By contrast, management-intensive grazing fosters a nutritive cycle whereby ruminants and their forage feed each other—with some gentle encouragement from the farmer. As cows eat, they move across the land distributing and planting grass seeds while fertilizing the soil with their poop. As the writer Michael Pollan puts it, “The coevolutionary relationship between cows and grass is one of nature’s underappreciated wonders.” The management-intensive husbandry comes in at this point to safeguard against overgrazing. Every day the Huses corral their beeves into a renewed paddock and pull up, then reinstall, the lightweight electric fencing. At Stone Broke it takes about three to four weeks for a field to rebound, then the cows are brought back for another feast.
When raised this way, cows become an impressively efficient way of turning grass into protein; the only energy source that’s needed is the sun. However, the situation isn’t so cut-and-dried. Even when they’re grass-fed, cows belch and fart a lot of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Methane is over twenty times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, and livestock including cattle account for about 18 percent of global methane emissions. While raising animals as the Huses do eliminates many of the fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, soil erosion, and toxic runoff that result from industrially grown cattle and the feed they rely on, it is not a panacea.
Later that afternoon, David’s father appears along the road. He wades a short distance into a parcel of land a few hundred feet from where the breeders and their calves are still drinking water. He summons them. I can’t hear his call, but from behind I see his torso moving from the effort. First one, then another of the animals looks up and begins to lumber over. The dark bodies now head toward him in a flock, V-shaped and slow. In the restored field the tips of summer grass feather up almost to the elder Huse’s shoulders.
The Huses didn’t always farm this way. Although they’ve used management-intensive grazing since the early 1980s, it wasn’t until about three years ago that they stopped relying as much on grain to feed and finish their livestock. And it wasn’t until then that the Huses ceased sending their animals for standard processing. Stone Broke used to sell its cattle to Moyer Packing Company, an old-school conventional plant in Pennsylvania. David tells me he liked working with Moyer, but things got rough after Smithfield Foods Company, now the fifth-largest beef processor in the United States, bought out the regional slaughterhouse in 2001. Almost immediately, the new corporate owner started lowering the prices it paid for cattle. Because of the rampant consolidation in the industry, the Huses were virtually held captive. By 2002 the family’s revenue from selling its beeves had dropped to 1972 levels. “When you let that concentration happen, you get put in a place where you take what they offer or you go somewhere else, but there’s nowhere else to go,” David tells me. He says part of why they decided to switch to organic methods was to access a more lucrative market. The Huses now earn more per pound; however, they rely strictly on Fleisher’s. “I’m shipping to one little butcher shop, and if he closes, I don’t know what I’d do,” David says. This year Stone Broke is hoping to break even. I ask what will happen if they don’t and he replies, “I could never do this if we had a mortgage payment.” He goes on, “My father’s retired and he has a pension. . . . I’m not crying poverty, it just hasn’t worked out the way I thought it would.”
Ironically, a major obstacle unconventional farms such as Windfall and Stone Broke face is the outcome of the very success of organic. As demand for all-natural food has expanded beyond a niche market, to keep costs down and stay competitive, most higher-volume retailers and processors have stopped buying inputs in small quantities. At Whole Foods’ first store in Austin, Texas, opened in 1980, much of the organic fruit and vegetables on offer were from local farmers. But as the organic industry has ventured into bigger markets, it’s become much more expensive to manage accounts with, say, twenty growers than it is with one large farm.
A 2007 study of small organic farmers in California illustrates the point. Some growers said they struggled to attract and keep middlemen because their volumes were too low. Whole Foods showed interest in the berries of one cultivator, but because he couldn’t provide two hundred cases a week, he lost the deal. Unable to find an organic buyer to work with, more than one grower ended up having to off-load organic crops as conventional at a considerable loss. Each of those surveyed eventually gave up organic production. Some stopped farming altogether, and others went back to conventional because it was easier to sell and therefore more profitable.
Building an appropriate distribution network isn’t the problem; the barriers lie in keeping it open to small producers. Alternative farmers and retailers from the first wave of the organic food movement in the United States created such a system. Established in the 1970s and 1980s, it consisted of small regional circuits that ran throughout New England and many other parts of the United States. Among the early dealers was Norman A. Cloutier, a health-food-store owner in Rhode Island. In the late 1970s, he started a distribution company, Cornucopia Natural Foods, Inc., and a few years later bought two key regional distributors in the Northeast. Over the ensuing decades Cornucopia aggressively pursued growth through a flurry of mergers and acquisitions of regional cooperatives and distribution outfits built up by small health food retailers and buyers’ groups. Today the company, now incorporated under the name United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI), is the leading handler of natural products nationwide. UNFI boasts over twenty thousand customers including Whole Foods and Sodexo U.S.A., a major food-service corporation that supplies hotels, restaurants, and institutions such as universities. According to Samuel Fromartz in Organic, Inc., UNFI’s “purchase of the last two natural-food-distribution cooperatives, Blooming Prairie in the Midwest, and Northeast Cooperatives in New England [in the early 2000s], marked the end of any alternative distribution network.” The need to stay competitive in the marketplace compelled UNFI to buy out smaller firms and shutter any regional distribution facilities it deemed redundant, whether or not these lines were crucial to small organic farmers.
I sit shotgun with Huse in a John Deere four-wheel, all-terrain buggy. The jerky ride takes us downhill through a field to where a few dozen one-year-old heifers are grazing. They are perched on a slope bordered by trees, the lower branches of which have been pruned by deer into a perfect line hovering just above the darkness of the grove.
Even though he raises his cattle strictly on grass, infrequently supplemented in small quantities with organic feed, Huse hasn’t bothered getting certified organic—none of the meat Fleisher’s sells carries the official seal. As with vegetable farms, the certification can cost hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars each year and involves piles of paperwork that eat up valuable work time. Also, like Morse Pitts and many other nonchemical, holistic farmers, the Huses and Applestones believe that as organic has gone mainstream, it’s been stripped of any real substance.
As we mingle with the cattle, Huse and Applestone talk shop, that is, about killing and butchering. (Huse imparts to me that some people believe this shouldn’t be done in front of animals destined for “harvesting.”) “Around here there’s a real bottleneck when it comes to slaughtering,” the farmer says. Stone Broke uses an abattoir that’s one of just two remaining regional facilities. There used to be eleven small houses around here, Huse explains, but in the last few years nine have shut their doors. This means it’s harder to get a slot for his animals, and processing costs are higher than ever.
Before the biggest firms consolidated the industry, Huse would pay twenty cents per pound to process a beeve, and, he says, “You’d give ’em the hide for the kill fee.” That would have meant a $160 outlay for an eight-hundred-pound animal. Now, for the same service, he must fork over about $500. By contrast, Huse tells me, it costs the commercial companies just $50 to kill and pack a head of beef at one of their industrial facilities. Processing fees are so much more at the local operations because there aren’t enough of them to meet demand, and each one handles far fewer animals than the mega-slaughterhouses. Compounding this, small slaughterhouses must pay disproportionately more to keep a shop that meets USDA specs.
According to Eric Shelley of the Meat Lab, “All the costs of running a slaughterhouse are basically the same whether you’re a small plant or a large plant. But if you’re a large plant, those costs get diffused, spread out.” Shelley tells me that small operators have to buy the same gear that the big places do, such