The Lost Taste of Pork
Finding a New Place
for the Iowa Family Farm
Paul Willis raises about 2,500 hogs a year and cultivates about 600 acres of corn, soybeans, and oats just outside Thornton, Iowa, two hours north of Des Moines. Four hundred and seventy-five people live in Thornton, which is dominated by the grain elevators of the local farmers’ co-op. I stopped for toast and coffee at the Chit Chat I (the check came to $1.06), where at the late hour of 9:30 the only customers still lingering were a table of retired farmers. Iowa produces a sea of grain, and much of it is fed to pigs. The state has been the biggest pork producer in the country for a hundred years or more. Paul Willis is making money, but overall the Iowa family pig farm is in deep trouble, and most of the farms won’t survive. Even the taste of pork has changed in the last ten years because almost all pigs have been bred to be lean. Rubbery is the best word to describe the pork; the flavor is bland, so the texture stands out. Occasionally in the supermarket, you can still find some marbled, more tender, and tasty pork, but most is as lean and characterless as factory-chicken breast. The lean meat is almost impossible to cook without making it dry and tough, and, no matter what, the new pork will never taste very good because it isn’t marbled with fat.
By Edward Behr
Fresh pork was probably never fashionable in ambitious American restaurants. Maybe it doesn’t cost enough; it’s much less than beef, since pigs cost less to raise than cattle. But last January at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, I ate a thick chop that had been cut from a loin roasted before a wood fire. I thought immediately that it was the best pork I’d ever eaten — tender and somewhat fatty, though you could avoid most of the fat if you wanted. Someone was raising delicious pork, and his name was on the menu, although I didn’t pay attention. Months later, I discovered the farmer was Paul Willis. He doesn’t sell to the commodity market. Instead, he manages a small group of producers whose pork ends up in a specialty niche, which was based at first almost entirely on restaurants.
None of my Eastern prejudices prepared me for the charm of Iowa. Most of the land rolls, and in early summer it was lush and green. There are individual trees and even patches of woods, but much of the land is solid cropland — at the top of any roll, you can see for miles. Somewhere in the distance is an elevator. Here and there are barns, silos, and modest farmhouses, making nostalgic pictures from an idyllic America. The silos are empty as a rule, left from the days when almost every farm milked a few cows.
I arrived at Paul Willis’s farm in early July. Actually, following the gravel road, I came first to the farm of his stepfather, Oscar Floy, whose land Willis now farms. That’s where Willis keeps most of his pigs. Floy is a strong supporter of his stepson’s way of farming. “It doesn’t foul up the environment” is a small beginning to what he has to say. Floy pointed me toward the spot where Willis was working. The pigs are held in by a single strand of electric wire just a foot off the ground. Floy explicitly warned me, but nonetheless I tripped over the first wire I came to, in one of the spots where the wire is pushed close to the ground so a tractor or pickup can drive over it
Willis and the hired man were rounding up a few pigs and loading them on a truck. It was my third day in Iowa, and, except for one or two pigs raised by a family for its own use, Willis’s were the first I’d seen. As recently as the 1980s, most pigs in Iowa were raised outdoors, and a few farmers continue that. But almost all pigs are now raised indoors, often on big corporate farms. Willis is a slight man who was wearing a straw hat and bib overalls, and after 20 years of farming his hair is still blond, free of gray. He started with one sow and five pigs. (His wife, Phyllis, later told me they’d bought their first new car just this year.) Willis does much of the work himself. Besides the hired man, an aspiring young farmer who owns one group of pigs, there is only summer help from high school kids.
Willis and I walked through the 20-acre pasture below Oscar Floy’s barn. The pasture is divided into 14 sections, each with about 125 pigs. Scattered through the pasture are small, utilitarian shelters — corrugated-steel “Port-a-Huts” and wooden A-frames, each big enough for a sow and her litter. The huts are where the sows farrow — give birth. Inside a number of huts, on a layer of straw, I saw tiny pink piglets, some of them just hours old, jostle each other to suckle the teats of a vast, ugly, inert sow, on her side and covered with dried mud. Two sows had built their nests in the open, pulling apart round bales of straw and giving birth there. Willis would have to drag a hut to them and place it over the newborns to protect them from the sun. The offspring are three-way crosses: most have various spots; some are all white, all black, or all red-brown, and a few are faintly striped lengthwise, like young wild boars.
Willis has a lot to say about pigs, about changing methods of farming, and about the state of agriculture in his part of the country. He speaks strongly but quietly, and he pauses. “Grass is cooler,” he said, “keeps the dust down, and seems to be healthier for the pigs.” In spring, the pasture is dense with grasses, clovers, and other legumes, he explained, and gradually the pigs eat all but some tough-looking grasses that they find unpalatable. In low spots, the pigs had churned puddles into mud, and some had packed themselves into it to cool off. During a hot, dry spell, the watering devices are set to run continuously so the pigs can make mud. Pigs perspire only through their snouts, so they need shade and they enjoy mud. The prairie soil between the rows of soybeans next to the pasture is a rich blue-black, porous and crumbly because it is filled with organic matter.
