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KURT & KAREN UNKEL Kinder, LA “You can't make a living at the farm. The conventional farm is a tough living right now, and the way the farm programs are set up you can't hardly survive with them, but you surely can't survive without them. And when you really get down to it, you can't ever—you can't ever better yourself.”
“People are starting to want to know where their food is coming from.”
Kurt Unkel grew up in family of rice and cattle farmers in Kinder, eating the traditional Cajun pork-and-rice boudin that’s prolific in this area of the state. For the first decade-plus of their marriage, Kurt and his wife, Karen, a nurse by profession, farmed on auto-pilot. But about eight years ago, with all three of their kids in school, they found time to assess their work lives, which induced an awakening. Seeing no way to make a viable long-term living in conventional farming, they began to transition to more sustainable farming methods, and also to direct-marketing their product. While Kurt still applies small amounts of chemical fertilizers to his fields, he hasn’t used any pesticides in years. Goats control the weeds, and his pigs feast on the brown jasmine rice that the Unkels now sell at a farmers’ market in Baton Rouge, and to a health-food store in Lake Charles. Their biggest leap was developing a recipe for a healthier style of boudin made with their brown rice, meat from their range-fed animals, and black beans. Their goal is to expand in this niche market, so that Kurt can quit the side jobs that have kept the family’s finances afloat during this long but rewarding period of transition. Just recently, representatives from Whole Foods Market helped bring the Unkels closer to attaining that goal by agreeing to sell their boudin in the Baton Rouge store.
Subject: Kurt and Karen Unkel --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Wednesday, September 12, 2007. I’m in Kinder, Louisiana with Kurt and Karen Unkel, and at their home. And if I could get y’all to say your name how you say it, and your birth date, and then we’ll go from there. Karen: I’m Karen Unkel. My birth date is December 14, 1959. Kurt: And Kurt Unkel, and I’m December 6, 1956. All right, thank you. And can y’all describe what you do for a living? Kurt: Well thank you. [Laughs] Well I farm for a living. I have farmed; I’m a third-generation farmer. I’m now doing some other part-time jobs since I got out of the—since I’ve got out of the large conventional farming and started trying to just farm the direct market where you—. And now we’re just trying to farm for our customers and for what they want. Can you tell me a little bit about that transition—what you were doing before you went to direct farming, and then how you—I mean direct selling—and then how you go about finding customers when you make t Karen: Oh that was probably, what? About seven or eight years ago? Well probably for the first 20 years you were a conventional large-scale rice farmer and soy beans. Kurt: And cattle. Karen: And cattle, and then decided to make that transition, slowly, by direct-marketing a different variety of rice. Kurt: And well, we started off with the beef. I started raising the grass-fed beef, and I still had—I farmed one little field of rice, and then we milled a little bit of the rice and I brung it and boiled it, and boy the people really liked the fresh-milled rice. And then we started doing the brown rice, and then the brown rice really just—has really taken off. There were two generations before you that did more conventional farming, which is what you inherited. What inspired you to change your tact? Kurt: The—you can't make a living at the farm. The conventional farm is a tough living right now, and the way the farm programs are set up you can't hardly survive with them, but you surely can't survive without them. And when you really get down to it, you can't ever—you can't ever better yourself. You know you’re locked into the—to the government programs and everything. And when I got to looking at it, you get paid the same if you try to do great or if you don’t do very good. You know your money was coming out the same. Karen: And the other thing was we were starting to hit 40 years-old and start thinking about health. Now by no means are we perfect. You know we still hit up McDonald’s and things like that, but with trying—we were trying to look at ways that we could incorporate healthier eating here and there. And so, and being farmers for like—well, if we raised cattle we naturally already grazed them, and so we can leave that like that and work with the meat. Kurt: And get away from the grain. And I started grass-feeding and asking questions about this—How do I do this? and How do—reading books. And everybody told me, Do not take your cattle to the sale barn. He says, You got a specialty product—a specialty market; he says, Direct-market it. So that’s when we started trying to direct market, and you couldn’t give it away. And then I talked to them in Baton Rouge, Red Stick [farmers’ market] and they said, Yeah. [I said] Let’s go down there. And then Baton Rouge started moving some meat, and then one thing—. I’ve noticed that a lot of these cities that have medical schools are much more health-conscious than these other cities. And it’s just, well, 10 years ago you didn’t have near the health-conscious people you have now. I mean it’s changed dramatically in the last 10 years. Karen: In the deep South. And how have things changed [since making the transition], like in what sort of palpable way? Kurt: I have tremendous amount of clovers growing now, where I went three or four years, I couldn’t make a clover grow. Karen: And clover is kind of a gauge of how— Kurt: Soil fertility. It’s improved. I’m only getting the white clover now, which is the bottom—I mean that’s your poorest clover, but it’s—. I mean I plant clover seed in those spots and crawled around on my hands and knees and crawled around, and I never could find a clover for years. Kurt: You could plow 100 acres and not find one earthworm. Karen: And having earthworms is another good measure of showing that your soil is healthy. Kurt: And it’s just the—the fertilizer—the way the fertilizer program has gone it’s like potassium. Your cheapest source of