Tag: Agriculture Legacy

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Kentucky’s Other Delicious Bourbon

CFA Admin

by Sister Kathy Curtis

This piece was also published in the Floyd County Times.

16204332142_7162bd2533_mJoyce Pinson of Friends Drift Inn Farm in Pike County invited me to Fort Cluck, the poultry component of the farm business, to meet her Kentucky Bourbon Red turkeys. Joyce and her husband Charlie also raise heritage breed chickens and ducks at Fort Cluck. The chickens and ducks are being raised for eggs and meat; however, the Kentucky Bourbon Reds are being raised to bring attention to the endangered breed.

Kentucky Bourbon Reds were originally bred in Bourbon County Kentucky and are on the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy’s Watch List. The Kentucky Bourbon Red is also included in Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste, a catalog of heritage American foods in danger of extinction.

The Kentucky Bourbon Red began falling out of favor when breeders introduced large breasted turkeys to meet the consumer’s desire for more white meat. Today’s turkeys can get so large that they fall over and need help getting up when it rains so they don’t drown.

Pinson’s connection with turkeys goes back several generations. In Civil war times, her family had an inn in northern Kentucky right along Dixie Highway near Ridgewood, Kentucky. “In those days, you used to sell your turkeys in Lexington not Cincinnati which was closer”, Pinson said.

“People would herd hundreds of turkeys all the way to Lexington. On the way, they would stop at my family’s inn where they had a corral for the turkeys.”

I was really amazed at how beautiful and sociable the turkeys were when we walked around in the pen. The toms were showing off their brownish-red and white plumage and blue heads. Strutting around and gobbling, they put on quite a show. But one of the ironies of raising a heritage breed is that you raise them to be eaten.

According to Pinson, the Kentucky Bourbon Red has a rich flavor. They taste like what you feed them. “My babies have had black berries, cushaws, pumpkins, weeds and corn to eat and a lot of lovin’.”

Pinson paid $11 each for her turkey poults compared to around $1 for chickens. From April until Thanksgiving they don’t do anything but eat. “I paid $70 for my first Kentucky Bourbon Red two years ago, as a Thanksgiving entree. But when I think of all the time I have spent with my turkeys, feeding them and giving them a place to live, $70 doesn’t seem so high.”

Pinson isn’t raising her Bourbon Reds for the money but to better understand and bring attention to the breed. Seeing her with her flocks you can tell it is a labor of love.

“People say farming is hard work and no joy. I say if you’re not having joy in what you are doing, why are you doing it?”

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Don Maggard’s Garden

CFA Admin

Don Maggard Introduction from Community Farm Alliance on Vimeo.

by Angie Mullins

(This article was also posted in the Hazard Herald.)

Don Maggard raises a garden.

Lately, though, he realized his garden has raised him up too.

Maggard, 63, worked underground in the coal mines for 37 years. After a lifetime of hard work, his back finally gave out and he had surgery five years ago.

He hasn’t been able to work in mining ever since so he felt he had no choice but to apply for disability benefits. He was essentially forced to retire at 58 years old, something the active and motivated man would never have dreamed he’d do.

“The hardest part,” he said, “was having nothing to do.”

Boredom led to depression.

His life had lost its meaning. He had a loving family, church and good friends, but he was sad because he felt useless.

Out of long habit, he continued to get up at 4:30 every morning and then had nowhere to go.

Then, after a year or so, he decided to expand his family garden.

He joined the Grow Appalachia at Cowan Community Center organization and began to explore new options.

Now, he is a regular seller at the farmer’s market, makes a good supplemental income, and has found a new lease on life.

“I just love watching it grow. I’d do it if I didn’t make a dime,” he said.

“But I wish I could have gotten into this a long time ago and not just depended solely on mining. The way mining is, it’s so up and down.”

He found plenty of things to do to occupy his time too. He attended canning classes, and has taken field trips with the Grow Appalachia group to other farming operations where he learned about organic fertilization, pest control and different crop covers.

He earned a Micro-processing certification to enable him to sell canned goods and a certification for home-based processing for candies and breads and other such home-made products. He’s working on getting a Farm Number which makes him eligible for grants to expand his farm with better equipment.

He will sell his canned goods under the brand, “Sweet Don’s Corn”.

He sold plenty of that corn this year, 20 bushels of green beans, kale, potatoes, cabbage, onions, lettuce, 10 bushels of tomatoes, mustard greens, kushaw, beets, pumpkins, swiss chard, eggplant, spaghetti squash, cauliflower, butternut squash, basil and oregano at the Farmers Market. Really anything he took down there sold well, he said.