The biggest pigs, nearing 250 pounds and almost ready for market, had been moved to two hoophouses that looked like updated Quonset huts, about 30 feet wide and 20 feet tall, made of strong opaque plastic stretched over galvanized steel arches. The hoophouses were lined with thick straw and cornstalk bedding. Willis puts up 500 to 600 round bales of oat straw, soybean straw, and cornstalks each year. In winter, he moves the farrowing huts into the hoophouses, so the sows have a warm place to give birth. Otherwise, pigs are happy to play in the snow.
Rather than rely on artificial insemination, Willis keeps ten boars. “I call it a cheap hired man — I mean, that’s what boars do.” The sows that had been bred to produce the next batch of pigs were in a barn and lot that Willis rents from a neighbor because there isn’t enough space at Oscar Floy’s. There would be room in the pasture, though, by the time the first sows were ready to farrow in late summer. Willis shoveled corn from a tall, new farm wagon, tossing it in an arc to the dozens of sows below. All the chewing at once sounded like running water.
Corn, oats, and soybeans, besides being good feed for pigs, make a useful five-year crop rotation together with the legume-grass hay that becomes the next year’s pasture. Like other nearby farmers, Willis sells these crops to the Thornton Farmers’ Co-op, which is associated in turn with Land o’ Lakes (the same as the butter), a huge Midwestern co-op made of local co-ops. Willis buys the starter feed for the piglets from the local co-op, and for the rest of the pigs, he generally grinds his own corn and combines that with soy meal from the co-op and a “premix” of salt, vitamins, and minerals. None of this feed contains animal byproducts, such as bone meal and grease, a potentially dangerous mainstream feeding practice that could spread disease. “One of the biggest problems was to get the animal byproducts out of the feed,” Willis explained. It’s not that the pigs won’t eat them. “Pigs are omnivores,” he said.
Standing in the pasture among the pigs, I had a feeling of well-being, even after watching Willis castrate day-old piglets. All around was green, except the immediate spots where the pigs had stripped the pasture to dirt. Since the land has few trees, the breeze blew steadily, as it used to do across the prairie. There was little or no rank odor, depending on just where you stood or put your foot. (Willis never seemed to watch the ground, but unlike me he never stepped in manure.) In the pasture, the manure falls where it may and starts to decay, and later it is plowed under. In a smaller space, pigs establish a separate “dunging” area, unless they are really crammed together. They are naturally clean, apart from a liking for mud.
Once, nearly all Iowa was tall-grass prairie, before it was plowed. The deep, black, rich soil is some of the best in the United States. Rainfall is normally sufficient and usefully concentrated in spring and summer. “There’s a lot of prairie enthusiasts around here,” Willis said as we drove in his pickup to see a rare untouched 40-acre tract of native prairie, owned by his friend Daryl Kothenbuetal. “It was just a real rough piece of ground.” Too rocky to plow. An intact prairie, Kothenbuetal said, contains 200 to 240 different species of plants.
Pork used to be a “mortgage lifter” for Iowa farmers. Prices would go up and down, but in the end hogs were a sure thing. (The difference between a “hog” and a “pig,” as near as I can tell, is that you raise a “pig” and you market a “hog.” ) The day before I met Willis, however, a top employee of a major Des Moines packinghouse told me what I was beginning to hear on all sides, “It’s going to be a struggle for the small producer to make money ever again.” Overproduction, coming from huge new operations, had driven prices well below the cost of production. Willis said, “I think a few big corporations are vying for position.” Family farmers can’t compete, not if they sell on the commodity market.
According to the USDA agricultural census, taken every five years, almost half of Iowa’s pork producers quit between 1992 and 1997, while the number of pigs rose by 21∕2 percent. The farms got a lot bigger — the 320 biggest farms averaged more than 13,000 pigs — and there were more absentee owners. The biggest producers — Murphy, Smithfield (Carroll’s Foods), Cargill, Iowa Select, Heartland — have vast amounts of capital, and they benefit from economies of scale, so they can stand a long period of low prices. Many of the family farmers who continue are badly in debt. Some have followed conventional advice to get bigger, and they have put up the expensive buildings needed for indoor production. To do that, they borrow a lot of money and lock into a long-term contract with one of the big operations.
According to Alan Vontalge, an Iowa State University agricultural economist, the capital expense will be repaid, but there is no potential for ever making much profit. He and his colleagues look at monthly figures. From January 1991 to October 1997, Iowa farmers made an average of just over $5.60 profit on every hog sold. Recently, they have lost an average of $24 per hog. “The last nineteen months have wiped out the previous 82 months.”
