Illinois Public Media hosted an advance screening of the film, “Greener Pastures” on September 15, 2023 at The Virginia Theatre with collaborator, The Land Connection. The film premieres on PBS stations March 25, 2024.
Greener Pastures trailer:
The post-film discussion has been edited for length and clarity.
Kimberlie Kranich
Good evening, everybody. Welcome. I’m Kimberlie Kranich, director of engagement and educational outreach at Illinois Public Media. I’ll be your moderator for this discussion and then we’re going to turn it over to you to ask questions of our panel. First, I want to thank again and introduce our filmmaker, Sam Mirpoorian. Sam, beautiful film. Sam is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who started making documentary shorts in 2017. “Greener Pastures” is his first feature film. It’s already won awards and has been shown across the country. You can watch it on PBS next year, including on Illinois Public Media. Next to Sam is Harold Wilken. He’s an organic farmer in Danforth, Illinois, where he raises corn, soybeans, wheat and rice on 3,200 acres. He started his own conventional farm operation in 1982. He transitioned to organic in 2003 and is now fully organic. His son and nephew work with him on the farm And right next to me is Leslie Cooperband. She’s co-owner with husband, Wes Jarrell, of Prairie Fruits Farm and Creamery in rural Champaign County since 2005. Their main operation is a goat dairy farmstead creamery. They use milk from their own herd of goats, to make cheese, gelato and yogurt with fruit from her organic orchard orchard on 80 acres of land. Welcome, Leslie. I want to start with the two farmers on the panel first to get their reactions to Sam’s film. And let’s start with you, Harold. When you watch the film what struck you?
Harold Wilken
I can relate to every one of those farmers. My crisis hit in 1991. I started in 1982 as a conventional farmer. On my own, left my family operation after three droughts and four years of poor prices. I was in a lot of the same shoes. We didn’t file bankruptcy. But we wondered where our next meal was coming from at one time. I was very fortunate to be married to a woman who believed in everything I did. And we raised three great kids. And one of the things that I found myself doing was up until about 1990, everything was about farming everything in Iroquois County I can find. And I learned to appreciate my family more. And I spent more time with my family and I realized that they were the most important thing in my life. And so I kind of had a transformation there where I put my family first instead of farming. And that caused me a little bit with some relatives, neighbors, so on so forth. And I had cancer in 2008. So, my situation was different.
Kimberlie Kranich
Leslie, what about you?
Leslie Cooperband
So, I am a first generation farmer. I came into farming through my work as a academic and extension specialist in soil science. And when my husband and I moved here, we wanted to have a farm to showcase ideas that we had been telling other farmers they should do to make their operations more environmentally sound and more sustainable. And so, so for me watching this film, I worked with a lot of farmers who were in similar situations, I worked with a lot of dairy farmers in Wisconsin, which is where we were before we came here. And chicken farmers in Maryland, and I have witnessed a lot of the plight that is shown in the film. But I also know that right from the get-go when Wes and I decided to start our little farm, that we were not interested in commodity farming. We wanted to have a farm where we added value to our milk, and that we could have a lot more control over the price of our products that way. So in that, in that regard, our farm started on very different ground.
Kimberlie Kranich
Sam, you’ve been taking this film around the country, at screenings just like this. Who’s been in your audience? And what’s it been like for you so far to show this in front of folks?
Sam Mirpoorian
It’s been surreal, very full circle. I was making like 13 bucks an hour as a graduate assistant, when I was working on my master’s. I was filming weddings on the weekend to supplement my income. So there’s just a lot of parts of me that didn’t think it was going to happen. So just I started working on it when I was 24. As I told you at dinner, I had just gotten fired from a job. So, I finally got to put all the time and energy into this and just hopped in my Honda Accord and made it happen with a wonderful group of supporters and individuals that would not have been possible with. But we’ve screened about 30-40 festivals now we started in March. So, it’s been about seven months. Definitely exhausted, it’s been nonstop. And it’s been great to see the audience as far as like farmers, non-farmers. A lot of people, you know, come up after the Q and A’s and panels and they’ll say things like, you know, I’m not a farmer, but my father or my grandfather was a farmer and I got to see the mental health stressors and things like that. In 2018, I never would have imagined this whole six, seven month journey would have been anything like this. I’m just beyond blessed, very grateful. And just hope that film inspires and impacts everyone who sees it.
