114 animal, vegetable, miraclesmall family farm; the former was the small farm’s bottom dollar, until the
bottom dropped out. In my lifetime Kentucky farmers have mostly had
the options of going broke, or going six ways to Sunday for the sake of
staying solvent. I know former tobacco growers who now raise certifi ed
organic gourmet mushrooms, bison steaks, or asparagus and fancy salad
greens for restaurants. On the bluegrass that famously nourished Man o’
War and Secretariat, more modest enterprises with names like “Hard
Times Farm” and “Mother Hubbard’s” are now raising pasture- fed beef,
pork, lamb, and turkeys. Kentucky farms produce flowers, garlic, organic
berries and vegetables, emu and ostrich products, catfish, and rainbow
trout. Right off the Paris Pike, a country lane I drove a hundred times in
my teenage years, a farmer named Sue now grows freshwater shrimp.
If we could have imagined this when I was in high school, that our
county’s fields might someday harbor prawn ponds and shiitakes, I sup-
pose we would have laughed our heads off. The first time I went to a party
where “Kentucky caviar” was served, I suspected a trick (as in “Rocky
Mountain oyster”). It wasn’t; it was Louisville- grown fish eggs. Innovative
cottage industries are life and death for these farmlands. Small, pioneer-
ing agricultural ventures are the scene of more hard work, risk- taking, and
creative management than most people imagine.
Among other obstacles, these farmers have to contend with a national
press that is quick to pronounce them dead. Diversifi ed food- producing
farms on the outskirts of cities are actually the fastest- growing sector of
U.S. agriculture. The small farm is at the moment very busy thinking its
way out of a box, working like mad to protect the goodness and food secu-
rity of a largely ungrateful nation.
These producers can’t survive by catering only to the upscale market,
either. The majority of farmers’ market customers are people of ordinary
means, and low- income households are not necessarily excluded. An ur-
ban area in eastern Tennessee has a vegetable equivalent of a bookmobile,
allowing regional farmers to get produce into neighborhoods whose only
other food- purchasing option might be a liquor store. Though many eligi-
ble mothers may not know it, the U.S. nutritional assistance program for
women with infants and children (WIC) gives coupons redeemable at
farmers’ markets to more than 2.5 million participants in forty- four states.