Not long after visiting Stone Broke, in a regional newspaper I come across a profile of a farmer named John Wing, who’d built a new slaughterhouse in Benson, Vermont, five years before. Because of the area’s lack of capacity he decided to start processing his own animals. State inspectors convinced him to construct his place to comply with federal standards. That way he could help alleviate the region’s slaughterhouse bottleneck that stretched south into New York and Massachusetts. Although it would cost much more, Wing decided to take their advice. The facility is still running today, handling about one hundred animals a week, but the $1.75 million he spent to outfit the small plant put Wing through Chapter 13 bankruptcy.
Also contributing to these higher costs are meatpacking regulations adopted by the USDA in 1996. The first meaningful revision since the Meat Inspection Act was originally passed in 1906 amid public outcry stirred by Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, the updated rules ironically seem to work in favor of the largest corporations. Central to the USDA’s new specifications is what’s called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or HACCP (pronounced “hassup”). All meat processors regardless of size are now required to write a HACCP plan—“basically a book, it’s that detailed,” Eric Shelley tells me—which can be particularly onerous for small operators. The document covers a range of issues related to potential exposure of meat to unwanted contaminants, such as chemicals, pathogens, hair, and bits of metal, at all points throughout the slaughtering and processing chain. While such a plan is undoubtedly a good idea, the document requires specialized knowledge in engineering and science that most small-time butchers don’t have. So they must hire outside consultants to write their HACCP plan; this can cost thousands of dollars for the initial document, and even more for revisions, which are common. But that’s not all—HACCP requires constant documentation. Huse tells me it takes his butcher an hour and a half every day to fill out the paperwork. “USDA makes it so hard to operate, many slaughterhouses are guys who are sixty to sixty-five years old, and they just get tired and quit and no one takes their place,” Huse says. “Why would they?”
That HACCP better suits the bigger facilities isn’t surprising. Before being taken up by the USDA, HACCP was adopted and refined by the fast-food chain Jack in the Box. The company revamped its system in an effort to salvage its reputation after a 1993 E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak was traced back to the company’s food. The dangerous bacteria sickened seven hundred people across the United States and killed four, including children, and were linked to meat processed in large industrial facilities. According to Marion Nestle’s book Safe Food, the spread of E. coli coincides with the rise of factory farming. “The earliest case [of E. coli] seems to have occurred in 1975, but the first reported outbreak occurred in 1982. . . . Outbreaks are increasing in frequency; there were 6 in 1997 but 17 in 1998.” As for why, she writes, “The most reasonable explanation involves the profound changes in society and food production that have taken place.” The changes have been dramatic indeed; in 2007 over half the cattle slaughtered went through just fourteen meatpacking facilities. Although HACCP introduces procedures that, when carried out well, could improve food safety, the regulations were shaped by and for industrial-scale processors to the detriment of their small-scale competitors, not to mention public health.
Frank Johnson’s farm is decidedly unassuming compared to Huse’s. It’s tucked in the valley on a much smaller two-hundred-acre parcel just outside the small town of Carlisle. The place is well-worn, unadorned. Off the main road, a dirt drive leads past a modest one-story, white house, where Johnson lives with his family. The main barn is across the drive from the house, and behind it are Johnson’s pastures. We walk to a field where the forty-five or so cattle Fleisher’s will be carving in the coming weeks are grazing on grass that’s a fluorescent green. Upon seeing the animals’ black bodies bulging with muscle, Applestone punches the air in excitement.
Johnson has salt-and-pepper hair and, unlike Huse, doesn’t look the part of a farmer. He’s wearing faded denim shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers. He looks like a suburban dad on a Sunday afternoon. He tells me he farms holistically “because you should leave the earth in better shape than when you got here.” Johnson is neither an eco-evangelizer nor a hippie who went back to the land. Huse shares these qualities. These men are straight-up farmers.
Johnson has known this is the life for him since he was a kid on his family’s dairy farm. However, when he was married to his first wife, he earned a living doing construction, he says, because she didn’t want him to work the land. But the desire to raise animals persisted. After Johnson divorced and then married a second time, he and his new wife, Judy Pangman—who wrote an authoritative book on chicken-coop construction—went into farming. About ten years ago they bought the “land base” of his family’s dairy farm, where the crops were grown. (The milking facilities are on the half that they didn’t buy.) They named their new place Sweet Tree Farm and have been paying the sizable mortgage ever since.
“Joel Salatin”—a grass-fed beef–farming guru—“says you shouldn’t have money tied up in land, but we have a mortgage. We had to,” Johnson tells me. “If you inherit the land, you’re in a really different situation.” So, to help service the debt, Johnson maintained an “off-farm job,” as they’re called, until just three years ago. And Pangman works full-time for an engineering company. “If it wasn’t for her income, we wouldn’t be farming,” Johnson says.
There is a tinge of shame in this admission, as is true with other farmers I talk to who must rely on external income to stay afloat. But, in reality, there’s nothing abnormal about it. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, the average small farm earns 85–95 percent of its income from “off-farm sources” such as the wages of a spouse. Medium-size farms, ones that earn between $250,000 and $499,999 in annual sales, rely on off-farm resources for almost 50 percent of their income. This means that most small growers don’t even come close to earning a living from being farmers. Old news in many respects, but with an increasing emphasis on organic and local, the struggle of the small farmer is cast in a new light.
Needless to say, Johnson works hard. He raises his own animals, finishes the Huse cattle, does his own butchering, and brings Sweet Tree’s products to farmers’ markets twice a week, selling the goods himself. Before our group leaves, Johnson shows me a smokehouse he built last year. The idea was he could make smoked cuts, adding value to his meat, boosting his earning potential. But he hasn’t yet been able to use it because he can’t get USDA approval. Thanks to convoluted regulations, which he said Cornell University’s trusted extension workers couldn’t help him figure out, Johnson’s smoker sits idle.
As Johnson traces his efforts to make Sweet Tree more profitable, all the things he’s done to cut costs and be more self-sufficient, he says he’s getting worn-out. “That’s the point I’m at. I’m raising the beef, I’m doing the butchering, I’m smoking my own meat, I’m doing inventory, and the markets. If I try to do more, it becomes a snowball. I can’t say it can’t be done, I just don’t have the ambition to do it. I was always ambitious, but these last eight years, doing both the farming and the markets have really taken it out of me.” Throughout the visit Johnson tells me several times that he’s afraid he’s going to have to stop farming and go back to wage labor.
LOGIC OF THE LOCAL
In the summer of 2007 I place a call to the USDA’s National Organic Program, or NOP, in Washington, D.C. Established in 2002, the NOP is the top body in charge of overseeing the organic system in the United States. A man picks up without identifying the office. I ask to speak to someone in communications. He tells me to hold on, then puts the receiver down and continues a conversation that I can hear and that my call has obviously interrupted. Several minutes later he picks the phone back up. I ask how many people are currently in the office. He says six. I ask what he knows about organic farming. “Nothing,” he tells me. I ask how long he’s been at the job. “A couple of weeks.” He’s a temp.
From its inception in 2002 through 2008, the NOP staff fluctuated between five and eight people even though the program has a heavy workload. Its duties include interpreting