Tom Frantzen

Meet Tom Frantzen, one of over 150 family farmers pioneering the organic meat industry with Organic Prairie.

Talk to enough organic farmers and you'll soon discover there are as many reasons for going organic as there are farmers. Some are motivated by economics, others by environmentalism. Tom Frantzen says the turning point came for him in October, 1979, when the newly appointed Pope John Paul II conducted mass in an cornfield outside of Des Moines, Iowa.

Back when Frantzen was growing up, the Catholic church took an active role in rural affairs. In particular, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, under Bishop Maurice Dingman from Des Moines, preached what was then a radical message: it energetically opposed corporate agriculture and the consolidation that threatened the livelihood of family farms. Against this backdrop, the Pope answered a handwritten invitation from an Iowa farmer to visit the state.

Frantzen, to his later regret, didn't attend. "I guess it was more important to paint my barn," he says. But he listened to the mass on the radio. "The Pope talked about stewardship for the land and preserving it from generation to generation. I was so struck by it tears came to my eyes and I had to quit painting. I decided right then it was time to take the farm in a new direction."

Then 27, Frantzen had been farming for five years on his father's land. Their methods were typical of the fence-post to fence-post methods of the sixties and seventies. "The truth was that the place was pretty much all corn." He used liquid manure, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. But after hearing the Pope, he started rethinking his approach.

 

In the early 1980s, the market for organic foods was extremely limited. "We had no interest in organics, but we were reducing our costs and our pesticides with better crop rotations," Tom says. Eventually he found his way to the Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), an organization with a mission to "research, develop and promote profitable, ecologically sound, and community-enhancing approaches to agriculture." (Tom served as the organization's president in the late 80s.) PFI pooled information and research to support farmers like Tom who wanted to alternatives to petrochemical monocropping. "I did some trials with and without herbicides. I learned that I could reduce inputs and maintain production."

The next step for Tom was livestock. He took a trip to Sweden to learn about alternative pork production. "My days of confinement were over." The deep bedding system, common in Sweden, replaces concrete or slatted confinement cages with social pens and deep layers of straw bedding. The result is a healthier-and happier-animal.

"There are huge differences," Tom says. "If you take the life of an average confinement hog, he's born on a slat floor, and he's seen little else but stainless steel. From there, it's off to a flat floor and concrete walls. It's an extremely mundane environment. My pigs, they're born in the summer, outside. Later, he's in a hoop building with fresh air, sunshine, and he gets a fresh shot of bedding every two or three days."

Not surprisingly, the deep-bedded pigs develop natural immunities that eliminate the need for antibiotics. Confinement hogs not only require chemicals to stay alive, but when it comes time to ship them to slaughter, they're terrified, having never experienced anything other than four concrete walls. This inhumane stress also can have profound effects on the quality of the meat. Moreover, the factory system of farming is the suspected cause of frightening diseases like Mad Cow. Organic farming prohibits the feeding of rendered animal byproducts, as well as genetically modified organisms. Organic Prairie farmers exceed organic standards by offering pasture and outdoor access to their animals whenever possible.

By the late 1990s, Tom had moved to an entirely organic hog operation, and he was instrumental in helping to launch the Organic Prairie brand. He remains a key supplier. He's even recruited one of his neighbors to set up a certified organic farrowing operation so that Tom can meet the demand for his pork.

 

Twenty-six years later, Tom can look around at his organic operation and feel good about fulfilling the vow he made to himself when he heard the Pope's message of stewardship. Thanks in part to the efforts of pioneers like him, the organic food movement is rapidly growing, fueled by millions of food consumers who care about the safety, quality, and health of their food-and the lives of the farmers who grow it.

But he hasn't let his pride in his own operation cool his ardor for social change. "Eating is a political act," he says. "Everything my family eats, we want to know where it came from." For Tom, the health of his family (his wife, Irene, and his kids Jessica, Jolene, and James) and of his community are all tied to the choices that consumers make when they put food on the table. "If you run down our gravel road ten miles, there would have been a dozen hog producers 20 years ago. Today, I'm the only one."

Most of the survivors in his state are raising hogs on a massive, corporate scale. "One of the real sins here is concentration of wealth. Iowa's a corn state, and hogs represent the main transition from rough to finished product," he explains. "Look, the reason I'm farming today is because I could rent my dad's sow herd and raise a crop of pigs. Next thing you know, I had my own herd. Kids today, they don't have that same opportunity."

Well, one kid does, anyway. Sixteen-year-old James is working alongside his dad part time, learning the art and science of organic farming. "He's interested, yup," Tom says. "He needs to go off and see the world first, but I hope he'll be able to take over for me as I get older."