Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Alright girls, take a cantaloupe
find one with a nice yellow color.
My favorite things to eat here that we grow are cantaloupes and watermelons and potatoes.
My favorite things to eat from our garden are sweet corn, eggplants, and cantaloupes.
It's fun because like sometimes you get to pick the first tomato or first watermelon.
Brown curl, green curl, eh. FARMING INVOLVES THE WHOLE FAMILY AT THREE
GIRLS AND A TRACTOR FARM. FOR JOHN AND SHARI KOPMANN, RAISING VEGETABLES
IS MORE ABOUT SHARING WITH THE COMMUNITY AND
HAVING A POSITIVE IMPACT THAN IT IS A JOB.
I think the difference between vegetables and row crops is with vegetables you need
to spend a lot more time there, it's a lot more hands-on. I enjoy the selling it
too where you're more selling it to individuals and you hopefully get comments back about
how good it was. We do it for several reasons. One is for
the nutrition, for our family and we want to share that with the community and the schools.
We enjoy growing produce, the satisfaction of putting a seed in the ground and growing
the plant and then the harvest. It's very fulfilling.
SHARING THAT NUTRITIONAL VALUE MAY BE MORE IMPORTANT TODAY THAN EVER BEFORE.
Our young people might be the first generation not to outlive their parents, and the reason
is childhood obesity. That's why MOCAN, the Missouri Council on Activity and Nutrition,
supported by the State Department of Health and Senior Services and contracted with the
University Extension, is very supportive of the Missouri Farm to School program. The big
idea is to get students to eat more fruits and vegetables.
THROUGH ATTENDING ONE OF THE FARM TO SCHOOL WORKSHOPS, THE KOPMANN'S EXPANDED THEIR
MARKET AND BEGAN SELLING THEIR PRODUCE TO WRIGHT CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND MANY OTHER
SCHOOLS. At the University of Missouri Extension
workshop in St Louis, we learned that there is a lot more schools out there looking for
produce. We was selling to one school a little bit of stuff already, but we found out that
they was looking for more things and we just met a lot more schools looking for things
and found out there was not enough producers to produce for the schools so we increased
our production for them and started selling a lot more produce to the schools through
that. It's just a great opportunity for a
small farmer to have an outlet for a large quantity of produce. It takes care of your
logistic problem, It's really been a god-send for us. It's increased our business, at
least 30 percent last year, and probably 50 percent this year.
I think the Farm to School program will be a long-standing program because I think
the schools that we've been selling to really like it and they like the fresh produce
and they told us when they get fresh produce from us, they don't have to throw hardly
any of it away, and when they get the produce that they get shipped in, they have so much
of it that they have to throw away it just isn't any good.
The University of Missouri Extension introduced us to this program. We had no idea that the
schools were looking for us. The school does not know how to reach the farmer and the farmer
does not know how to reach the schools and they were integral in getting us together.
We would have never known, they help us on a lot of programs, but particularly the Farm to School
program.