Driving north along Interstate 35 to see Paul Willis, I had seen a hand-painted sign: “Murphy Hogs Go Home.” Murphy, from North Carolina, is the biggest producer in the US. At the town of Jewell, I had switched to highway 69 in order to see some of the big indoor operations close up. “Modern Hog Concepts” said the plaques on one set of metal buildings. There wasn’t much to see. All activity was hidden indoors. No pasture. The most impressive thing was the smell. Farther on were 18 enormous, identical buildings side by side. Even when I got to the Willises’, the names on the galvanized feeders in the pasture seemed to tell a story. The old ones were blazoned: “Pride of the Farm.” Newer ones said: “Waste Watcher.”
At that moment in early July, packers were paying producers 29 cents a pound, but last year on average, according to Iowa State University figures, it cost a farmer 37 cents to produce a pound of pork. Paul Willis’s group of family farmers is guaranteed at least 431∕2 cents, live weight, delivered to Des Moines. “That probably doesn’t mean a lot to you,” he said, “but a farmer can make a little money.”
On the Willises’ answering machine, you hear Paul’s wife saying, “This is the Willis Free-Range Pig Farm,” which makes it sound innovative. But Paul Willis merely raises pigs the way many Iowa farmers did as recently as six or seven years ago. What’s special is that the Willises have escaped the commodity market and found a way to sell humanely raised, marbled pork. Paul now manages a group of farmers, 36 at the time of my visit, who raise tender, rich pork for restaurants and a growing retail trade. The pigs are fed no animal byproducts, and they receive no subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics, which are a matter of course and perhaps necessity in the big indoor operations. If Willis needs to treat an animal with drugs, then later, when it is healthy and market size, he sells it on the commodity market.
Phyllis Willis, Paul’s wife, is warm and outgoing with a sense of fun. She pronounces her name to acknowledge the rhyme. “Paul and I both enjoy animals,” she said to me. “I love pigs.” She explained that she is a traditional housewife who cooks and cleans and, with great pleasure, takes care of the chickens. The Willises’ two grown daughters live not far away. Phyllis Willis takes a strong interest in liberal politics, she said, and by nature she is outspoken, which gets her into trouble. Speaking of the indoor pig-raising methods, she said meaningfully, “I don’t want to say anything.” And she visibly, and seemingly unavoidably, shuddered. She would have spoken her full mind, I’m sure, but Paul was there, and he had already delivered much of the message.
The three of us sat at the kitchen table eating a delicious lunch of porkburgers, new beets and beet greens, boiled potatoes, and salad, with store-bought Iowa white bread. “We’re in a bread desert,” Phyllis said. She loves to cook, and a few weeks before she hadn’t been intimidated when a Chez Panisse chef and a San Francisco restaurant critic came to dinner. The phone rang and Paul got up to answer. He came back a few minutes later, saying, “Another young guy, desperate, from Scotland, North Dakota: ‘How soon can I get in on this?’”
Marble, rubber, and the changing pig
Much of the pork problem turns on the changing pig, which began to diverge from the wild boar when the first pig was domesticated 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. The Eurasian wild boar, to give it its proper name, has a proportionately bigger head, a long snout, and two small tusks; its wiry body is covered with black hair. The meat is never marbled. (Nonetheless, it is admired everywhere that wild boar live. It smells like pork when it cooks, but the taste to me partly recalls lamb.) Early pigs were lean and long-legged; they grazed for much of their food and were often tended by a swineherd. Slowly, in some places, pigs became rounder and fatter. But in Western countries, progress was slow until the early 19th century, when English breeds — the source of American breeds — were crossed with meatier and fatter pigs from China. Fat was good. “Meat” meant both fat and lean. Most pork was salted, and lard was important in cooking.
At the turn of the last century, Joseph Harris, founder of the Harris Seed Co., wrote a masterly book called Harris on the Pig. He said, “The aim of all breeders of animals designed solely for meat, is to have the body approximate as closely as possible to the form of a parallelopiped. In proportion to the size, an animal of this form contains the greatest weight.” Harris’s rectangle gave more of the most desirable cuts, and it was filled out by fat, including the cheeks. “The broader and deeper the cheeks,” Harris said, “the better, as next to the ham and shoulder there is no choicer meat on a pig. A well-cooked cheek of bacon, with roast chicken, is a dish for an epicure.” He admired a breeder in England who was said “to have formed a breed of pigs that, when fat, were ‘nearly equal in height, length, and thickness, their bellies almost touching the ground, the eyes being deep set and sunk from fat, and the whole carcass appearing to be a solid mass of flesh.”
“Are our hogs too fat?” Harris asked. And he answered: “A very large proportion of our hogs are fed by those who kill them for use in their own families. If they prefer fat hogs, they feed longer or on richer food, and if thin hogs, they can kill earlier [as all packers do today]. They have the matter in their own hands. As a rule, when we have little corn and thin hogs, there are less cheerful faces in the kitchen. The most skillful cook cannot get along without lard. The fatter the hog, the more lard and the more doughnuts, fish-balls, croquettes, Saratoga potatoes, apple pies and flakey pastry.” And, he added, “If those who buy hogs want thin ones, let them manifest their preference by paying more for thin pork than for fat pork, and they will soon get what they want.
