“It can be hard to look at something and be like, ‘Those pickles are eight dollars. I can get them at the store for three.’ Well, I can tell you I grew those pickles.”
That’s Jann Knappage. Ask her what she wishes people understood about farming and she’ll walk you through a single jar: starting the seeds, watering them, putting them in the ground, harvesting, washing, processing, pickling and finally labeling. All of that is in the price, and all of it happens around a full time job and a young family.
When Jann talks about what helped Fox & Hen grow, others come first. A Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) grant paid for their high tunnels. Grant workshops and support from Grow Appalachia, the Kentucky Center for Agriculture and Rural Development (KCARD), Community Farm Alliance, Kentucky Highlands and other resources. For more information about resources, including financial suppport, reach out to CFA at info@cfaky.org.
Jann and her partner Kevin own and run Fox & Hen Farm on ten acres of mostly hillside in Menifee County. They grow produce and turn much of it into jams, jellies, pickles and herbal salts, which they sell at the Red River Gorge Market and the Menifee County Farmers Market. Jann also serves on the Community Farm Alliance board. Her story says a lot about what it takes to farm in Kentucky today, and about what it means to have a community behind you while you do it.
Most of Fox & Hen’s produce grows in two high tunnels, each about 30 by 70 feet, with another quarter acre planted outside. They don’t use chemicals and follow organic practices, though they aren’t certified. Turmeric and hibiscus grow alongside the vegetables, and fruit trees planted a few years ago are still working their way up to a first harvest. There are animals, too. The pigs will eventually be processed for meat, the chickens keep the family in eggs, and the sheep, Jann laughs, are “more like glorified lawn mowers” for now.
They’ve been at it since 2018, and Jann still isn’t sure she’s earned the word farmer. “Maybe aspiring farmer,” she says. “Even though we’ve been at it for almost eight years, I still feel like a beginning farmer in many ways, but established in other ways.”
That honesty shapes how she thinks about success. Jann and Kevin both work off the farm. They have a small child, and they’ve weathered some wild seasons. The hardest part, she says, is that there’s no clocking out. After a long, hard day at work, the farm still needs you when you get home. So her definition of success is simple: “Just being here is a success.” And on the days the booth is full, with jar after jar of things they grew and made themselves, she’s proud of it.
Food has been at the center of Jann’s life for a long time. She studied nutrition in college and planned to become a dietitian, until time spent working under a dietitian in a hospital showed her that clinical work wasn’t for her. She turned toward community nutrition instead, always with an eye on the bigger food system.
Her first try at growing food came in 2012, during a summer of service when she was her group’s sustainability coordinator. They started seeds in Styrofoam cups, planted an 8 by 8 foot bed, and started far too late. Summer ended before anything was ready to pick. It didn’t matter. During her last year of school she went to work at The Happy Box Farm, an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) farm in Troy, Ohio. Her mom had always kept flowers but never a food garden, so learning where food really comes from was new and exciting. “I was like, ‘I’d much rather do this and be outside.’”
That summer of service was also her first taste of Kentucky, and she fell for it. So in 2014, when The David School in Floyd County needed someone to run its garden program, Inch by Inch, she said yes. The David School serves students who weren’t finding success in public school. The garden became a Grow Appalachia site, with two small high tunnels and field plots that added up to just under an acre. Students grew the ingredients for their own hot sauce, made it themselves, and sold it at the Floyd County Farmers Market and at the school.
After two years there, her friend Kathy Curtis, a Community Farm Alliance member who had started that school garden, told her about an opening for CFA’s Eastern Kentucky Farm to Table Coordinator. Jann applied and got the job. “And then they never got rid of me,” she jokes. She has been a member, a staff member and now a board member. “I owe so much of my career, resource connection, and feeling a sense of community to CFA.”
She’s open about the burnout that can come with years of food and farm work. What keeps her going is paying attention to what gives her energy. Farming on top of a full time job is tiring, but it gives her a well rounded view of food. Recently she stepped away from agriculture in her day job, and that change has brought fresh energy to the farm and the market. She loves developing recipes for everything she cans, and she’s taking a community photography class with Erica Chambers so she can learn to photograph food. “Trying to never stay stagnant and also knowing when to say no and what to put your energy into, it’s always changing,” she says. “You have to be willing to fail.”
She has advice for anyone just starting out. For new farmers: there’s no single right way to do anything. “I feel like a lot of times when you’re just starting out you feel like you have to do everything by the book. Well, first off, depending on who you talk to, it’s a different book!”
For new food system advocates, her advice is even shorter. “You gotta show up! You have to be present and people gotta know you, and that’s how you’re gonna have the greatest impact.”
When she isn’t growing, canning or talking about food, Jann is reading. Right now she’s halfway through Burn of the Everflame by Penn Cole, the fourth and final book in the Kindred’s Curse Saga. “It’s an emotional roller coaster,” she says. “It is a wild ride.”
Next time you’re at the Red River Gorge Market or the Menifee County Farmers Market, stop by the Fox & Hen Farm booth and say hello. Pick up a jar of pickles, and now you’ll know everything that went into it.
If you farm in Kentucky and want a community behind you, the way Jann has had for years, reach out to Community Farm Alliance and find out what membership looks like.