Kimberlie Kranich
Let’s get a sense of who’s in the audience. If you’ve ever farmed or are a farmer, could you just raise your hands? We can get a sense. Okay, we have farmers in the audience. Excellent. If you work for an organization that supports farmers, can you raise your hand? Okay. What about farm broadcasters? Do we have any folks in the audience? I know Todd Gleason’s here. Are you a student or a filmmaker? Raise your hand? I think okay. All right. So that’s who’s here. It’s good to know. Sam, let’s talk a little bit about how you found the farmers in your film. Was it difficult? And how did you pitch the film to those farmers who might end up in the film?
Sam Mirpoorian
Yes, so it was a good six-to-seven-month discovery process. The CDC released a series of statistics around March April 2018, sharing that farmers and agricultural workers have the highest rate of suicide among any profession in the United States. I spoke to probably 100 plus farmers. They love Facebook. They’re very active on Facebook. I got added to a dairy farmers for Facebook group, about 10,000 farmers. So that led me to Juliet. But it started with Jeff. I went to a couple events by myself didn’t know anybody and I met some people from the farmers union. They recommended Chris. So the following month after meeting Jeff I was with Chris and then while I was in the hotel room, Chris sent me an article about Jay not knowing who Jay was by Modern Farmer magazine. He reached out to Jay on Facebook. And then, you know, reached out to Juliet on Facebook also. And yeah, it just it was a very harmonious process that took a long time. But, you know, I got really lucky.
Kimberlie Kranich
You know, mental health is a very big part of your film. And on September 22, 1985, was the first Farm Aid concert right here at Memorial Stadium at the University of Illinois. One of the things that grew from Farm Aid was that Farm Aid created the Farmers Resource Network, which is an online database with organizations that help farmers find mental health guidance, and resources for transitioning to sustainable farming. So I want to ask the two farmers on the panel: have you reached out to mental health services? Have needed those? I know, Harold, you started with, you did when you had some depression, there was some intergenerational stress over the farm. And then you, as you mentioned, you were diagnosed with cancer, and you took a break for a while from farming to take care of your health. Was it difficult for you to reach out for help?
Harold Wilken
Yes, actually. My wife was the one who said if you won’t go get help, this was during the cancer, if you don’t go get help for you at least do it for me. And, of course, you know, part of it was that old German pride. But the other part of it was just fear of the unknown. You know, like, I could stay in my bubble. And you know, feel sorry for myself. When I went to counseling there in 2009, I guess I had to share with people. And that was hard at that time for me to do. I totally recommend it. I ended up in a group with a wonderful group of people. We, we again, helped each other through our issues. At that time, I was fortunate that I had survived stage four plus throat cancer. And if you’re listening to me gravel here, that’s why. And the radiation continues to keep giving, year after year. So maybe someday I’ll be silent, which my wife will be happy about. I muddled around in conventional agriculture, from 1991 to 2003. I hated what I was doing. I didn’t like GMOs. But I felt like I was on the squirrel cage I couldn’t get out from under. And finally, well, what happened was in 2001, our daughter Janie died in a car accident. She was 15 years old. Her and I had a lot of discussions about how I hated conventional agriculture and really wanted to go organic. But again, I didn’t want people talking about me. I didn’t want to deal with the public and you know, if you think fifth grade girls are like back bity kind of thing, conventional farmers are worse.
After Janie passed, Herman Brockman, who was our organic farming proponent on the farm next to me, knew that I was disgruntled with conventional agriculture and asked me to transition 33 acres for him. I did that for two years. In 2003, and 2004, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And so our farm is grown by renting land from other people who have the same values we do, and so because of that, I was able to bring my son back from when he got out of the U of I in 2012. My nephew from Kentucky joined us in 2013. And we’ve been on a path of organic farming ever since. And then started a flour mill in 2017. Because we want to get closer to the consumer. All this would never have happened, if I would have given up ship in 2008 or in 1991. So anybody who has somebody they know with mental health issues or depression or you know, having a tough, tough time, be sure to encourage courage counseling, because without that, I don’t know where I would be.
Kimberlie Kranich
Leslie, you talked with me some about the emotional ups and downs of running a farm, particularly the kind of farm you run? What’s been your sources of support and have you reached out for any services provided to farmers?
Leslie Cooperband
I have not reached out to any services. Most of the support that I get is from my husband, Wes, and my siblings and good friends who have been involved in direct market kind of agriculture, because we all share very similar kinds of stresses. And just being able to have sounding boards within our community and our family that’s how I’ve been able to keep things going.