During the 1990s in the US, packers have paid more for lean, and they have gotten leaner pigs. The move to lean occurred in a number of countries. The US pork industry watched beef consumption tumble downward, while chicken consumption more than doubled. Pork was holding steady, but it was clear to producers that pork should be identified with chicken. Packers began to pay farmers by “percent lean,” determined by measuring the thickness of fat on the back, which more or less indicates the amount of marbling within. (When the outer fat was thick and in demand, it was sold as fatback. There’s no fatback today.) The pork producers advertised their lean pork as another, generic “white meat,” and consumers ended up with bland, rubbery pork.
Instead of Joseph Harris’s rectangle, the present pig is long and rounded, swelling a bit from its snout to large loins and hams. The complicated muscles of the shoulder bring a lower price, and the cheeks have lost all prestige. The pig’s body is plastic because its genetic base remains wide and generations turn over rapidly. A sow gives birth to about ten young twice a year.
But the lost marbling in pork tasted good, just as it does in beef. Fat is the main source of meat flavor, it gives an impression of juiciness, and it indicates tenderness, though there’s not a direct cause-and-effect relationship. When you cook lean pork, it generally becomes dry and tough. But even when you overcook marbled pork, as nearly every American does for fear of trichinosis, or when you hold the cooked meat for a time before serving it, as chefs sometimes do, then marbled pork is much more forgiving. “Personally, I think we went way too far,” a meat scientist at the National Pork Producers Council told me. The technical brochures of the Pork Council make clear that consumers prefer the taste of marbled pork (just enough fat to be visible, about 2 to 3 percent within the lean). They also like darker color, which is tied to more juicy and tender meat. All those qualities are determined first by breeding and then by feed. In addition, a conscientious producer and packer minimizes the effects of stress — fear — that pigs feel at the time of trucking and slaughter. It is well known in the industry that stress affects meat flavor and texture.
Pork is economical because pigs make especially efficient use of feed. A pig weighs three pounds at birth and weighs 260 pounds at slaughter, just five and a half to six months later. The loin has reached a marketable size and is, or was, marbled by fat. But fat isn’t tied perfectly to taste. “Sometimes without the marbling you’ll still have a real good eating quality,” Willis told me. “We really don’t have all the answers on that.”
The breeding strategy and the breeds themselves remain remarkably similar to what they were in Joseph Harris’s time. Chester White, Yorkshire, and American Landrace are the top white breeds, which are chosen for sows because they reproduce well and make good mothers, providing plenty of milk. Boars come from the red and black breeds known for meat — Duroc, Berkshire, Hampshire, Spotted Poland. (A lard breed like Gloucestershire Old Spots has been so far given up that it is on the “critical” list of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.) A farmer might start by crossing a Chester White sow with a Duroc boar, and then cross the offspring with another red or black breed known for meat. The crosses give hybrid vigor. For now, fortunately, some small companies continue to supply farmers with pure-bred stock that has old-fashioned marbled meat.
Oscar Floy, Paul Willis’s stepfather (his father died when Willis was young), has a voice that even over the phone sounds as if he were smiling. I asked, Is Paul raising pigs the way you did? “Yeah, un huh, sure. He’s basically doing it the way my generation was taught. It generally came out of Ames [site of Iowa State University]. Their veterinarians came out and told us about putting them on clean ground, rotating the pasture, worming them, and giving them air.” Air? “Your instinct is to seal all the cracks in the barn, but you’ve gotta open up the doors and give them air, without letting a draft on them. Those are the things they taught us.” And Willis’s techniques are nearly the same — “basically to keep the hogs healthy, along with some refinements.”
But farmers used to keep fewer pigs. Floy raised just 200 hogs a year. “We had everything for a while — we had cows and chickens and pigs. It was a pretty good system. If one thing didn’t pay enough, the other would pick up. The lady of the house would take care of the chickens. (Papa cleaned up the chicken house.) That would give her money to take care of food for the family, the things she would buy for the house, some clothes for her, and pin money. She had a garden, too. It was a full-time job for her. And she was watching the kids,” he said. The biggest, surest income came at the end of the year from selling the hogs. “That’s why they were known as ‘mortgage lifters.’” But from the time of the Second World War, there wasn’t enough hired labor available, and so Floy dropped first the cows and hay, then other animals, and finally the pigs. “We just got down to raising the corn and soybeans.”
“That’s how it evolved. My neighbors, too. You didn’t have much money, but it wasn’t a bad life.” Farmers did a lot of the harvest work together. “You’d go from neighbor to neighbor with a thrashing rig; the same with a corn sheller.” And the pork? “Then it was fattier. They used to show a picture of a fat hog, and he was round as a barrel.” But demand for lard dropped, and by the 1940s Iowa farmers were selecting and breeding leaner pigs.