potassium is a potassium chloride they make, and it’s—and it’s great. I mean it’s all right for the potassium, but you’ve got 40-percent chlorine, and your chlorine, you see, is taking everything out in the soil. And you—and it just—a lot of your chemical fertilizers, if you—you’ve got to be very careful how you handle them. You can get by using them very lightly. Like this year I used the potassium chloride on my rice field, but instead of 40 pounds to the acre I put 9 pounds to the acre. And did that hurt you at all, to put that little amount on it? Kurt: I think it’s one of my best yields I’ve ever had this year. It’s going to be up there. If it’s not the best it’s going to be up there with one of the best. Karen: Our biggest goal was to get away from pesticides and herbicides, and especially right on this 140 acres. The rice is grown off of this farm and the goats work as our herbicide here. [Laughs] They—well you can't tell by our yard ‘cause we haven’t mowed, but as far as the farm weeds, the goats trim around the trees you know. So tell me a little bit about your backgrounds. Kurt: Yeah, I grew up—I grew up across the canal right over there. My daddy grew up about a half-mile down that way, so yeah, this is—or this land here hasn’t, but we’ve got some land here that’s been in the family, you know, for I guess 80, 90 years or something now. Karen: My mom was from here; my dad was from Oregon, and he was in the Air Force, so I was born in Japan and we’ve lived all over the world. And when he retired, this is where my high school and college years started. Now, when you were doing conventional farming, were you selling your rice to a mill that would then process it? Kurt: They would—the mill would just, yeah. They would— you’d take samples to the mills and the mills buy it and you’re through with it. And so all of the rice, probably, that you were selling them wound up being white rice—polished? Kurt: Yeah, your rice just got mixed in with everybody else that had the same variety, and it was easier to sell then. We had, must have had 12, 15 mills back then. I think we’ve got, well, we must have about four now—four really big—. I mean they’re just like everything else. You’ve got one or two—. So now…does all of your rice end up being brown rice? Karen: We probably sell about half of our rice or more—a little more than half—to the mills. Needless to say, we can't market 70 acres [Laughs] direct-marketing. Kurt: You know, because I mean one acre, good gosh there’s no telling how many pounds of boudin one acre of rice will make, you know. [Laughs] And so the rice that you direct-market that’s brown—what do you do with it? How do you get the hull off? Kurt: It’s hand-milled in the—outside; that takes the hull off. And it’s a small hand mill, and it’s electric, but it takes the hull off. Now on my bigger orders when we start going with the stuff, the food, and the boudin and that, there’s one little mill left in the Louisiana, in Gueydan, and he has—it’s a small family-owned mill, but it’s I mean small. He can probably mill 500 pounds of rice an hour ,which is—the Farmers Rice Mill probably can do 50,000 pounds an hour, you know. For the record, tell us what exactly the difference is between white rice and brown rice? Kurt: Okay, all of your rice is—you got a hull on the outside layer. You’ve got a bran layer of—and the germ—the germ and the bran layer on the outside of the rice. Then the middle is your starch, but when you take the hull off you have just the rice and the bran and the germ— Karen: Which is brown rice. Kurt: —brown rice, and then they have a polisher that rubs the bran off, and then you have your white rice. How would you describe the difference in flavor between white rice and the rice that you direct-market? Karen: Flavor versus no flavor [Laughs] is the issue, I think. Is the Red Stick Market in Baton Rouge the only place where consumers can buy your rice? Karen: No, in Lake Charles at Pure Foods, they started taking it there. And what about your boudin? Where can people buy that? Karen: Right now only at the Red Stick Farmers’ Market, yeah. That’s why we’re trying to get labeled, so we can start moving it to stores. Any time you have a meat product, you have to go through USDA. And since we want to use our own meat, we have to go through a USDA slaughterhouse, which they just opened here in Lacassine. Up ‘til a year ago we had no USDA, so we couldn’t use our meat, and we wanted to make sure—. Our cows are grass-fed; our pork is free-range grass, rooting around, but they’re also supplemented with our rice, so we know 100-percent what they’re eating. Kurt: That’s what has got me. When I saw how the nutrition changed my animals, it’s—I mean it’s just so true. I really believe what you—you are what you eat. I mean their attitudes even changed. I mean they’re more relaxed; they’ve calmed down. They weren’t more nervous, but research has found out the calcium levels had did that. That’s—I mean if you’re eating grass that’s grown on a land that’s really, you know, has too low of your calcium, magnesium, boron—all these levels are low—the grass is not going to have it right. And then your PH gets down, and if your PH isn’t right in the grass and then the cow eats it, and then the PH isn’t right in the cow’s stomach and just everything—it just—everything is connected to everything from your one-celled animals all the way up to us. Well tell me about your boudin: when you started making it, and then also describe it. Karen: We grew brown rice; we were selling it. It went well. We had the meat, and somehow it just happened that we’re like, Why don’t we value-add our products? Well easier said than done. So we did, but we got the approval to have it made in a business—a local business that makes boudin—and so that restricts to have them make it for us. We can only sell it at the farmers market, ‘cause that’s considered a food fair. So we were—you know, and that’s been good. It’s been going on for about what? Three years, and it’s been a good test market for us. And [in] the last year we’ve seen a lot of growth in the boudin. So now we’re ready to take it further and try to get it into some health food stores, and it’s kind of a unique Cajun product. I mean it’s a Cajun product, but it’s moved toward something healthy.