Kimberlie Kranich
Sam, you said something at dinner that I didn’t expect to ask you up when I’m going to you you’ve taken some time off from documentary filmmaking for your own mental health. Tell us a little bit about that.
Sam Mirpoorian
There’s always this, you know, like this pressure to always propel your film career. And when you’re independent you’re just not at the bottom, but you’re low on the totem pole when it comes to just the whole film space. So yeah, no, I was I was developing like two projects immediately after this one. And I decided to like table them for the next few months. Just because I am currently doing therapy and mental health coaching myself because I was getting pretty burnt out.
Kimberlie Kranich
That’s great to hear. You were 24 when you started making “Greener Pastures.” Now you’re 30 years old. What did you know about agriculture when you started looking into this film? And how was your experience of making the film changed what you know?
Sam Mirpoorian
I knew absolutely nothing about agriculture. And I learned so much about agriculture and farming after this, you know, five-year journey. And it just gives me a huge sense of appreciation. Just waking up three, four and five in the morning and doing this for X amount of hours and having no control over, you know, policy, Farm Bill, trade war, tariffs, climate change, weather and I have no idea how they do it. But I just got a brief sample size and it was life changing.
Kimberlie Kranich
Leslie, you and Wes were at the University of Wisconsin for seven years, and you were professors of soil science. And then you came here. So how would you compare the life you had, as a professor working with farmers and the life you now have as a farmer?
Leslie Cooperband
It’s exponentially harder to farm than it is to be a professor and academic. It’s even more challenging. It’s more intellectually interesting because no two days are the same course, we picked one of the most challenging types of agriculture doing a dairy. And then on top of that, doing value added production on our farm. So, there’s so many pieces to it. There are so many things that I never was trained to do, particularly in the realm of business and running a business, managing employees, doing social media. All of the things that you have to do these days when you have a small, diversified farm, and you’re doing direct market farming, there’s so many hats. I never could have anticipated that.
Kimberlie Kranich
Juliet really loved her cows. Do you love your goats?
Leslie Cooperband
Absolutely. It’s a total love affair.
Kimberlie Kranich
And I think you have a certain certification with the way you raise those goats?
Leslie Cooperband
Yeah, we’re certified animal welfare approved. And we have been since 2010. It’s a certification that emphasizes pasture-based livestock production and high animal welfare. There are very strict standards and we’re audited every year. So, we have to maintain those standards. And it’s the kind of farming that actually embodies a lot of the ideals that Wes and I have had from day one with regard to how we wanted to raise our animals and how we wanted to improve our land. When we bought our farm in 2003, it was all in corn and soybeans and had been for close to 100 years. And our soil was even though it’s the beautiful, rich dark prairie soils, it was completely destroyed. And now our soils under perennial agriculture are just absolutely beautiful. And when we get those torrential rains, we don’t have the kind of flooding that a lot of our neighbors have because our soils are so much improved.
Kimberlie Kranich
Harold, you talked about what would the neighbors think when you transitioned. And there’s this idea that there’s nobody to do the farming. But your son works for you, your nephew works there. Tell us a little bit about why that was possible for you.
Harold Wilken
Well, because we are 100% organic, we do command a better price for our products. But you know, I’m very blessed in that I was able to bring Ross back. There’s the satisfaction of knowing that even if I keeled over from a heart attack, what we built will continue, even without me. I have a saying about when you farm with your son. The difference between a headlock and a hug is just the amount of pressure that you exert. That’s a joke, of course, but anyway. One of the things that is so satisfying, is when I talk to a person that I worked with, like a customer of ours, and they’re always so appreciative. And they make you feel even if you have a down day, you know, one person telling you know about how wonderful it is to have good healthy food that we are raising, that we’re taking care of our soils. It’s a feeling I can’t even describe. Our soils are also very much improved because of our organic and regenerative practices. And there’s a satisfaction to that, that you can’t put down on paper.
Kimberlie Kranich
Sam, you endured quite a bit to make this film told us a little bit about getting up really early, long night long days. Can you give us a little more insight on that for the aspiring filmmakers in the house?
