by Holly Hughes
Growing Pains
In addition to being offspring-producing dynamos, pink pigs have been bred to grow fast and convert feed into meat efficiently. They are helped along, if you want to call it that, by some marvels of modern factory farming. First of all, they do their growing inside warehouse-like barns typically holding two thousand hogs, all of the same age. The growing pigs are kept in groups of about twenty in pens that allow each animal between five and eight square feet on which to live out its life—an area measuring two feet by four feet, maximum. With no way to move freely, they don’t burn off precious calories with exercise. Their food often contains animal byproducts. Those can consist of feathers, heads, feed, and viscera from poultry processing plants and excess baby chicks from hatcheries. They can also include slaughterhouse waste such as hog hair, tendons, ligaments, entrails, bones, and blood from cows and pigs. Occasionally, commercial hogs are fed spent restaurant grease and rejected ingredients from packaged snack food factories—batches of overdone corn chips, defective candies. Not particularly healthy, but highly caloric.
Artificial lighting and climate control assure that the pigs live under optimal growing conditions all year round. They receive daily rations of antibiotics, not to keep them from becoming sick, but because low-level (subtherapeutic) drug administration makes livestock grow a few percent faster than they would normally. Mechanical augers transport food to their troughs; slats in the floor allow their excrement to fall into pits below, where machines move it away. Human presence is all but unnecessary. Liberty Swine Farms, for instance, an Indiana operator, produces about twenty-two thousand pigs a year with only eight employees. One employee’s salary is spread over 2,750 pigs. Jennifer Small recalled visiting a commercial hog barn in Illinois housing thousands of animals. No humans were there. It was as if the entire barn was on autopilot with mechanical devices handling all the husbandry duties of a traditional farmer. “It was eerie,” she said.
Six months after it is born, a factory hog has gone from a creature you can cradle in the palms of your hands to a 250-pound porker that is ready for slaughter. But at Flying Pigs Farm, a pig takes between eight and nine months to reach a similar weight, longer during the cold season when the animals have to burn calories just to stay warm. Human contact is a constant factor in a Flying Pig’s life. Yezzi and Small go out of their way to make sure that their pigs are docile and accustomed to human contact, not for sentimental reasons or to make pets of them, but because becoming used to humans reduces stress, and unstressed pigs are easier to handle, grow better, and produce better meat.
Thousands of factory animals can be crowded into a single barn that occupies a fraction of an acre of land, but the four hundred or so hogs found on Flying Pigs Farm at any time have the run of twenty to thirty acres. An acre is about the size of a football field. Yezzi has three full-time employees, plus one part-timer, and an employee’s salary can be spread over only 170 pigs, not the 2,750 at the Liberty facility. Employees at Flying Pigs have to deliver feed to the pigs daily by tractor and wagon. To prevent the spread of parasites, Yezzi never keeps pigs on the same patch of ground for two years in a row, so he actually has forty to sixty acres of valuable land tied up as pig pasture. The pigs live in groups of five to a couple dozen, depending on their size, in roomy paddocks enclosed by electric fencing. Each group has a feeder, water spigot, and portable metal hut in which to take shelter. Workers move the huts, hoses, feeders, and fencing to fresh pasture every two weeks in the summer. In the cold months, they insert wooden platforms inside each hut so the pigs don’t have to lie on cold, wet ground. Straw, which can cost a dollar a day per hut, is placed on top of the platforms to help the pigs stay warm. Yezzi’s crew has to be vigilant and clean out the huts whenever the bedding becomes even slightly moist—pigs are notoriously susceptible to pneumonia. Every morning and evening someone visits every hut and rouses its residents and makes them get up and move about. “We check for illness,” said Yezzi. “If an animal is slow rising or has its tail and ears down and is looking mopey, we move it into the barn for closer observation and treatment if necessary.”
