Joel Gindo ’13 finds satisfaction producing food for his family, community

BY EMILY CHRISTENSEN | PHOTOS SUBMITTED

Joel Gindo ’13 believes in the timeless adage “You are what you eat.” Raised on a homestead dairy farm in Tanzania, he helped his parents — who both worked traditional full-time jobs — with the chores and learned the value of homegrown food. Today, Gindo is forging a similar path in South Dakota, where he works as a controller by day and operates Free Happy Farm during his “off hours.”

“I try to stay away from telling people how to do things, but for me and my family, I don’t believe in antibiotics in our animals. If you have to give them antibiotics, there is something else that isn’t right, and I like to fix those other things so I don’t have to do the medication,” he said. “My pigs have access to open, clean air. They can move from the woods to the farm to the pasture where they can follow their own natural behaviors.”

In addition to pigs, Gindo and his wife, Kristina Goematt Gindo ’12, also raise chickens and grow corn and soybeans. But there are no cows on the Gindo homestead.

“After you milked cows twice a day, every day growing up, you never want to do it again,” he said.

In less than 10 years, Gindo has gone from producing food for his family to selling extras at a local farmers market to providing fresh food to nearby restaurants. In 2018, he began expanding beyond his community through a partnership with Niman Ranch, a farmer network committed to animal welfare and sustainable farming practices. Though he currently provides fewer than 40 pigs a year to Niman, he’s hopeful that a new building and other improvements around the farm will allow him to raise at least 100 pigs for the organization.

“Right now, my barn is too small to fit a tractor inside, so I am cleaning up after the pigs all by hand,” he said, adding that he is also looking for more land but is usually outbid by larger farming operations and others with deeper pockets. His plight, along with that of other small farmers, was the subject of a 2022 New York Times story about record-high farmland prices. He’s also been featured on an episode of Connected: A Search for Unity on PBS, which detailed his journey from Tanzania to Iowa to South Dakota and the people who helped him along the way.

If he can continue to grow his contract with Niman, Gindo believes that someday he will be able to focus more of his efforts on farming and only work his traditional 9-5 during the less busy seasons.

That also might allow him the opportunity to return home to Dar es Salaam and share some of the farming practices he’s learned stateside with his family and friends in Tanzania.

“My original plan was always to get a degree, farm here for a little bit, and then take what I learned back to Tanzania to help make a change in my town,” he said. “That’s still my goal, but my life is here now. I have Kristina, and we have a son (Nathan). But I’ve learned a lot about how to grow a family farm, and when I am in a position to be able to, I still want to go home and train them to do the same.”