Sam Mirpoorian
So, in the beginning, in that 2018 trial phase, when I had no money, it was like, let’s book a hotel room for a day if it’s too far away, if it’s not too far away, we’re gonna go down and back, you know, we’re gonna be on the road for like 12 hours. So I remember when we went to Ohio with Jay our first day, like, we shot for like, three, four hours and then got back home at like midnight. After 2018 and 2019 rolled around and the money started getting slimmer, I would crash with the farmers like at their in their homes. I remember staying in Jeff’s guest bedroom upstairs. Old farmhouse there was carpet in the bathroom, there were ladybugs everywhere. Upstairs had a door, you know, like the upstairs had a door. So it was a it was a classic farmhouse. It’s incredibly cold in Minnesota, I mean, you’re shooting it’s like, in the negatives. In the summertime, it gets as hot as you know, 95 plus, I was not actually prepared for the weather, I think the weather conditions probably took me by like surprise more than anything. And so I think when you’re out there, like you’re, you believe in the project, you believe in yourself, you think or know or feel something good will happen. But you know, I’m out there not thinking I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t know if anything’s gonna happen. I don’t know if I’m wasting my time wasting my money. So you have to just like, push through that doubt. But the conditions and the mental challenges that came with it about you know, like not having money and stuff. It was very difficult, but I did get I did get lucky along the way. And I met some great people to help us get to the finish line.
Kimberlie Kranich
Harold and Leslie, you can relate to all the farmers in this film that Sam made. What issues specifically do you share with those farmers? And then what challenges do you think are unique to your type of farming that we can sort of tease out?
Leslie Cooperband
The first thing that struck me about the farmers that are featured is that there’s almost nothing that they have control over. They are subject to prices that they don’t control. They’re subject to an ever-changing climate, they’re subject to political winds, they’re subject to global trade. And it is such an enormous set of hurdles that most human beings would not be able to overcome just on a daily basis. And I think for us, the things that we share are definitely the financial struggles, the fact that it costs a lot to farm, it costs a lot for them to farm the way they did in the film, it costs a lot for us to farm, the way we do, the choices that we make are not choices that are based on minimizing our costs. And yet, the reality of what people expect to pay for food, even food like ours, that is considered a high-end product, it is not close to what it actually costs to produce that food. And as a result, it is a constant financial struggle. And that is something that we share with the farmers featured in this film. But the main thing that is different for us is the fact that we do set our own price, and that we look our customers in the eye on a weekly basis at a farmers’ market in our farm store. And they do give us feedback, both good and sometimes feedback that is helpful in improving what we produce. And like Harold said, there is nothing better than when, especially when you are having a rough day of somebody telling you how much they love what you do and how much our farm has improved their family’s life, they’re our community. And those kinds of experiences do fill you and keep you going. And that definitely was not something that the farmers in this film had the opportunity to experience.
Kimberlie Kranich
Sam, are you hopeful about farming in the US based on your experience over these past five years?
Sam Mirpoorian
The inevitability of eight billion plus people and a growing population in this planet will result in the eradication of small family farms, I think it eventually will be, you just can’t rely on everyone to be a backyard gardener or backyard farmer, I think there’s just the supply and demand is just going to continue to grow. There’s a lot of different alternatives, the way foods being grown and being made. But I just feel like sometimes it’s hard to not accept that. The bigger farms are always going to win and this film is a love letter in the hope of continuing to support the smaller farms. Support them as much as you can. It’s just tough because there’s just so many people on this planet and the bigger guys are the ones that really can pump out what most of most of the population wants and needs.
Kimberlie Kranich
Harold, tell us if you agree with that. And I need to ask you, where do you where do your corn and soybeans go and is that typical of farmers in this area?
Harold Wilken
Okay, first of all, I have a little different perspective. Almost all of our small grains are sold through our flour mill. Then our corn, about 25% of that goes to tortillas, food products, organic food products. Another 20% goes to distilleries. When I first went organic and we were doing more of our own marketing I had this model. I came up with the idea that if we can’t feed you, we’ll get you drunk and my wife axed that one right out the gate. I thought it was cute. The rest of it goes for feed organic dairies. Soybeans, we sell to Japanese for tofu, miso nado, if anybody’s into that. And soy sauce we sell here in the United States to tofu makers, soymilk makers. And then some of that also goes for feed as well. So, we have a diversified market end strategy. Never in my life have I seen more money available to small farms and to startups to local foods. Leslie, what about you? Are you hopeful?