The only time a Flying Pig hog receives medication is when it becomes sick. Antibiotics are not given as part of the daily regimen of healthy animals, even though they will not grow as fast as regularly treated pigs. And because of the presence of animal byproducts and other chemicals that Jennifer describes as “gross” in commercially formulated feeds, Flying Pigs Farm uses a custom formula of corn and soybeans mixed at a local grain mill, a step that costs sixteen thousand dollars a month. Being on pasture, the couple’s pigs are always active, rooting, running, and mounding together fifty-strong in pig piles on chilly days. All of this activity gives their flesh color and texture lacking in commercial pork. They forage while on pasture, but Yezzi says that the benefit to that is not so much the weight gain, but that they are kept active and interested. Foraged food also adds flavor to their meat.
The Day of Reckoning and Beyond
Efficiency being the watchword, a two-thousand-pig commercial barn gets filled all at once with animals that are the same age. When the hogs reach slaughter weight, the barn is completely emptied, as all of its former residents are trucked off to slaughter. The large slaughter facilities that commercial pigs go to can kill and butcher more than a thousand pigs an hour, a process that inevitably leaves a few animals alive and sentient when they are dipped in vats of scalding water for hair removal, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Unskilled and often ununionized (and undocumented) workers wield knives along a disassembly line, repeating a single cut all day long, rather than performing the skilled job of butchering an entire animal. The “kill fee” at a big plant is between ten and twelve dollars per carcass. According to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics, an unskilled slaughterhouse worker earns a little over eleven dollars an hour. A Vermont study showed that trained meat cutters in the area near Flying Pigs earned sixteen dollars an hour.
Flying Pigs pays a kill fee of fifty dollars per animal. How commercial hogs and Flying Pigs’ animals die is as different as how they are raised. Yezzi loads between ten and twenty pigs a week into his truck and drives them to a USDA-certified slaughterhouse about ten miles from his farm. They arrive there the evening before they are due to be killed and are housed together in their own enclosure overnight. Spending the evening among pigs they know calms them and relieves the stress of transport. Excessive stress at the time of slaughter can ruin the flavor and texture of pork. With no fear of humans, they remain calm until they are killed one at a time by the facility’s owner, who processes a maximum of thirty pigs a day. This not only assures as humane a death as a pig bred for human food can get, but allows the on-site USDA inspector to examine each carcass individually, taking all the time needed, an impossibility in a mega-plant where a thousand pigs an hour stream past on a conveyor system. In addition to paying the kill fee, Yezzi spends up to two hundred dollars per carcass, nearly twice the going rate, to have a professional butcher cut it to his exact specifications.
Yezzi has a tremendous advantage over many other small-scale meat producers in that there is a USDA-approved slaughterhouse just down the road. Before it opened, he or one of his employees had to drive for over an hour to the nearest facility, wait there until the animals were off loaded, and return home—twice a week. It represented a tremendous cost in fuel and labor that he no longer has to bear. His fuel bill is further reduced because he burns recycled vegetable oil from nearby Williams College and other sources.
Every Thursday, Yezzi picks up his meat. He hits the road for the 225-mile drive to New York City between six and eight o’clock in the evening, arriving at about one o’clock Friday morning. He crashes at a friend’s apartment (another money-saving measure that other small producers don’t enjoy) and gets up at six o’clock to make deliveries to his restaurant customers. Two hours later, he arrives at one of the three farmers’ markets he attends each week in
the city. But even as customers line up for his pork, Yezzi is still incurring expenses. Renting a space at a market costs seventy-five dollars a day. He has to hire sales help in the city to tend his booth for an additional hundred to hundred and fifty dollars a day—about 5 percent of his gross sales. Late Saturday afternoon, he packs up and drives back to the farm to get ready for the next group of pigs.
As you may have guessed, even before I undertook my hard-edged financial analysis, I had already made up my mind that the taste of rare, heritage-breed pork was worth it to me. Sure, it’s expensive. But we are all supposed to be eating less meat, so my answer to those who say that grass-fed beef and pastured pork are elitist luxuries would be, “Eat less meat and when you do make it the good stuff. Your wallet will be no worse off, and your circulatory system and conscience will thank you.” Now I can add, “And take some comfort knowing that the extra money is spent on better production practices.”
