Arkansas Farmers Are Fighting Hunger With Sustainable Meat and Dairy

Kerry Harrington had only worked with the 14 other Arkansas farmers in the Grass Roots Farmers Cooperative for two weeks when a dairy farmer in the co-op offered her a rather generous gift.

“He said, ‘Do you want this cow?’ ” Harrington recalled. Chris Ward of Fresh Food Farm didn’t expect anything in return—though Harrington did pay him for the animal, named Lexus, six months later. “I would call it a loan without terms,” she said. “I think that’s very symbolic of the cooperative spirit.”

Harrington joined Grass Roots as a founding member in 2014, when she and her husband, Josh Jimenez, were both bookending the hours at their full-time jobs with labor on The Other Side Farm, their burgeoning pastured-poultry and raw-milk operation in Marshall, Arkansas.

It’s also a fitting symbol for a cooperative that got its start in part thanks to Heifer International USA. Best known for its work to end hunger and poverty in developing nations through livestock aid, the charity is now able to quantify that its two-and-a-half-year-old project based in Arkansas, where one in four people is food insecure, is making strides against poverty. With capital, mentorship, and marketing strategy as well as development support from Heifer, a network of sustainable meat farmers who had been working together informally for a number of years were able to incorporate as the Grass Roots Farmers Cooperative. Heifer has contributed nearly $3 million to Grass Roots, which is nearly financially sustainable after two years in business, thanks to its home-delivered-meat subscriptions.

Joining Grass Roots was a game changer for beginning farmers Harrington and Jimenez. Harrington had been working as a farmhand and Jimenez as an artisan for a wood-toy company when they started The Other Side Farm. The cooperative eased problems of cash flow by providing chicks and feed, the cost of which was subtracted on the back end. By ordering chicks for multiple producers at once, Grass Roots was able to get a lower price per bird than the farmers could have individually. The couple lease their land, and milk is available on-site to their neighbors below retail price. To Harrington and Jimenez, the community’s well-being is a greater motivator than making more money.

“I would rather have my customers be healthy than not have them as my customers,” Harrington told Heifer’s World Ark Magazine. They’re an appreciative bunch. “Best chicken and chocolate milk EVER!!!” one fan wrote on Facebook. “It’s a beautiful place full of love and a certain sense of calm you couldn’t find anywhere.”

Additionally, a $3,200 grant from Heifer built The Other Side’s first five chicken tractors. Dubbed “prairie schooners,” the portable, floorless chicken coops are rolled to a new area twice a day. The chickens can forage for fresh grass, weeds, and bugs while the fields are systematically fertilized. In the first year, Harrington’s brood set a record as the plumpest in the co-op.

Yet the greatest challenge of being a farmer isn’t pulling a prairie schooner, raising a fat bird, or rising to milk Lexus, the symbolic cow, at 5 a.m. It’s finding a facility to process and package your product—then marketing, selling, and distributing a product from Searcy County, Arkansas, where the median household income of a little more than $21,000 is about half the state’s average, to a customer who can afford it.

That’s where Grass Roots takes over. The co-op is close to meeting its goal of selling 60 percent of its pastured poultry, pork, hickory nuts, berries, and grass-fed beef and lamb directly to consumers via its subscriber-based home-delivery program. It’s also available for retail at virtual and real-life farmers markets and brick-and-mortar stores. The other 40 percent is sold to restaurants and institutional food-service businesses, including colleges and hospitals in Little Rock and in Memphis, Tennessee.

Early indicators show success. Across its producers, Grass Roots farmers reported an additional $35,000 in sales from participating in the co-op, according to Heifer. In 2015, The Other Side Farm raised 5,000 chickens, up from 1,200 the year before. Jimenez now works full-time on the farm, and Harrington has a full-time managerial role at Grass Roots.

In the meantime, The Other Side has growth in mind. Within five years, Harrington hopes there will be piglets, which other members of the co-op can source from The Other Side and raise. More immediately, she has in mind an addition not to the barnyard but to the farmhouse.

“Our next step is creating another farmer,” Harrington said, a livelihood she wouldn’t be able to pass on to the next generation were it not for the co-op. “If the co-op hadn’t come to fruition, I probably wouldn’t be a farmer at all.”