couple. Without discussion, Pitts consents.
The farm has six full-time workers whose starting pay is $7.50 an hour. A few of Pitts’s additional laborers, such as Kevin, who minds the farm stand, are volunteers. Pitts’s employee situation has gone through several configurations: early on he used interns, then local high school kids, then his sister Kathy brought in disabled people to work—“It wasn’t the right setting for them,” he tells me—then he went on to college kids from the nearby town of New Paltz, then Gonzalez arrived. Gonzalez, his brother and sister-in-law, and their relatives now fill many of the jobs on the farm.
At one point Windfall employed twenty-eight people, but the payroll taxes and workers’ compensation fees got to be too much. The only company in the area that offers workers’ compensation insurance once recommended to Pitts that he should stop farming organically because then he’d need fewer employees and that would lower his costs. Pitts sees the problem as being deeply embedded in current economic policy. “If you’re going to employ people here, the government will tax the hell out of you,” he says. “But if you employ slaves in China, they’ll reward you.” He also thinks agricultural policy is to blame: “Lots of little farms could meet the needs of the market. Why doesn’t this happen? Because the USDA thinks it’s good to stop farming, get people off the farm. This made sense during the Dust Bowl, but not anymore.”
Pitts tells me it can get tricky managing his employees—Gonzalez and his field hands are prone to working too hard, picking more than will sell at the farmers’ market. The extra labor drove his earnings down considerably last year. When I ask, Pitts tells me that in 2006, he earned about $7 an hour. That’s fifteen cents below New York State’s minimum wage. “It’s not a living, it’s a life,” he tells me. “You’re not gonna get rich, but you get to do what you love all day. And if you’re working on the farm, you’re not spending much money, so the money you make you can just put back into the farm. And believe me, the farm will gulp it all down.” Before leaving Windfall I ask Pitts how economically sustainable his farm is. “It’s basically not,” he says. “Anything can knock it over, it’s always hanging in the balance.”
STONE BROKE AND SWEET TREE
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
