By Austin Price

Kenny Johnson was a part of the music scene in Austin before he took his creativity to the homestead life. He started out playing grunge — “It was the 90’s” — before managing a restaurant for nine years. Today he runs a pasture-raised egg farm called Happy Chick Farms with his wife Stephanie and two children, Nevin and Emma, ages 8 and 3 respectively. As with any small farmer, the struggles with Mother Nature have been real and arduous. When asked what sort of music describes his life today, Kenny shakes his head and answers with a laugh: “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
The farming life doesn’t come easy, particularly to the small family man who wants to do things right for his chickens as well as the consumers.
Kenny tells story after story of his hardships. There’s the time when 1,800 pullets — adolescent hens — didn’t make it back to their coops the night of a rare Central-Texas-snowstorm. Kenny had to get out of bed to single-handedly pick up each bird and put her inside so she wouldn’t freeze to death. Another time, he had to feed his chickens while suffering a stomach bug. “It was one of the worst days of my life,” he says, recalling how he dragged through a hour-and-a-half process made longer by steady vomiting and heavy lifting.
And on top of it all, he threw out his back. 
“You lose it, you completely lose it,” says Kenny. “You get beyond your capabilities. I’ve pushed myself way beyond my limits. Mentally, physically, the whole gambit.” 
For years, he has worked through his pain. “I couldn’t stop because I have kids, and everything that we had done would have been for naught. I had two retirement accounts and cashed them both in for this place. I was not gonna let my back take it all away. And of course we don’t have healthcare because the government sucks.”
“This is why we need nonprofits like Farmgrass,” he says. Last year, Kenny applied for and received a grant from GroACT’s emergency medical fund to help with his back. This grant was made possible by the proceeds from Farmgrass Fest and the many farm and music lovers that support the work of people like Kenny.
The Johnsons stand as an example of why the small family farm is needed in this part of Texas — where our cities, as well as our farms, are rapidly growing. 
“We’re artists, musicians. We’re creative when we need to be, and we really do make it work,” he says. He explains the joy of farming: “I spend a lot of time with my kids. We have breakfast every morning together. We host a market every other week for the community, with about 130 families involved, that come out and get fresh milk, cheeses, honey from other local farms. Grass-fed beef, pork sometimes. It’s a life unlike the one I grew up in, and it’s amazing.”

Visit Happy Chick Farms to Learn More!
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We recently had the pleasure of visiting Karen and Hershel Kendall at Indian Hills farm in Smithville, TX who grow just about everything from pecans to cattle. We talked catfish farming, Farm to Feast, and houses burning down. Hear their story:


Farmgrass: Your farm really is a beautiful place. How long have you been here? 


Hershel: We started buying it in ’83 with the intent of moving back here someday. In ’86, it was the biggest recession in Texas. It hit Texas later than it did anywhere else, we were living in Alaska and it hit Alaska at the end. 70 percent of the population left Alaska and left houses and condos just sitting there. We had friends in Houston that were buying houses for $5000 on their credit cards. We bought this place when things were high, but that was 
​'​83, and then when we started to farm (catfish) nobody wanted to buy it. It was a luxury, everybody was in survival mode, they weren’t buying frivolous things like fish. ​

FG: People at the Farmer’s Market say you have the best beef in Texas. Do you think you do?
Hershel: [Laughs] I have no way of knowing that, but I know ours is very good. I know that it couldn’t be raised any better.

You can find the Kendall's delicious Black Angus beef and other tasty treats at the Sustainable Food Center’s farmers markets at Sunset Valley and in downtown Austin! ​

"The idea of actually having someone be my boss is pretty offensive."This past weekend, Farmgrass visited Phoenix Farms to talk with Nathan Heath, who heads up the family owned and operated Bastrop farm. We got a chance to meet the fam and see what they're growing, as well as talk farm-to-table restaurants, the absolute need to be outside and the Zac Brown Band. Check it out:

Farmgrass: How did you get involved in organic farming?

Nathan: We moved up to the panhandle by Lubbock, between Lubbock and Amarillo to a little town called Earth and got involved with cattle production like wheat pasture. We would do wheat harvest in the off season and that was when I got introduced to massive conventional agriculture and how much chemicals they use. Slowly I realized I wasn’t at all interested in that. We would work on farms that had 15-20 thousand acres of the same crop and we were hired to do custom harvesting on machines, and then seeing when they would package it how much chemicals they would put on it. The packers on the machines would have to wear respirators. You were in danger of being crop-dusted at any time because they would just dust right over people. And then they take that feed and they give it to animals that we’re supposed to eat. It all started to just go together. Like when they grow cotton, they defoliate it with Agent Orange on massive scale and then we wear it. Growing up, we were never used to that but then when you’re around hundreds of thousands of acres of it, it is pretty disgusting. Eventually, we were looking for a place that we could farm year-round and a place where hopefully people would buy it, so that’s kind of how we ended up here.

Farmgrass: Seems like you guys are doing pretty well, considering how you keep having to clear out fields to make room for more crops..

Nathan: I’m trying to stop doing it. I’ve got like 15 projects that are all 85% done, never quite get to 100%. I told myself after I did this one, I wasn’t going to do anymore till I got some stuff done. We don’t have any more room to plant right now. Like this whole field will be in onions by January, and half that field will be in potatoes. So they’re already spoken for you know?
We’re constantly looking at what we call “Farmer Porn,” the seed catalogues, but we don’t have anywhere to plant it. So you kind of get like the burn of ‘oh man, I wanna try that and that…”

Photo courtesy of facebook.com/phoenixfarmstx
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Farmgrass: How big is your operation, how many people do you have actually working the farm?

Nathan: My mom and I are full-time and then Shayda (Nathan’s wife) helps sometimes. Up until last week we had three guys that helped, but that’s only been seasonal in the fall. Occasional volunteers, some from Odd Duck came out a couple of times this year. 

Farmgrass: How did your relationship with Odd Duck begin?

Nathan: Well they came to the Triangle market…We didn’t even know a farm-to-table restaurant existed when we first started this. After that, it was like, "huh there’s actually restaurants that buy food from farmers?!" It developed from there, about the same time Shawn Cirkiel (chef) of Olive & June started Parkside Project, he met Sam at the market and then we started selling to them. And that’s how that started, selling to restaurants. 

Odd Duck is definitely the top at committed to spreading it around. It’s easier for the chefs to order from Hardie’s [produce wholesaler] – there’s just no way around it. I mean what does Hardies have? Everything you could possibly imagine. It does take a lot more work when a chef makes that commitment to buy from local farms, and I mean because we’re not huge we don’t have 50,000 heads of cauliflower at any time. You cannot get what you want – especially now because we do a lot of restaurants. We do ours solely on first come; send the list to everyone at the same time and whoever orders it first gets it. It’s a big commitment on their part to buy from local farms, because there are some big farms around here, like in the Valley there’s some 400-acre farms where if you want Brussel sprouts they’ll have thousands of pounds. It’s really cool that they make that commitment, and they get the upside benefit that their food tastes better!