There wasn’t any fine print on the label of my package of Flying Pigs chops to explain all the extra costs that had gone into producing them. It said only, “Premium pork from the Battenkill River Valley.”
The fine print on the label of those $3.49 a pound Swift Premium chops that were “guaranteed tender” said: “With up to a 12 percent solution of pork broth, sodium citrate, and natural salt.” Huh? “Natural salt?” “Sodium citrate?” A little research revealed that the supermarket chop had been “enhanced,” which means the meat was injected with a saline solution to remedy its lack of taste and dry texture. By my objective calculation, that factory pig corporation charged more than forty cents a pound for salty water. Did I feel ripped off? You bet.
THE UPSTART CATTLEMAN
By John Kessler
From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Back in the saddle as chief dining critic of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, John Kessler only occasionally can steal time for long-form feature writing, like this in-depth profile of a cutting-edge meat producer. Knowing all the stories along the food chain—that’s what makes Kessler such a vital voice.
It took a mere 20 minutes from the time the coal-black, 1,100-pound heifer ambled through a raised door into the slaughterhouse until two sides of beef, hanging on hooks, disappeared into the cooler. The cow entered a small chamber with high, grass-green walls that enclosed her like a shoebox around a loafer. She looked around curiously with big, brown, avid eyes—first left, then right, then up at a captive bolt pistol pointed at her head. And that was it. One wall lifted and she collapsed onto the kill floor.
The six men working inside this small abattoir—no bigger than a studio loft apartment—made quick work with knives and saws, the first cut straight into her heart, stopping it cold. Soon, one fellow delivered this still-warm organ on a rolling steel cart to a white-coated USDA inspector who eyeballed it closely and ticked a mark on his clipboard.
Will Harris III, the owner of White Oak Pastures, drew a knife from his belt holster, neatly bisected the heart and cut a cube from its center. “Sweetest meat you’ll ever try,” he said, popping the red morsel into his mouth. It was not yet 9 a.m.
With his 240-pound frame and Stetson hat capping a sun-creased face, Harris looks like the kind of hardcore cowboy dude who’d think nothing of a little raw offal for breakfast. Yet despite the country-road gravel in his voice, he doesn’t always sound the part. He loves to quote George Washington Carver on the order of nature and Michael Pollan on the dangers of industrial food production. He takes enormous pride in the organic certification that his pastures and vegetable garden have received and in the new solar panels he is installing.
Others have taken notice, too. Harris’ farm has become a way-point for Florida-bound tourists who stock up on his grass-fed meats. Hungry humans take their meals in a newly completed open-air dining pavilion just down a hill from the abattoirs called “Pasture to Plate.” For now it serves as a lunchroom for his employees, who sit by beating fans along two picnic benches. Soon, it may welcome visitors, visiting chefs and culinary students who want to experience life on a working farm. Like he does many nights, Harris plans to meet his family here and microwave the leftovers for dinner.
Row by row, Harris is breaking the mold on farming in Georgia. His organic grass-fed cattle are slaughtered with methods animal welfare advocates call commendable, and steaks from his beef are cooked and plated in Atlanta’s finest restaurants. Whole Foods prominently features White Oak Pastures beef in its stores. And Harris, with 85 employees and what seems like half of Early County working for him, is now doing for chicken what he’s done for beef: raising pasture-fed birds and slaughtering them more humanely.
But 15 years ago White Oak Pastures wasn’t anything like this and Harris, a fourth-generation Georgian farming land owned by his family since the Civil War, seemed destined to farm the same way his father had, and his father before that. Harris’ father—a harsh, unyielding man—pushed the farm as far as he could, pumping any and all chemicals into the earth and into the animals to turn acreage into meat. Armed with an animal science degree and a quick mind, Harris set out to best his father, and he did.