Leslie Cooperband
I’m hopeful. But I’m also concerned that fewer and fewer people understand where their food comes from. And that the disconnect between those who eat and those who produce food is just ever widening. As a producer of dairy products, I’m concerned about people’s perception that animal agriculture is inherently evil, and that somehow it is less environmentally sound than plant-based agriculture. And a lot of that is based on just complete utter lack of understanding of how various crops are produced, and how there are dairies, and livestock producers that are raising their animals in a way that is very much helping to fight climate change. I’m hopeful because I do see the next generation stepping into farming. I am concerned though, that it’s not just going to come through policy change it is going to come from people acting with their pocketbooks and making those decisions every day to purchase that kind of the kind of food that really embraces those values that are going to help the planet and help the smaller local economies. And that, to me is the way the best way forward for the survival of the small and medium scale producers is that we feed a region we have no aspiration to feed the world. And in actuality, folks that are being told by the large grain processors that they feed the world is really a myth. And I think if we focus on our region and feeding our region and nourishing our region, that that we will be able to sustain ourselves.
Sam Mirpoorian
The farmers are the most resilient and smartest group of people I’ve ever been around. Like I remember being in the combine or in the planter, where it would break down every like eight minutes when you’re going over like a row. If that happened on a Friday, you have to wait till Monday or Tuesday till a John Deere rep comes out. And it’s like as a farmer, you can’t wait. You can’t afford to lose four or five days for that. So like, they’re mechanics, they’re chemists, they’re there. They’re wizards in the field. They’re almost like meteorologists, being able to work around when it rains. If it was going to be a population that has to deal with these kind of like oppositional forces, I think farmers are the ones that can deal with it and fight through it.
Harold Wilken
One other thought I’d like to bring forward is that there are a lot of first-generation farmers, kind of like Wes and Leslie, that are coming into agriculture. Like it was like bakers during the pandemic. We’ve gained 20 or 25 bakers that we started working with, there were IT people that lost their jobs, you know, in that they bake for comfort and the next thing they know they’re doing entrepreneurial stuff with food. But also there are people that have been in the corporate world for 20, 30, 40 years, who get this epiphany. Like the spirit of the previous generations, that’s been in them all the way along that cultivates, then they become farmers at 40, 50 60 years old, and they’re having the time of their lives. And I see more and more of that happening as time goes on, because for the longest time, people have been told, Oh,unless you got $5 million, then you or grandpa owns, you know, 400 acres, you’ll never farm. Well, that’s not true. You know, they can buy five or seven acres, and they can go into raising elderberries or, you know, nuts, and have beehives and all different kinds of things that are feeding people food, and not an ethanol plant. So, I’m pretty excited about those kinds of things that I see happening in my world.
Kimberlie Kranich
Do we have questions from the audience for our panel?
Audience Question 1
I’m from rural roots, myself, somewhat support farmers in my background, my uncle went broke in his 60s. But other farmer relatives that got rich, and I think I wanted to say that Sam, if he made another movie about agriculture, you’d be very interested look at the other end of it, where probably within 50 miles of here, the average net worth of a farmer is 10 million, something like that 5 million, a lot of dough. There’s a lot of prosperous farmers in this country. And they use a lot of pretty amazing technology. So that would that’s a whole other side of farming. We this is the historic you guys put us. This is the historical story. The little family farm is going out, and we’re getting these big industrial farms. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing. But a question for each of the other two panelists. I wanted to ask Harold how his yields and input costs compare and what he would say my tenants who hate to see a weed in their field. So that’s a question for him. And for Leslie, I’ve talked to you in Wes about how soil is being depleted and how there’s a race to get ever more toxic chemicals so you can keep farming as the weeds evolve. How much longer do you think we got before the soil starts to rebel and we really get some losses in in productivity.
Leslie Cooperband
That time has already come and gone. I mean, most farmers don’t rely on their soil to sustain their crops anymore. So, it’s basically a medium and inert growing medium, and they supply all the nutrients through fertilizer, they manage pests and disease through pesticides. And so honestly, they don’t really need to care much about the quality of their soil, because they’re not deriving a whole lot from it, except that it’s just a physical vehicle in into which the roots grow temporarily. The fact that we now live in a world where we have to be concerned about helicopters and pretty soon drones spraying fungicide in the middle of the summer, because farmers are being told that they need it, whether they need it or not. And we now have herbicides that don’t stay in place after they’ve been applied, they can revolitalize and drift on to our farm or another farm and have a devastating effect an unintended consequence. So, you know, it really depends on what people’s threshold is for tolerating that system of production.
