Farm and Fiddle

Attorney Stephen G. Jeffery has been defending farm families and farm communities since the 1990s when the first incursions into Missouri from industrial interests began. In those days, the corporate takeovers came from ag-related industries like concentrated animal feeding operations (cafos) that stole markets while polluting aquifers and waterways. Fast forward to the 2020s and we find industria...

Attorney Stephen G. Jeffery has been defending farm families and farm communities since the 1990s when the first incursions into Missouri from industrial interests began. In those days, the corporate takeovers came from ag-related industries like concentrated animal feeding operations (cafos) that stole markets while polluting aquifers and waterways. Fast forward to the 2020s and we find industria...

As the oldest radio program in the world to talk about sustainability, Farm and Fiddle loves taking a break from farming to talk about sustainable music. In this episode, old-time fiddler Howard Marshall plays old-time dance music with bass player Kathy Gordon, guitarist Heinrich Leonhard and multi-instrumentalist Asher Ferguson. Marshall talks about where the music comes from and all the musician...

Melissa Vatterot, policy director of MCE, talks about bills that have been introduced in the Missouri legislature that affect water quality and definitions of ownership of water. She gives suggestions about how people can help protect water quality for today and tomorrow.

Missouri Rural Crisis Center was started in the 1980s when farmers were losing their lands due to government programs that left them in the lurch. Today MRCC continues to work against industrial takeovers that started in animal agriculture with giant facilities that raise thousands of animals in overcrowded buildings, polluting creeks, air and rivers for miles around. Tim Gibbons discusses these i...

When Green Belt Express announced they were putting massive electric lines through North Callaway and Boone Counties, other national green-power corporations came into neighborhoods to access farm land for solar and wind "farms" to ship electricity to big cities in the east. These properties are expected to take land out of farming forever but Susan Burns and Mid-Missouri Landowners Alliance are f...

James Owen is Executive Director of Renew Missouri, an organization working to bring more sustainable energy options to the state. Among other topics is the legislative effort to allow community solar in Missouri. Many other states have this option so that developers can include electric generation in their plans for subdivisions, apartment complexes, commercial buildings and so forth. In Missouri...

Dave Dillon is Vice President of Public and Media Relations. A St. Louis native, he chose to go to college in Fulton and has spent much of his career working on rural issues, partly with the MO Department of Agriculture. In this interview with Margot McMillen, Dillon talks about why rural hospitals are having such a hard time and what this means for rural communities. It's more than the health of...

This podcast features interviews with three of the staff of Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill near Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Ryan Fielder, music conservator, Gabe Francisco, draft animal coordinator and Kitty Durham, farm manager, talk about their jobs and the Shaker community legacy. While the village today has restored buildings and added modern electricity and internet, the heritage is deep: 100 yea...

Consumers from the mainland are usually ignorant--or don't care--where their ocean fish comes from and we certainly don't think about it coming from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, suspended just a few miles offshore. And these CAFOs aren't in the news even though we read about plastic pollution and chemicals flowing from farmland into the Gulf of Mexico. Don't Cage Our Oceans is...

Fiddle player and performer Mike Fraser and Howard Marshall, champion fiddler and author of three books on Missouri fiddling, gave this workshop as part of the Big Muddy Folk Festival in Boonville, Missouri, on May 15, 2022. Their teaching style is conversational and they cover a wide range of topics, from the differences in fiddle styles to variations in tuning to where fiddle tunes come from. To...

In this episode, Deb Hudman of A.T. Still University, talks about her project and the various ticks and their diseases. Missourians can mail ticks to her lab--and we've sent her thousands of them--and she classifies them then looks for disease that they might transfer to humans, our pets, our livestock or the wild creatures living in our many ecosystems. On her website, she has begun to post maps...

In this episode of Farm and Fiddle, which aired at 6 p.m. Central Time on KOPN 89.5 FM in mid-MIssouri and KOPN.org on the worldwide web, plant diagnostician Pent Tian tells about his laboratory and his work identifying plant problems. His advice is sought by professionals and amateurs in all kinds of plant businesses or avocations. This year, Missouri has had a very wet, chilly spring, which mean...

North Carolina farmer Craig Watts had a 2-year honeymoon with the poultry industry, built four poultry barns and struggled to pay them off with a contract under corporate rule. He learned too late that the corporations hold all the cards. In this interview, Watts explains how the system works. The farmer takes on all the debt but has no control over the inputs supplied by the corporations. They ca...

Sherri Dugger, Executive Director of The Socially Responsible Agricultural Project, talks about how SRAP helps communities faced with problems caused by Industrial Livestock Farming. Many communities learn about the health problems, water pollution, and air pollution caused by Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. If a community learns that a CAFO is coming into the neighborhood, SRAP will help...

Beef prices at the grocery store are sky high, but cattle ranchers aren't seeing new profits. It turns out that the giant corporations are squeezing consumers and blaming supply chain problems, but cattle ranchers suffer from lack of competition because only a few corporations own all the markets. And consumers don't know where their meats come from because labeling is misleading. Labels that say...

When Afghan refugees come to mid-Missouri, they find welcome from community organizations with direction from Catholic Charities of Central and Northern Missouri. In an interview with Margot McMillen, three organizers tell how these new neighbors come to the community and how  community members can help them adjust to their new homes. McMillen talks to Dan Lester, Executive Director of Catholic Ch...

This interview originally aired on 9-22-21 with Carol Davit and Margot McMillen. Carol talks about what makes a prairie, what plants and animals depend on prairie ecosystems and where you can find prairies in mid-Missouri. 

Webster Davis, Secretary to Missouri's NAACP chapter, and a black farmer, talks about challenges and progress in the agricultural community. Davis focuses on new legislation at the federal level introduced by Cory Booker and co-sponsored by many progressive senators in Congress. Webster talks about the difficulty of finding markets, faced by all small farmers, and expresses hopefulness about the p...

Organic grower Dan Kuebler has been well-known to mid-Missouri farmers and consumers for decades. Now he is working to convert part of his farm to the growing of hemp, a new crop in Boone County. To make the transition on the hill where he farms, Dan has brought in truckloads of composted sawdust and new dirt to create a terrace-like terrain. He plans new infrastructure as well, and takes listener...

Update on bills working through the state capitol this session. Josh visits with Brian Smith, lobbyists with the Missouri Rural Crisis Center (MRCC). The mission of MRCC is to preserve family farms, promote stewardship of the land and environmental integrity and strive for economic and social justice by building unity and mutual understanding among diverse groups, both rural and urban. Brian has b...

Rhett & Josh (both veterans) discuss topics and issues related to veterans. Special Guest Doug Bannister calls in and shares his experiences as a veteran.

Missouri Organic Association has recently received the gift of buildings for offices in Hartsburg, in rural Boone County. Their new location will benefit farmers and other food producers with the addition of a certified kitchen to process products for sale throughout Missouri. Jackie Casteel is charged with bringing the dreams to life, and in this interview she tells how the work is going and reve...

This episode covers home-based skills from the past like natural fabric dyes and the safety-first maintenance of wood stoves. KOPN community radio has been around since 1973, so the archives provide a treasure trove of information, much of it passed from person to person in interviews before the internet. In this episode of Farm and Fiddle, Rhett dives into the shelf of old recordings and finds so...

Art Cullen and the Storm Lake Times made history a few years ago when the small-town newspaper won a Pulitzer for editorial reporting. They take their local issues seriously, covering the courthouse, local schools and immigrant populations. In a state where conservative values are often taken for granted, Storm Lake has managed to quietly integrate a population of immigrants recruited by the meat...