Parents dream of sending their kids off to college to become doctors and lawyers, Matt Kleopfer said.
Heck, he probably thought so, too.
But no longer.
“The best kids in class need to be going into farming,” Kleopfer said Saturday in a full-throated endorsement/celebration of all things agricultural.
Kleopfer spoke at Saturday’s Allen County Conservation District annual meeting.
He told his story, growing up on the farm, and then moving off to college.
“Go make something of yourself,” his dad advised him. “Don’t stay on the farm.”
And he did, earning a pair of college degrees before embarking on a wildly successful career as a band and music instructor at Iola High School.
But amid the marches, rehearsals and road trips, Kleopfer felt something was missing.
So in 2017, he gave up his teaching career to focus his life on his family’s farm outside of Fredonia.
And he hasn’t regretted a second of it.
Kleopfer, wife Jenessa and their four children run Harmony Hill Farmstead, where they practice regenerative agriculture, producing pastured poultry and pork, grass-finished beef and lamb, free-range chicken eggs, raw dairy products and fresh produce.
“It’s more of an educational farm,” he said. “We’re not big, crazy producers or anything, but people come to our farm to reconnect with exactly what you’re going to talk about here tonight: soil conservation.”
The Kleopfers continue to offer up plenty of music. Matt, Jenessa and their three oldest children, Kamden, Kennedy and Karson performed a medley of bluegrass and gospel tunes during the meal.
PROPER nutrition is often overlooked when folks talk about seeing kids thrive, Kleopfer said.
That’s what led Kleopfer to focus on biome research in recent years, learning how what children eat affects how they behave.
“The research has come so far, so quickly, that we’re beginning to understand the food that we’re eating. The highly, highly, highly processed, refined stuff that we can’t even recognize what it is any more, but it’s very fancily labeled and it’s got bright colors on the box. 
“It’s not what we raised on our farms any more. It’s been changed, it’s been adulterated, it’s not what it was.
“What’s coming down the road is very scary,” Kleopfer predicted, describing what’s sold on convenience store shelves as “hypertension and brain fog.