Harold Wilken
Soils not gone forever. So, we’ve transitioned about 3600 acres over the last 20 years, takes about three to five years for the land to wake up and go, Hey, wait a minute, I’m alive again. When you’re spoon feeding it, and you have to spoon feed it every year, and you have to spoon feed it more and more. And then you have to raise more and more, because it costs more and more. That’s that squirrel cage effect. On our farms we use manures. We don’t use any outside amenities other than we do put on some elemental sulfur, low gypsum. But we use manures and cover crops. Now in the meantime, when we transition, we’re not going to have the yields we would if we were spoon feeding it. As an organic farmer, our yields are about 75 to 80% of our neighbors. Our input costs are not near as high. But we have a lot more labor, a lot more fuel, a lot more machinery expense. On our 3,200-acre farm, we actually employ six people full time, and about four or five that are part time some teenagers were in smart, hard to find laborers, they get them early, train them right and bring them up and hope they’ll stay with you. Right now, conventional corn is somewhere in the mid fours. I’m going to say that on the low side is nine for organic, in on the high side specialty the crop somewhere around 12.
Jim Meadows
I had a question for Sam about just about the process of making this film. And considering it was a multi year process. The film that you ended up with isn’t what you imagined you would be making when you began or did the stories of the people you were following. go in different directions?
Sam Mirpoorian
It never goes the way you plan at all. It was really funny. I was looking at the deck that I started writing for this in 2018. And the only farmer that was on there was Jeff, there were like four other farmers that I didn’t even remember talking to. Although the biggest challenge was trying to tell an extremely diverse story. And I wanted to I was trying to find a balance between men and women. And Becky was in front of me the entire time. Like I met her on our first shoot in 2018. But she did not become such a profound symbol of his multigenerational hope for futures to come until like, a year and a half into the shoot. And then we kind of like tried to figure out how we could, you know, make, you know, because the end of the day, it’s like we’re telling information, and we’re trying to convey information and in an entertaining way because it’s a movie right? So, like, information is boring, you know, so it’s like we have to do do fun things and like Chris wants to retire. We it was hard to build his ark, like the three points structure have a beginning, middle and end. So, with Becky it’s all Okay, well, why don’t you like do something Chris has never done? You know, Chris is always helping politicians. Why don’t you become a politician and run? So, it was a very, like, very ideal, perfect situation.
Todd Gleason
You said it was your wife that caused you to actually seek out some help? How important is it for, in your opinion, for people to be there? For those who need help? And what? What does it mean to be there? Is it simply that she said, you need to do it for me? Is it simply that they’re there? Just to listen to you what, and I think this varies across all kinds of places and people, but what was it for you that really caused you to go?
Harold Wilken
Okay, so when you get cancer, you need a caregiver. In my case, I was diagnosed the second week of July 2008. I had surgery, the first of August, and my mother-in-law died while I was on the table. So, my wife not only was there for me, but also lost her mother as well. You know, and a lot was going on. She was teaching school full time, she has run me to doctor’s appointments, some of the neighbors help with taking me to radiation and chemotherapy as time went on. But anyway, she had spent July to December taking care of me. And so, when she said do it for me, it was like I thought, well, that’s the least I can do for everything she’d done for me. So, it was because of her that I went and in to a counseling program. I went to Kankakee, twice a week, met with the same group, people who graduated out, some people came in every week. But the vulnerability of being with other people and hearing their stories and then hearing yours and this was not all farmers. This was just everybody who was having a tough time dealing with life. So, it was all the way from people who won’t be when they got constantly depressed. People with chronic depression, to people like me that were dealing with cancer, two people are going through divorce. I became part of a nucleus that helped each other out. And that was the part that was the most important for me. By the time I left that situation, I felt like I was on more on top of it. I stayed going to a counselor every other week for I think a year you know and talk out issues. You realize you’re not the only one and when you help other people kind of get a hold of themselves, it helps you as well.
Audience question 3
Sam, I’m wondering over the four years of filming, how many hours of video did you have that you edited down to the final product?
Sam Mirpoorian
That’s a great question. Probably like five or 600 hours. And then we did the math. It’s like 0.001% make the film like 85 minutes from 600 hours.
Audience question 4
I felt really bad for the family farms going out of business. So, what as a consumer can I do to you know, not put my money towards the corporate farms? Or like how far do I have to look? How do I meet a farmer? Just to what can I do to not make things worse?