But then, one day, without consulting anyone, he just stopped. He stopped feeding his cattle a mixed ration of grain and powdered dietary supplements they digested poorly, and he stopped implanting estrogen pellets behind their ears. He stopped buying bull semen and instead bought bulls. He stopped loading weaned 7-month-old calves into 53-foot-long double-decker hauling trucks to travel 1,400 miles in their own filth to a feedlot. Soon, he stopped spraying his pasture with pesticides and fertilizing them with ammonium nitrate, and as they turned brown and died, he knew he was risking everything. But he kept going.
“The thing is, those fields were already dead,” Harris says as he climbs into his beat-up 1995 Jeep Wrangler to make the evening rounds of the property. As he does every night, he brings a double-barreled shotgun and a bottle of Yellow Tail shiraz along for the ride. The sun slants with a hot, eerie stillness as the Jeep chuffs over a green hill and a flock of speckled guinea fowl, which look like giant potatoes with tiny heads and stick legs, disperse.
He casts a steady hazel-eyed gaze on visitors and avows he truly loves the animals—not just his dogs and horses, but also all the mooing, baaing, clucking and quacking things that roam so freely over the thousand acres of his storybook pretty farm. These are the same creatures that will one day find themselves headed for the two slaughterhouses on site. They are the lifeblood of this whole operation, and Will Harris is their badass Old MacDonald.
“Let me tell you a story,” Harris says, which in his south Georgia accent sounded like “stirry.” He had more than 1,000 acres to cover this evening. There was time to tell it, and it was a good stirry.
Tough Love, History Guide a Young Farmer
Harris shakes his head as his Jeep lumbers over the four-lane divided highway the Georgia Department of Transportation has been building through the center of White Oak Pastures. “Here’s your tax dollars at work,” he mutters.
Getting the cattle from one side of the road to the other would be no easy feat, so GDOT agreed to build a tunnel under the raised highway. One good thing came from this mess: When bulldozers cut into the pasture abutting the road, they uncovered a clearly distinct stratum of soft, brown topsoil above the hard, red clay. “Fifteen years ago, this wasn’t here,” Harris says.
Nor were the other markers of healthy organic soil: the mushrooms that sprout so suddenly on the pasture after a night’s rain; the black dung beetle that scurries from a cow patty when Harris crushes it with the toe of his leather boot.
But in 1866, when his great-grandfather arrived, the land was even richer. James Edward Harris was a Confederate who assembled and conscripted his own cavalry to fight the Union soldiers back from central west Georgia. After the war, the bank repossessed the farm and freed the slaves, who joined their former master as sharecroppers. Together, they traveled to homestead this new property in Early County—about as far so
uth as you could go in this part of Georgia before the forested red clay hills give way to the flat landscape and sandy earth of the coastal plain.
Every Saturday the Harrises butchered enough meat—one cow, two or three hogs and several chickens—to last the family and the sharecroppers through the week. They raised their four children in a simple two-story log cabin, among them Will Carter Harris, who most likely took possession of the family farm upon his father’s death in 1909. The younger Harris married Beulah Bell, the sheriff’s daughter and a formidable woman who had a reputation for working black farm hands harder than anyone in the area. They built a new home next to the log cabin.
The family stepped up their production of beef, pork and chicken to sell in nearby Bluffton. They butchered the animals before dawn and made near-daily deliveries. They also opened a commissary beside their house where they sold dry goods and cigarettes alongside vegetables and meat.
The beginning of the Great Depression was doubly hard on the farm, as Will Carter Harris was rapidly losing his eyesight to cataracts. According to family lore, Beulah one day hopped in the family’s Model T, drove to the schoolhouse and withdrew her only child to come work on the farm. He was 8.
Will Bell Harris spent his days riding around in a horse-drawn carriage with his father. He was the bossman’s eyes, and his mission—reinforced over and over by both parents—was to inform on farm hands and cowboys who weren’t pulling their weight. He learned to be feared from an early age.