Farmers plant hopes for growth on co-op

CEDARVILLE -- It took more than five years of farming before Jeremy Prater could pay himself a salary.

That isn't unusual for small livestock producers who raise their animals exclusively on pasture or in the woods, feed them a non-Genetically Modified Organism diet and sell directly to customers.

But Prater, the founder of Cedar Creek Farm in Cedarville, is hoping a newly formed cooperative can improve the situation by leveraging some of the same principals that food industry giants use to reduce costs.

"At this point, people that can either suffer longer than everybody else or are crazy, that's who's doing it," Prater said. "The farm's paid for, all the equipment is paid for -- my grandparents worked 50 years to get that done -- and all this infrastructure's here. It still took five years ... and that's the real challenge."

More than a year and a half in the making, the Grass Roots Farmers' Cooperative launched two weeks ago to face the challenge head-on. Eight successful small farms in Arkansas formed a partnership to collectively buy non-GMO feed, market the products, coordinate butchering, make deliveries and handle customer service.

In addition to Cedar Creek Farm, Arroyo Family Farm, Dettelbach Farms, Falling Sky Farm, Freckle Face Farm, Lawrence Farms, Onyekwelu Farm and The Other Side Farm are members of the cooperative.

About half the farmers in the Grass Roots Farmers' Cooperative are full-time farmers. Cody Hopkins, general manager of the cooperative and co-owner of Falling Sky Farm in Marshall, said the goal is to get the other half to that point in five years.

An economist would say they're leveraging economies of scale, but Hopkins said the group is simply buying goods and services in bulk to reduce cost and save time.

"This will allow farmers to focus more on farming and less on being a deliveryman, taking the animals to the processor or being the processor in some cases, or doing the customer service," he said. "What we're really doing is working together to build something that used to exist maybe a hundred years ago for farmers, but doesn't exist now."

Little Rock-based Heifer USA provided guidance and funding to the group.

Hopkins said a trip to a Heifer International program in Nepal last year was part of the group's inspiration.

"Witnessing the farmers working together in a farmer-owned cooperative was a pretty powerful experience," he said. "We came back and thought this is how we need to do this."

At Cedar Creek Farm, the cooperative is just one tool that Prater is using to earn a living.

It turns out that back-to-basics farming requires a lot of experimentation.

Prater's henhouse is a converted RV. His meat chickens, bred by Crystal Lake Farms in Decatur, live in pens that Prater moves twice a day to provide fresh pasture. He calls the mobile pens "prairie schooners."

Prater originally used wood frames, bent plastic pipe and plastic sheeting to create movable pens for a limited number of chickens, but the pens were flimsy and scaling up was difficult.

For the upcoming season, he adapted a greenhouse frame from Jamesport, Mo.-based Featherman Equipment to house the birds. Featherman now is shipping the product to other members in the cooperative.

Because the new chicken house is too heavy to be moved by hand, Prater rigged a winch and anchor system. He figures that many farms using the contraption won't be able to afford a tractor.

"A lot of small-scale farming is kind of reinventing the wheel. The premise isn't different, but how you do it, that's changed," Prater said. "Every farm's a little different anyway, so you're always going to do some experimenting. That's also been a big gift with the co-op. Every farm doesn't have to do every experiment anymore."

Prater has 70 goats, 150 laying hens, 55 head of cattle and 70 pigs. That number is growing as the animals give birth, and he'll have 10,000 chickens on pasture later this year.

In the past, Prater's handled deliveries, marketing and customer service in addition to taking care of the animals. Now, the cooperative is handling these tasks for the farmers.

Prater said some major customers -- like Vetro 1925 and The Farmer's Table Cafe in Fayetteville and The Hive in Bentonville -- stand to benefit. The cooperative can provide a larger selection of meat than a single farmer and issues like unexpected snowfall on one farm won't mean a restaurant doesn't get a delivery.

Little Rock restaurants that had been dealing with other individual farmers -- like Boulevard Bread, Cafe@Heifer and South on Main -- are shifting to the new system as well, he said.

In addition to restaurants, the cooperative will offer a "Herds to Homes" direct-delivery program. For about $1,200 a year, customers will get 100 pounds of chicken, 50 pounds of pork and 50 pounds of beef delivered in four installments -- a cost of around $6 per pound.

"We're trying to scratch out a living wage, while at the same time treating the animals responsibly, using humane production practices and taking care of the environment," Hopkins said. "And there's a lack of efficiency because of that. We don't just cram every animal we can onto our farms."

Prater said ideally about 50 percent of the meat produced would go directly to customers, 25 percent would go to restaurants and the rest would go to wholesale customers, like U.S. Wellness Meats in Monticello, Mo.

"The idea for what we want to do doesn't need to get that far away from a farmer actually knowing who their customers are," he said. "That's our real principle."

Prater said his grandparents, who own the land and equipment and have raised cattle, goats and contracted to grow chickens in a commercial chicken house, scratched their heads when he wanted to change practices on the farm.

Still, Prater thinks they're impressed with how things have gone so far -- and hopeful the farm will remain viable for the next generation.

"People forget that the Tyson houses in the '40s were revolutionary things and totally changed the Ozarks," he said. "Their time has kind of come and gone in terms of what works for the marketplace, so this is just the next phase of how to get good food to your customers."