King Dairy Farm receives governor's award for conservation

PINEY FLATS, Tenn. – Conservation is just a habit, a way of life, for Steve King, owner and operator of King Dairy Farm on Warren Drive in Piney Flats, Tenn.

So forgive his surprise over his farm receiving a governor’s award for outstanding conservation practices.

“Conservation has been bred and born in me,” King said. “It has been practiced all my life. My dad was very conscientious about conservation.”

King is the seventh generation in his family to run the dairy farm, which has been operating since 1774. In June, the farm received the 2010 Governor’s Environmental Stewardship Award for Excellence in Agriculture and Forestry, given annually by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation.

The farm has about 200 cows, which are milked daily at 2 a.m. and 2 p.m., King said. Each cow averages about 20,000 pounds of milk a year. They also have about 240 replacement heifers, he said.

In addition to dairy, the farm markets hay and straw, King said.

Among the many green practices on the farm is conservation tillage, in which crops are grown with minimal cultivation of the soil to reduce erosion. Additionally, animal and milking parlor wastes are stored, to keep them out of nearby water sources, and later used as fertilizer to help replace depletion of nutrients in the soil. The farm installed a pipeline to deliver the waste to croplands through an irrigation system.

Recently, the farm installed a new, energy-efficient vacuum pump in the milking parlor.

The farm also focuses on efficient use of its well water.

“We use water three to four times and get a good return every time,” King said. The water is used to cool the milk, nourish the cows, flush holding lots and irrigate crops.

“It is a dollar spent trying to get back three to fours dollars in return,” King said.

In all, the farm uses about 10,000 gallons of water a day.

“It’s the farm winning this, not just me,” King said.

The 800-acre farm is run by King’s family, which includes his wife, Teresa, who does the bookkeeping, and his kids, John and Lauren, who both work part-time on the farm, as well as a few other full- and part-time staffers.

“I’m very proud of him, him and my brother. It’s been a good year,” Lauren King said, referring to the award and two others the farm and family received this year.

The farm received the 2010 Boone Watershed Aquatic Stewardship Award on July 10, and John King won the Future Farmers of American East Tennessee Star Farmer and the FFA Tennessee Star Farmer awards this year.

Those awards are in addition to the three Conservation Farmer awards the farm received in past years, the most recent in 2008, from Sullivan County.

“The recognition they got is very well deserved,” said Katherine Sells, the district conservationist for Sullivan County with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. The Sullivan County Soil Conservation District nominated the farm for the governor’s award, she said.

“It [conservation] helps them and the people that live around them and the people that live down the stream from them,” Sells said, because conservation is cleaner and less damaging to the environment than alternate methods. She also said the farm is a “Tennessee business” that provides employment for others.

“Steve [King] has a philosophy of doing quality work and producing a quality product and local production of food has become important for the community,” Sells said.

The award was presented to the King family June 24 at the Ellington Agriculture Center campus in Nashville. At the same time, 15 other nonagricultural awards were presented to individuals, community organizations and government agencies across the state.

“We are doing what needs to be done, we always have, always wanted to,” King said of his farm’s practices.

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