Each family slaughtered the pigs for the pork that was eaten at home. “We always butchered our own,” Floy said, “even in the days before we had [freezer] lockers in town. Before that, my mother would can up pork. Butchery time was March, when it was cool… you’d leave the meat to chill overnight in the corn crib.” Before the days of canning meat, his mother would “cook it and put it up in big stoneware jars, and pour lard over it.” First the meat was salted. “Then she got modern and she got a canning outfit. And then we got the lockers in town. This was before we had electricity on the farm; after that, we had our own deep freezes.”
Floy wanted to talk about the indoor hog operations that began to spread in the 1970s, including one belonging to a nephew, which he visited. “He does a good job.” Nonetheless: “Oh, they stink. God never made that kind of a smell. They mix water with hog manure and urine — God never made that kind of a stink.” When Floy came home, the smell in his clothes was so strong that he thought of throwing them away.
The new indoor confinement
The new skinny pigs need different treatment on the farm. Since pigs don’t have fur, they need fat to stay outdoors in winter, and the new breeding for lean has left them without fat and fragile. They don’t do well outdoors. The large operations with lean pigs use indoor “confinement,” which essentially applies the logic of raising factory chickens to raising pigs. That’s bad with chickens and maybe worse with pigs. As you can tell after spending five minutes with them in a pasture, pigs deserve much better. They trot off to a safe distance from strangers, and immediately they turn around and study you curiously. Gradually they move back. They are friendly and smart; that’s part of the tragedy of the slaughter. Big pork might face a serious image problem if its methods were widely known. They aren’t what you want to think about when you eat.
Many of the buildings have no windows; ventilation is provided by powerful fans. The ammoniac stench of liquid pig manure, stronger than cow manure, permeates the atmosphere. Pregnant sows are held in individual pens behind metal bars — “gestation stalls,” too narrow to allow exercise. They chew the bars neurotically. From there, they go into “farrowing crates.” Feed is carefully controlled. Tails are routinely removed because pigs under stress may chew each other’s tails off. Manure falls through slatted or perforated floors and is flushed regularly into sometimes-vast manure “lagoons.” Division of labor means the work is less skilled than in the past, and an article in The Des Moines Register last fall described high employee turnover from these low-quality jobs, along with health problems arising from breathing gases and dust. The health problems are new, so they haven’t been fully studied.
The more automated methods of confinement allow one person to handle more pigs, so labor costs are lower. An individual farmer trying this may have shorter hours and more time for his or her family. But neighbors of the bigger operations object strongly to the smell, and the watery manure in the “lagoons,” held back by earthen dams, has repeatedly spilled. In North Carolina in the 1990s, the biggest manure spill entered the Neuse River and notoriously killed a billion fish. Dr. JoAnne Burkholder of North Carolina State University identified a highly toxic organism, Pfiesteria piscicida, related to the creatures that cause red tides. The organism thrives in the presence of extremely high levels of nutrients such as the nitrogen and phosphorus from manure.
“Those buildings are a public health hazard,” said Paul Willis. “You’re talking about air pollution, water pollution, antibiotics, superbugs.” Unlike the sows in confinement, he said, his sows have no problems such as mastitis that would require treatment with antibiotics. He finds that a sow with some fat, kept outdoors, will grow even when she is providing a heavy supply of milk to a large litter. But a lean sow producing that much milk “falls apart,” he said, because she wasn’t bred to be robust and she lacks the good health that comes with living outdoors. Even if you put the lean sow out in a pasture, she won’t do well.
Willis blames Iowa State University for having promoted factory farming and large-scale production in the past. Around Thornton, only five farmers are left who raise pigs the way he does, and they all belong to his group of producers. Of the rest, “some just plain quit.” A few put up one or two small confinement buildings, but only for pigs that they buy at 40 pounds and raise to market weight. (Yet the point of confinement is to have the advantages of large scale and to provide the big corporations with a large, steady supply under their control.) I discovered that Willis’s views on confinement have two tracks. He had no word of criticism for any neighbor who had put up small confinement buildings, which he merely pointed out as we drove past. He was quiet, I think, out of respect for difficult decisions and from a sense of loyalty to family farmers. Maybe he understands the urge to keep on farming even when the odds are against you.
Willis sounded like an old prairie populist when he said that the big producers and packers are turning Iowa into a banana republic, running the small farmers out of business and hiring them back “to work on the plantation.” Is there anything good about confinement? “No, there really isn’t,” he answered. “What these are is animal factories.” But doesn’t confinement production reduce a farmer’s long hours? “On a nice beautiful June day, I’m outdoors, and they’re in a stinking confinement building.”
