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 as stainless steel equipment, and specific high-end stun guns, saws, and knives. He mentions one required knife that goes for $3,000. While it makes sense that anyone handling food should have the most professional tools, these industrial accoutrements may well exceed what a small facility will ever need. They also typically drive the cost of opening a USDA-approved plant well over a million dollars.
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