Karen: Well the majority of it is rice, like any boudin but it’s brown rice, and then we just use our meat. It’s just—because we’re selling it as our boudin and we have the beef available. We know what the beef has been eating. We know what it has not been receiving. And so we did that and decided to add some black beans just to add a twist to it. Black beans add more fiber, and then of course beans add more—other nutrition to it. Kurt: Well you got a lot of—boudin normally calls for byproducts, liver. I mean liver is a main part of these boudin, and other things. She didn’t like liver, and she can—and I’ve had other people tell me that they won't eat boudin ‘cause they can taste the liver, you know, in it. So anyway Karen was like, we got to take the byproducts out and just use the meat. And then, but then what are we going to substitute with? And that’s when she came up with that, where you try to work with a bean protein, a meat protein, your brown rice, and get this—get as balanced of a meal as you can. And—and it did good. Karen: And of course all the seasonings are the true Cajun, you know. There’s going to be that spicy pepper in there. Kurt: See really, the Chadeaux’s that makes our boudin, I just let them use their salt and pepper. Karen: Minus the MSG. We ask them not to put any MSG in it. Kurt: And they used whatever, ‘cause we didn’t work with a lot of—I didn’t know how many green onions and how many yellow onions and all that. So I just said, Y’all just use whatever rates y’all do. And we took the MSG out. And I have eaten theirs and I like their seasoning, and, but the thing I’m going to work on right now is the salt. That’s the only thing I want to work on. Most of these boudins and sausages are very high in sodium, but they sure don’t taste good when you take the salt out of them. But there’s got to be a happy medium in there somewhere; you can pull the sodium levels down a little bit and still keep—keep the flavor. So do you put pork in the boudin ever, or is just beef? Karen: We occasionally make a batch of pork boudin, and we use—it’s all the meat. We just de-bone, like, the pork chops, the roast; that’s the meat that goes in there. We don’t use any byproducts. And then occasionally we’ll make a batch of beef boudin, and that will be, you know, the sirloin steaks, the round steaks. It’s the roast—the meat part of beef is what’s put into it, so we don’t use any byproducts on the beef either. Kurt: And going with this, to put this boudin in the store to sell any volum Karen: And it’s easier for us to do the beef because his family has been raising beef forever. His brother raises a lot more beef than we do, so we’re—he’s growing his under our standards at the moment, and so he is going to be a supplier as we grow. We can pull from his herd and use his meat. Kurt: And then if this pig herd works out to where it’ll do good, then we’ll have the—be able to supply the pork. But when we started this—my customers in Baton Rouge have been wonderful. I mean it’s just unbelievable how the one-on-one with your customers is what’s made this business, because they—they tell you what you want. And I had a lot of them, you know, I’ve had a lot of them come back and tell me they didn’t like this. This wasn’t any good. I mean everything you do on these programs, your first four or five times are failure. But then anyway we’d talk to them. Karen would—we’d send our surveys; they would fill them out and mail them back to us. And we found out our customers, most of the people are scared of growth hormones, antibiotics, your pesticides and your chemicals. They didn’t care if I was organic or not organic. They weren’t really—the grain-fed or grass-fed was not a big issue. Those were the main issues that, you know—. So I went to work on raising them to where they will be chemical-free, hormone-free, and antibiotic-free. Karen: People are starting to want to know where their food is coming from. Kurt: You know and—and the biggest and that—I would say now that may be a bigger issue than the hormones and antibiotics, knowing they can actually drive here and see where these animals came from. Karen: They can source their food. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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hat transition?
Can you describe it for me—the ingredients and the taste, and how it’s different and similar to traditional Cajun boudin?
e, we-—I do not have the source of pork to supply it. That’s why we’re going with the beef. 
