farm Together Now

Amy Franseschini, Daniel Tuckey

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781452134024
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

The story of the sustainable farming movement, with numerous photos: "Inspirational, informational... a glimpse of what the future of food may well look like." — Treehugger With interest in home gardening at an all-time high and concerns about food production and safety making headlines, Farm Together Now explores the current state of grassroots farming in the United States. Part oral history and part treatise on food politics, this fascinating project is an introduction to the many individuals who are producing sustainable food, challenging public policy, and developing community organizing efforts. With hundreds of photographs and a foreword from New York Times columnist Mark Bittman, Farm Together Now will educate, inspire, and cultivate a new wave of modern agrarians.

Knopik Family Farm

Location:

Fullerton, Nebraska

Organizing body:

2, plus many more through various organizations

Scale:

1,000 acres for mob grazing, 400 for crops

Type:

For profit

Currently producing:

200 cows

In operation:

Since the late 1960s

Web sites:

North Star Neighbors: nebraskafood.org/shop/producers/nstar.php

Nebraska Food Cooperative: nebraskafood.org

Third-generation farmer Jim Knopik decided to protest when he found out that some very large “factory farm” meat producers were going to be moving to town and disrupting the local economy, and bringing along their environmentally toxic approaches to food production. In the process of mounting a resistance against the confined-animal feeding operation (CAFO), Knopik realized that his own farm was involved in some practices that were also ecologically unsustainable and were harming the animals and the land.

Knopik reformed his farming and founded North Star Neighbors with his wife, Carolyn, and a network of four farms in the region. North Star Neighbors is a direct-marketing cooperative specializing in raising beef, pork, lamb, chicken, turkey, and duck. Their Web site states: “Our animals are raised from birth on our farms. We know exactly what they eat from birth. They are never given antibiotics or artificial growth stimulants. No animal by-products are fed to our animals. Our animals are not grown in confinement buildings. They are raised on grass and in open lots and grain-finished on non-GMO (genetically modified organism) corn, soybeans, oats, and alfalfa. Our animals are taken directly from our farms to a family owned, USDA-inspected processing plant.”

Recently elected county supervisor, Knopik is devoted to environmental activism and has started the statewide Nebraska Food Cooperative, which helps sustainable producers directly market their food online.

Interview with Jim Knopik

Could you talk about where you’re from—the region, the people, your land? Jim Knopik, owner: I live ten miles west of Fullerton, Nebraska, in Nance County, which has a lot of different kinds of soil. I’ve lived on this farm since I was a year old. And now I’m sixty. When my dad started farming, it was all about sustainable agriculture. He would just get whatever the soil would give him. If he wanted fertilization, he did it through rotation. When I started, in the late ’60s, we wanted to get bigger and be more productive—we started using synthetic fertilizers and chemicals in our farming operations.

What was it that you saw on other people’s farms that convinced you to make that switch?

Less weeds in the field, for one thing—that’s something farmers always like to have, clean fields. So if the chemicals can do that, you naturally move that way. It’s a lot about image, too. If things don’t look good, people won’t listen to you. Image is everything.

How has your livestock operation changed throughout the years?

I raised hogs out in the open up until about ten years ago; we probably raised eighty to a hundred at a time. When I first started raising hogs, I could make fifteen dollars a head. If you sell a hundred of them, that’s fifteen hundred dollars—a lot of money back in 1970. And then, around 1980, I built a confinement operation, which handled about five hundred at a time. But I found out that in confinement, animals’ health becomes an issue. It got to bother me that I had to run around with a syringe in my pocket all the time, vaccinating hogs. When it came time to have those animals on medication twenty-four hours a day to keep them somewhat healthy, that’s when, in my mind, it wasn’t sustainable. I didn’t think I was qualified to administer medicine in the way it needed to be done. But there was this “get big or get out” idea.

As time went on, and those profit margins went down to two or three bucks, well, you had to raise five times as many hogs to make the same amount of money. The [consolidation] of the industry just kept taking those margins away from the producers and putting them in the pockets [of big operations]. That’s why now you see the big operations doing fifty thousand hogs.

Jim Knopik and grandson Lane move the electric fence and their herd twice a day.

When did the CAFO factory farm try to move into your community?

I think it was June 1997. That situation caused me to take a hard look at what we were doing on the farm. The way we operated then was by observing our responsibility as farmers to feed people. You hear on the radio that every farmer feeds 128 people—that’s the kind of thing that keeps you in the seat for eighteen hours a day. That was propaganda, I think, but it made me work hard just the same. My responsibility was to society, to feed people.

But after the big hog guys came in and tried to push all of their hogs onto a small, little area in our community, I realized that I had isolated myself from what was really going on in the world. Once I saw what the CAFO was doing, I understood that I had to become more involved in my community. This was another kind of responsibility that wasn’t just about working and keeping your nose to the grindstone.

So what happened was that, in June 1997, a real estate guy came in from out of town wanting to acquire some land that we rented. He wanted to meet me out on a dirt road near where the hog guys wanted to set up their hog site. And they wanted fifteen sites. There was something real fishy about the situation. This caused me to ask a lot of questions.

With a hog farm of my own, I knew some of the environmental impact that I was causing, but I was containing it on my property. Yet here they wanted to bring in half a million hogs into too small of an area. I could see what was going to happen.

Two weeks before I was approached, the mayor of Fullerton called me up and she asked me if [there were any] hog barns available. “What the hell is going on here?” I thought. “Why is everyone trying to do this undercover and not being really open about it?” I could see something wasn’t right.

When I started asking questions, and once it finally broke open that the hog guys were going to come in here and [set up a CAFO], that’s when people looked to me. In a matter of about four days, we went from 6 or 7 neighbors discussing it at coffee on Thursday morning to having more than 150 people at a meeting on Sunday night.

We grew that fast, and that night I was elected president of the organization! The organization was called Mid-Nebraska PRIDE (People Responding in Defense of our Environment).

It seems like that is a big shift to happen so quickly.

Oh, yeah. That was when I really transitioned from a farmer to an activist, I guess. I almost abandoned the farm because so many people were calling who were having the same problem across the state. You see, this hog guy was moving to other areas. Once those people found out about how we stopped him, through getting our community organized, we were called into their communities. We were doing town hall meetings, hell, probably twice a week during the next six months. And then, of course, we were having our internal meetings, oh, I would say, dang near every day—and sometimes twice a day. I figure we had 180 meetings the first year.

How did North Star Neighbors gro...