Letting pigs be pigs
A lot of the more natural methods for raising pigs result from research in Sweden, which banned confinement methods in 1988. An ethologist named Per Jensen and other scientists theorized that the stress of confinement resulted from frustrating the pigs’ instincts. So they released domestic pigs into the forest to see how they would behave in the wild environment of their ancestors. The pigs’ instincts were intact. Film captured the social behavior of the group, the running and playing, the rooting for food, and each sow going off by herself to build a nest — scratching out a hollow in the earth, shaping the nest with sticks, and lining it with soft grasses and ferns. (Willis saw a video of this work several years ago, and he told me, “A light bulb went on in my head. I thought, ‘This is what I’m doing, and now I know why.’” ) Using this new knowledge, the scientists developed practical outdoor and indoor farm settings that would enable pigs to follow their instincts. More recently, the United Kingdom also banned raising pigs in close confinement.
Mark Honeyman of Iowa State University specializes in three “alternative swine production systems.” One is the old outdoor way of farrowing sows in huts; another method starts with pigs at 50 pounds and raises them to market weight in hoophouses using deep bedding; and the third is a Swedish method of raising pigs indoors but providing deep bedding and using other techniques borrowed from the outdoor methods — no close confinement. The bedding is deep so the pigs can root through it and so composting will start underneath and provide warmth in winter. The farmer adds fresh straw or corn stalks regularly to the top, eventually bringing the depth to as much as four feet. In theory, the surface is dry so there is little odor, but the two other Thornton farms I visited with Willis fell short of that. (He was mildly embarrassed; the farmers weren’t home, and he would find a tactful way to speak to them later.) When the pigs are gone, the manure and bedding are spread over the fields as rich fertilizer. Honeyman says that production costs with the alternative methods are the same as or less than those of confinement. Raising pigs either indoors with deep bedding or outdoors requires more labor and skill, but there’s a big saving on buildings and equipment.
The alternative methods do require “keener husbandry skills.” The farmer must observe the animals for signs of illness or distress, of a sow that is about to farrow, of discomfort in midsummer heat, of a need for more bedding or feeder space. For decades, American farmers have tried to take more and more control of nature — to “steamroll it,” Honeyman said — rather than learn from nature and cooperate with it. He didn’t blame his academic colleagues, though for years scientists at agricultural universities have concentrated on providing the tools for controlling nature. American agriculture has been consumer-driven, Honeyman said, but the consumers have been the farmers themselves who are sold products — buildings, machinery, agricultural chemicals, drugs — to solve problems. Now Honeyman and others are exploring methods that anticipate and avoid many problems altogether.
Paul Willis linked his outdoor methods to flavor. “If something tastes good,” he said, “I think it reflects the health of whatever it is you’re eating. Allowing the pig to behave as naturally as possible is enhancing the eating quality.”
More food in Iowa
Driving through Iowa, you might almost think the state food was pizza. But along with the various kinds of fast food, you are struck by the many cafes, steak places, and supper clubs, as if you’d been transported 30 years into the past. A shining exception to the rule is Bistro 43 in Des Moines, which serves Iowa pork from Berkshire hogs raised on family farms. The restaurant’s menu even credits the farmer who grows the organic salad greens. The Field to Family project of the nonprofit Practical Farmers of Iowa, promotes direct links between farmers and restaurant and retail customers. (PFI, which mainly conducts on-farm research of sustainable agricultural practices, was started by farmers and belatedly embraced by Iowa State University.) Gary Huber, co-director of the Field to Family project, introduced me to several outstanding Iowa growers.
Larry Cleverley, grower of those organic salad greens at Bistro 43, is an energetic, easygoing man with long, loose gray hair. He cultivates five acres of vegetables in Mingo, Iowa, on what was once his grandparents’ farm. He started just three years ago, when he sold 50 pounds of greens in his best week. Last spring, he was up to as many as 400 pounds of greens and 200 pounds of potatoes a week. “I didn’t have a timetable, but I wouldn’t have imagined doing this much business ever.” He grows thirteen kinds of potatoes — “Iowans love their potatoes” — and 10,000 heads of hard-necked (rocambole-type) German Porcelain garlic, which makes him the biggest garlic grower in the state. His favorite tomato: “Oh, I like Brandywines.” Some of Cleverley’s heirloom vegetable varieties come from the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, in northeastern Iowa. He worked for eight years in business in Chicago and then 16 years in New York. When he thought of returning to Iowa, he noticed that Des Moines restaurants had evolved to the point of serving arugula and mesclun. ( “When I was growing up, herbs were salt and pepper and bacon.” ) In the summer before he left New York, he worked every weekend at the stand of a farmer selling produce at the 97th Street Greenmarket.
