Tennessee Local Food Summit is a hive for food justice in the Southeast
NASHVILLE — About 70 miles north of Nashville in the town of Red Boiling Springs in Macon County, farmer and educator Jeff Poppen, better known as the Barefoot Farmer, runs one of the oldest and largest organic farms in Tennessee. For nearly 40 years, he built rich soil for his bountiful farm before the second-largest meat producer in the world forced him to move from the 250 acres he’d been farming since 1974.
When his neighboring property owner partnered with Cobb Vantress, a subsidiary of the multinational mega-giant Tyson Foods, to place a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) — aka a factory farm — 450 feet from his homestead and garden, Poppen’s first instinct was to organize.
This self-described “dirty hippie” found unlikely allies in his neighbors — a Baptist preacher, a state trooper, a politician, and what he calls a “chemical farmer” — all opposed to an industrial chicken house moving in.
They knew that the confinement of nearly 40,000 birds in one area would produce a putrefying odor from airborne chicken feces along with a toxic runoff that would contaminate the pristine waters of Long Hungry Creek, designated as “exceptional waters” by the state. Agricultural runoff from such massive chicken houses can contain antibiotics, hormones, heavy metals, chemicals and dangerous bacteria.
Despite community resistance to the Tyson CAFO, Poppen kept seeing Tyson chicken in his neighbors’ refrigerators.
“It dawned on me that my problem wasn’t really Tyson or even Big Ag — it was the public who was buying their food,” he said in an interview at last month’s Tennessee Local Food Summit at Cumberland University in Lebanon.
Read the full story at Hellbender Press.
Élan Young 