Now, he is working on expanding his Farmers Market offerings with about 40 fruit trees that should bear fruit in the next 2-3 years, and is interested in trying some nut trees.

That’s not all. He sells the roots and medicinal herbs he finds in the woods such as ginseng to dealers and has researched the process for making homemade hominy with his corn this year.

Even his health is better.

He walks to his garden, which is about a half mile from his house on Big Branch in Perry County, twice a day. He believes the exercise keeps him healthy and that his back pain would be much worse if he didn’t keep moving. His back hurts worse in the winter when he can’t walk or tend his garden.

He still sometimes needs help from his three grandsons, or his daughter Abigail Maggard, who is a co-manager of the Letcher County Farmers Market.

But he enjoys that part: showing the younger generations how to plant and tend and reap food from their own land with their own hands.

“They need to see what you can benefit from growing a garden,” he said.

He is the seventh of twelve kids raised in the aftermath of the Great Depression when a garden was critical to keeping a big family fed.

“If we had another depression, I don’t know what the young people would do,” he said. “They would starve to death.”

Besides the financial and health benefits, gardening and selling at the Farmers Market brought him other benefits such as friendship with the other farmers, boosting the local economy, and teaching the kids about a healthy way of life.

“They can buy straight from the garden, not straight from a can,” Maggard said. “We need to show them that.”

Perhaps most would agree, that with everything he has overcome, there is plenty that Don Maggard could teach.

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From Digging Coal to Digging Potatoes: One Miner Tries his Hand at Farming

CFA Admin

by Angie Mullins

Shane Lucas has found what he loves to do. Now he hopes to make a living at it.

When he was laidshanelucasWP off from the coal mine after 17 years and had to take a lower-paying highway construction job, he turned to farming his 29-acre piece of land to supplement his income.

Lucas, 40, who lives in the Cowan area of Letcher County, was recently called back to work at a coal mine in Harlan County, though he hadn’t started yet as of late October. While he is glad for the money and knows he can’t turn it down, he knows it’s not what he wants to do.

 

“If I could do anything in the world, this is what I’d be doing,” he said, gesturing toward his garden on a brilliant late fall afternoon.

He is proud that he was able to supplement his income this year through his farming. He says he made over $580 one particular Saturday morning at the Whitesburg Farmers’ Market. He sold approximately 1,600 pounds of tomatoes this season. If not for a blight, it would have been at least 4,500 pounds, he believes. He sold potatoes, onions, greens, kale, cabbage, corn and beans too.

When asked what the other miners did to make ends meet after the massive layoffs that rocked the Eastern Kentucky coalfields in 2013 and 2014, Lucas replied, “They left.”

Unwilling to join the outmigration that took so many of his co-workers hundreds of miles away to find work, Lucas dug in his heels and kept planting crops.

“It’s a lot harder work than running a piece of equipment on a mine,” he said. “But I love it.”

He was disappointed, though, that he rarely saw coal miners at the Farmers Market buying the healthy food and supporting the local farmers.

“It bothered me,” he said. “They think we’re ‘tree huggers’.”

He even dressed in his mining uniform when he rode through the Mountain Heritage Festival Parade in Whitesburg on a parade float with Grow Appalachia and Farmers Market volunteers. He says he did this to show miners and farmers they “don’t have to be against each other.”

For now, Lucas knows that he must accept the call to go back to the mines to support his wife and extended family that live with him on Lucas Farm, as his new sign calls his home.

However, he says he will miss spending so much time in his garden. Perhaps this is because more than just economic stress pushed him to expand his small garden from a hobby into a business.

He was taught to raise a garden by his dad, Richard Lucas, who died in January, 2014.  Since his dad died, he has put in many more hours than ever before in the garden.

“He’s out here with me,” Lucas said.  He even bought back his dad’s first tractor, a grey 1948 Ford, from a neighbor who had bought it from Lucas’s dad years ago. He found the right parts and has it running again, working the land his dad once helped him farm.

Lucas has a five-year plan to try to make a living farming. He has a small produce stand nearshanelucasWP2 his house that he wants to expand. He has considered getting his micro-processing license and Certified Market license to expand his offerings. He’s installed an efficient drip irrigation and fertilization system. He even plans to try growing 2,000 plugs of Shitake mushrooms next spring.

He has expanded his growing season by using a high tunnel type of greenhouse he built with help from a grant he was awarded through the Natural Resources Conservation Service. There are still rows upon rows of tomatoes in the high tunnel not yet ripe in late October. Lucas expects to keep growing through December and he is working on a contract to supply vegetables such as broccoli to the local school system.

“I’ll just keep trying, “ he said.