At the Des Moines farmers’ market, to encourage customers to buy unfamiliar items, Cleverley hands out recipes and cooks up samples in a wok set on a portable grill. “Iowans aren’t going to buy escarole unless you sauté it up with oil and garlic and finish it with a little white wine or a squeeze of lemon.” He added parenthetically, “In New York, marketing was all I knew.” Beth Jaeger, Larry’s wife, has her own career, but she sells beside him at the big Saturday farmers’ market. Des Moines customers rise early. When I met her, she was impressed with the rush that had occurred that morning at 7 am. Beth answered a salad question. A few days before I left home, I had noticed that when I picked greens from my garden and ate them within a few hours, they had much more flavor than they did the next day, when the taste was more neutral. “Did you wash them right away? It’s the washing,” Beth said. Larry agreed. They sell their greens rinsed and, for restaurants, fully washed, but they tell customers if they want top quality, they shouldn’t wash greens until the day they will be served.
Bruce Smith is a long-time market gardener. He is an unusually tall man, who is straightforward when he talks and helpful, open, and welcoming to strangers — typical Iowan characteristics, as I realized by the time I met him. Smith raises his produce on the farm in Jewell where his wife, Laurinda, grew up. About 30 hog confinement operations have sprung up within a two-mile radius. The Smiths aren’t happy about that, though it was hard to think of the neat buildings as threatening on a clear, quiet summer day, when no one was handling manure and raising a stink. Bruce Smith and I toured the ten acres that he cultivates with help from only his wife, who works part-time at the university, and their daughter, Jenn, and son, Nick. Bruce explained his choice of career, saying, “I’ve always loved that tired, achy feeling: ‘Man, I’ve really done a day’s work.’” The Smiths emphasize green beans but altogether raise 70 to 80 different vegetables in more than 200 varieties. Some are Asian vegetables in demand in the university town of Ames. “We live by e-mail,” Smith said. It frees him from the phone. Every day he sends out a list of what’s available, and stores and restaurants send orders back.
Judy and Dean Henry and their son Mike cultivate 30 acres of pick-your-own fruit in Nevada, Iowa, near Ames. They began their business, called the Berry Patch, in 1973. The biggest crop is strawberries, but they also grow raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, rhubarb, currants, gooseberries, asparagus, apples ( “Jonathan is Iowa’s favorite apple,” Dean said) and hardy sour cherries, including the classic Montmorency. They do all this work with limited outside help. Besides selling at the farm, the Henrys sell at half a dozen farmers’ markets around Ames. Dean Henry is a serious fruit grower who raises multiple varieties of everything, including gooseberries that had turned reddish and tasted remarkably spicy. “When I first started here, Iowans didn’t know what blueberries were,” Dean Henry said. “They’d say, ‘What are those, little grapes?’” He’s an Iowan himself. Until a couple of years ago, the Henrys also raised a few pigs and sold the pork at retail. They miss the taste.
Finding a way to make a living on pork: Niman Ranch (again)
In 1993, when many farmers in Iowa were giving up on pigs or turning to confinement, Paul Willis was still selling his hogs to conventional packinghouses. He had served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, and that year he was in California visiting old Peace Corps friends, who were raising lamb and selling it to Niman Ranch. Best known for dry-aged beef, Niman is a network of ranches and farms that raise high-quality, marbled meat using humane methods. It started as a one-ranch beef producer, and it still does all the final grain-feeding of cattle at its own two California ranches (see A of E 47). But the business has grown, and its offices and a “processing” facility are now located in Oakland. Willis learned about Niman Ranch when he was staying with his California friends. He went to San Francisco, where the offices then were, and introduced himself to Bill Niman, one of the company’s two founders. Niman remembers, “He said that he’s a pig farmer in Iowa, and that he was in the Peace Corps with our lamb producers.” Willis described his farming methods and pork. “I told him, ‘I don’t know if I’d be interested. I think we have the best pork in the world right now.’” It was raised outdoors in California. Willis returned home and sent Niman some chops — not fresh but frozen. Yet they were so clearly superior that Bill Niman dropped the California producer and switched to Willis.
Niman Ranch now sells pork to restaurants, some independent stores and supermarkets, and the California supermarkets of the Whole Foods health food-gourmet chain. (The pork appears under the “Whole Foods” rather than “Niman Ranch” label; you have to ask to be sure.) When the chain switched to Niman pork, its sales of pork rose 50 percent, and the only apparent explanation was better taste. Whole Foods will gradually introduce the pork into its Middle Atlantic stores, called Fresh Fields, beginning in late summer. It was demand from Whole Foods that enabled a total of 36 farms, most in Iowa but a few in other states, to produce pork for Niman Ranch. Fifty more farms are on a waiting list. An enthusiastic young Niman employee named Rob Hurlbut had been looking for an opportunity to expand the business in a new direction. He took charge of the Oakland end of the pork project. The meat is always marbled, and, Hurlbut says, the company takes a loin chop from every shipment from every farm and grills the chop to be sure the taste meets Niman standards. The Niman Ranch Pork Co. is owned half by the original Niman Ranch company and half by the pig farmers who participate. (Buying in is easy on the farmers: with each delivery of a hog the farmer contributes a dollar per hundredweight and Niman contributes a dollar.) Hurlbut expresses the reasonable Niman view on eating fat and on eating meat in general: “Eat less, but eat better.” That’s not going to win widespread popularity among Iowa farmers, but so far Niman is the best thing happening to family pig farms.
