The bus is crowded for 6 a.m. on a Monday, headed out of town. In the row behind me a teenage girl sleeps; the jacket she’d pulled over her head has slouched down around her shoulders. I disembark after two hours traveling north through the Hudson Valley to the town of Kingston, New York. Here I meet Joshua and Jessica Applestone, owners of Fleisher’s Grass-Fed and Organic Meats, a butcher store located on the main shopping street. They have invited me to come with some of their employees to visit the farm of their main beef supplier, David Huse.
Fleisher’s sells meat only from animals grazed on pasture and raised without hormones or antibiotics. It’s a relatively young business and like farmers’ markets it’s part of the burgeoning network for nonfactory food. Fleisher’s buys carcasses from small farmers, cuts them into steaks and chops, grinds them into burgers and sausages, and makes soap with the leftover fat. The Applestones, both in their thirties, revived Joshua’s family butcher shop, also called Fleisher’s. Started by his great-grandfather in Brooklyn, New York, over a century ago, the original went out of business around the time industrial meat processing took off. By working with farmers such as David Huse, the Applestones aim to help build a lasting market for humanely raised, ecologically sustainable meat.
From Kingston we drive an additional ninety miles north in two separate cars. I ride with Joshua and his main butcher, Aaron. Jessica is in the SUV behind us with two employees and two interns (the unpaid labor of idealistic youngsters seems to be a key feature in the emergent clean-food movement). Joshua and Aaron, who exchange a jocular banter like old college friends, tell me about the trials of being butchers selling strictly grass-fed, nonhormone, free-range meat. One of the most difficult aspects of the trade is getting and keeping access to slaughterhouses. Because USDA guidelines are tailored to industrial meatpacking plants, Joshua and Aaron explain, it’s disproportionately more expensive for local abattoirs to stay in business, and far costlier for small farmers to process animals. Federal food-safety laws are written for—and often de facto by—big corporations such as ConAgra and Tyson, not producers such as Huse and Fleisher’s.
Joshua and Aaron also talk about how the art of butchering is being lost. What gets taught in agriculture schools these days is referred to as meat cutting. When animals are slaughtered and packed at large-scale, mechanized facilities, where most meat in the United States is processed, they get broken down into bulk parts, sealed in thick plastic, boxed, and sent to retail stores. Here, the meat cutter comes in. Unlike a butcher, a cutter only has to know which way to position the block of beef when running it through the band saw to shear off, say, a T-bone steak. Eric Shelley, who runs the Meat Lab at the State University of New York, Cobleskill, a schoolroom slaughterhouse, explains, “If people are under forty years old, they don’t know where the meat comes from on the animal. Traditional butchers know how to bring something walking in on its feet to something that leaves in a package that can go straight onto the grill.”
According to Joshua and Aaron, losing the skill of butchering reinforces our reliance on dirty factory-farm production. This is exactly what’s happened; as of 2000, the top four companies slaughtered more than 80 percent of U.S. beef, leaving few choices for processing meat outside the industrial oligopoly. By not knowing how to take apart an animal, we’re forced to get meat from producers that confine their cows, pigs, and birds, stuff them full of feed they can’t digest, and inundate their systems with chemicals including hormones and antibiotics. Fleisher’s aim is to fuel a transformation of the food system that’s crucial for the survival of ecological health, animals included.
We crest a quiet hilltop. “It’s right around here somewhere,” Joshua says from behind the wheel as Aaron inspects the cryptic directions written in black marker on butcher paper. Joshua and Jessica visited the farm this time last year, not long after they first started working with David Huse. Today’s outing is part of how they stay connected to the growers that raise the meat they sell. “That’s the whole point, to know exactly where your food comes from,” Joshua says. We head up the driveway past a small wooden sign that reads STONE BROKE FARMS.
The Huse farm consists of seven hundred acres of mostly hilltop land just south of New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. Tall elms, oaks, and cedars rustle and shimmer when the summer breeze breaks through. The pastures are full of tall, pale grasses. Only a few houses dot the landscape. David Huse and his father have raised five hundred or so Angus and Hereford cattle here each year for the last four decades. Over that time they perfected their livestock, breeding solid blacks, white-faced blacks, and white-faced reds to achieve a specific musculature. Joshua, who was a vegan for seventeen years, effusively describes these animals as “walking blocks of steak.”
David and his father work their cattle farm themselves, occasionally hiring kids from the town down the hill to help with repairing equipment and other menial tasks. The elder Huse is from Kansas, and, according to David, “He was the first in his family who wasn’t a farmer, a preacher, or a schoolteacher.” David’s father left the family wheat farm to eventually become a vice president at Bell Telephone. In 1966 he bought this acreage for his retirement; that way he could be a small farmer with his own economic safety net. When the Huses moved here, David was still in high school. After earning his associate’s degree in animal husbandry in 1972, he joined his father raising cattle full-time.
The family house is a sprawling, two-story ranch-style homestead, built in the 1940s. Inside, the place more closely resembles a suburban dwelling than a farmhouse. Its decor is of a different time, like a Technicolor film from the 1960s that has faded but retains its elegance. The living-room furniture is arranged around a massive, spotless picture window that frames the view down onto the undulating Cobleskill Valley majestic with cumulus clouds of green trees.
It’s early July, the height of killing season. “We start slaughtering in June and continue through October. We do about three or four head a week,” David says as we pile into his truck to go see the “breeders” a few fields away. David Huse is of medium build, about six feet tall, and is at once grizzled and boyish. He has on muddy cowboy boots, coveralls, and a baseball cap that says NASCAR and has yellow lightning bolts that shoot from his temples. When I ask why he’s a cattle farmer, he comes back with “Everybody wants to be a farmer, now don’t they?”
We’ve driven the short distance to where the breeders and calves are chomping away in what used to be the front yard of a farmhouse. The white, two-story Victorian is burned out, just barely standing. The animals seem not to notice our arrival. Calves, all born about two months ago, stand close to their mothers, who graze in one big group. As they bite and pull on the grass, the brown and black lines of their backs move like the lapping of waves in a pond. Their hides are slick against the curves of their stomachs. Digested grass shit lands in clumps at their feet. Tails swoosh and swat at flies. Knees crook and hooves kick out, then drop back heavily upon the ground. Deep eyes stare not at us, but languorously through us.
What happens on a grass-based livestock farm is relatively straightforward: the animals graze. As for what the cattle eat at Stone Broke, fifty different types of grasses carpet the Huse acreage including brome, rye, timothy, bird’s-foot trefoil, and white and red clovers. “Whatever naturally grows up here is what’s best,” David says. “I haven’t used fertilizer in ten years.” As for how the animals eat, the Huses have adopted a system called management-intensive grazing, popular among all-natural grass-fed meat farmers. Put simply, management-intensive grazing entails herding the cows to a new field each day and using portable electric fencing to keep them out of the previously munched area so the grass can regenerate. This method safeguards against overgrazing, which is what happens when ruminants—mammals such as cows that chew their cud—are left to their own devices. Since new shoots of many grasses are sweet and tender, cattle will return to nibble at the same spots, preventing the emerging leaves from fully growing. Fresh blades are what nourishes the root systems, so if they can’t form because of too much grazing (and the continuous traffic that compacts the soil), the grasses will suffer. Overgrazing has multiple ecological effects: It destroys ruminants’ primary source of food, forcing farmers to resort to feed, the most affordable of which is grown using polluting, irrigation-intensive industrial methods. And, as grasses die off, a cycle of degradation sets in. Opportunistic weeds begin to take over, and runoff and erosion increase,