Sam Mirpoorian
I just briefly, I would say the most immediate thing you could do impact wise is just buy local, go to farmers markets and just buy local as much as you can.
Audience question 5
The other day I saw a pumpkin stand by the side of the road. And their pumpkins were $14. And in town, they’re 3.99 at a discount grocery store. So like, can you explain that at all simply?
Harold Wilken
Buy one pumpkin from the good people and not buy six from the store.
Leslie Cooperband
I mean, I think where we are we are very, very fortunate to have some amazing farmers that support this local food economy. And it’s not that hard. And in season, when you go to the farmers market, you’re not really going to pay that much more than what you would pay at a grocery store more than the quality of that food is so superior. If you buy greens at the farmers market, they were picked the day before, they’re gonna last you over a week, if not closer to two weeks in your refrigerator, whereas that box salad mix that you buy in the grocery store, if you’re lucky will last 24 hours. So while you may think dollar for dollar, it’s more expensive. In actuality, when you when you experience that kind of quality of food, that food is actually going to nourish you way more because it’s much more nutrient dense. It is not it’s not just about the actual dollar for dollar value.
Sam Mirpoorian
The one thing I’ll say is I had never had an actual farm-to-table meal prior to this film. Like literally go to the hen house, grab the eggs and cook them never had that before ever. And it was the most satisfying thing I’ve ever had, like, I’ve never felt fuller for hours and felt better. So like echoing what you said, like quality over quantity, like you really, really feel that. Buy local like, I am a firm believer, it’s amazing. Buy that pumpkin for sure.
Kimberlie Kranich
Any more questions from the audience?
Jerry Cardin
I have a comment, I would just like to say thank you, Sam, for doing the film. And thank you, Illinois Public Media for putting this program together. And I remember growing up getting rid of the few dairy cows we had because it didn’t pay to raise the amount of milk anymore. And then we had to get rid of 200 chickens because my dad and my granddad fought about the fact that the chickens weren’t paying for themselves anymore, because we didn’t have a large enough chicken operation. Same thing with our hogs. Now, my brother four years older than me, took on the mantle of farming and taking over this farm. During the 1980s during the downturn in farming, he got caught up in the cycle of alcohol and depression. And it was 32 years ago, this last Tuesday that he took his life, because the stress became too much for him. And so I’ve been following the stories about farmers and suicide for a long time. And this kind of documentary is so needed. And part of the issue with my brother was not wanting to reach out for help, like Harold was talking about because of the talk of the town. Small town with around 1,000 people. And when I was discussing with him on the phone that he finally admitted he had a problem with alcohol. And I said, Well, Steve, you need to get to AA because I’m in recovery had been down the road of sobriety for a while myself. And Steve said, well, people will talk, people will know that I’m going to AA. And I said, Well, Steve, people know you’re the town drunk now. So, you know, there’s no shame in seeking help. But I think that is the reason that a lot of people don’t reach out. Farmers and non-farmers alike. This kind of thing is important. Thank you.
Kimberlie Kranich
Quickly, final thoughts starting with Sam and just go down the row.
Sam Mirpoorian
Just incredibly grateful for this opportunity to screen with Illinois Public Media and the Virginia Theatre. I have a personal relationship with Illinois Public Media. This is my second year working with you all so thank you, Moss. Thank you, Reginald. Thank you, Kimberlie just super, super grateful. Yeah, Independent Lens. PBS acquired the film. So it’ll be on National Public Television, March 25th. And this film climate is just incredibly just a huge blessing. I mean, you, you go to like some of the biggest film festivals in the world, Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and more than half the films there don’t have deals. I just feel so lucky to just to be here and just thank you everyone for taking the time to hang out tonight.
Harold Wilken
I got to watch where I was 30 some years ago. And, you know, it kind of made me like retrospect through the film, you know, what I dealt with and how I dealt with and I’m very grateful to be here. I could have died in 2009 or 2008. But for some reason I’m still here. And I’m very grateful for that. And thank you for inviting me to be a part of the panel.
Leslie Cooperband
I also want to thank you for inviting me to be part of the panel and to have the opportunity to, to see the film and to reflect on its significance on so many levels. I do I’m very happy that more people will actually see it because I feel like somehow even though everybody eats, so few people think about agriculture on a day-to-day basis.
Kimberlie Kranich
Leslie, Harold, Sam, thank you so much.