Since skilled butchers have largely disappeared from the US, and since most restaurants want meat already cut into individual portions, Niman has hired and trained 16 butchers to work in the Oakland plant. Most stores that carry Niman pork have only the loin and spare ribs. Other cuts have to be ordered directly. Unfortunately, for now you can’t get ears, rind, and tails for simmered oreilles, couennes, et queues, as in Lyon, but you can get the more practical caul (the veil of fat surrounding the stomach) for wrapping various meat mixtures, such as for grilling and sautéing. The main thing missing is suckling pig, although Niman does offer young, 50- to 100-pound “roasters.”
Paul Willis brought one more thing to the table — an enthusiastic endorsement by the Animal Welfare Institute in Washington, D.C., which has now given its approval to the humane methods of all Niman farmers and ranchers. The AWI, a pragmatic group, worked with farmers to produce a list of simple criteria, largely to do with space and bedding, that are kind to pigs and represent good husbandry. Diane Halverson, who is in charge of the AWI’s work on behalf of pigs, grew up on a small Minnesota dairy farm where, besides cows, there were pigs and other animals. The AWI rules are so far from fanatic that there is not even a requirement that animals have access to pasture. But large-scale factory farming is expressly prohibited: “Each farm shall be a family farm, that is, an individual or family member must do all of the following: (a) own the hogs; (b) depend on the farm for [his or her] livelihood; (c) provide the major part of the daily labor to physically manage the hogs and the rest of the farm operation.”
It was Paul Willis who linked superior taste, environmentally sound methods, and humane practices with a discriminating market willing to pay a premium for good pork so that farmers could earn a decent living. And so far Niman Ranch is the only significant alternative to the commodity market. Why Paul Willis? He knew that if he was going to keep on farming the way he wanted to, he had to find a new market. He knew, too, that San Francisco was receptive to well-raised, healthful foodstuffs with superior flavor. “But I didn’t know how to approach it. I probably was looking for five years before I found anything.” The Peace Corps experience, he explained, gave him “a network of people all over the country. It broadens your perspective, and maybe gives you some more imagination.” As he spoke, he seemed caught between his reluctance to appear at all self-flattering or critical of others and his sense of the obligation to give straightforward, honest answers to questions. An Iowan dilemma.
Yet sometimes to talk with Willis, you might think that next to nothing had been accomplished. “Ed,” he said to me at one point, speaking of the Niman Ranch effort, “It’s a desperate situation. This is the only way people are going to be able to keep on farming.” The drama for him is whether Niman can expand into new markets fast enough and take on more farmers before they have to quit. “A lot of them are going to go broke.” Phyllis told me she thought that she and Paul should cut back some of their own production, which would reduce their income, to make a little more room for farmers on the edge.
Paul said, “The brand represents a network of producers doing sustainable raising of hogs using our standards — the Animal Welfare guidelines. My goal is to be big enough that anyone who wants to raise pork in this way, we could market their pork as Niman Ranch brand.” He also said, “It’s still a way a young person without very much money can get started in farming.” Really what he wants is to save both the decent old way of raising pigs and the traditional family farm.
Getting too big?
As I heard about Niman Ranch expansion, I realized that Willis and the company were wide open to growing as much as possible. It seems logical to me that Niman Ranch brand meats might someday appear in regular supermarkets, the way “Certified Angus Beef” does now. I –wondered whether the company could become too large to uphold its standards.
Yet the Midwestern family farmers waiting to join Niman are experienced pork producers, familiar with the superior old methods, and they represent substantial production and acreage. Potentially, there is a vast supply of high-quality pork. To be sure standards are met, Bill Niman would like to establish a separate Niman Ranch slaughterhouse.
There’s more than one niche market, I remarked to Tom Frantzen, an Iowa farmer who sells to Niman and has also found a buyer for organic hogs. “It’s still doggone tiny,” he said. “If you look at the hogs in both markets, it’s still microscopically tiny.” The organic buyer takes a dozen hogs a week; Niman at that moment was buying 300 hogs a week. Altogether, according to a knowledgeable packer, 225,000 hogs are slaughtered in the state of Iowa each day. The niches are minute.
What about organic?
On the subject of organic pork, Willis said, “I think it’s an admirable goal, but it’s not practical.” He uses conventional fertilizers as well as some chemical sprays against weeds. The obstacle to producing organic pork, he explained, is the cost of organic feed. He estimated that the switch would increase costs by about $50 per hog. That’s just 19 cents per pound, not much, except that restaurants really want only the loin, and the rest of the meat has to be sold on the commodity market. The entire $50 would have to be added to the price of the loin, and restaurants would balk. Willis told me all that over the phone before I arrived in Iowa. So I was surprised to discover that he was growing 20 acres of organic soybeans for the health-food market. (The variety is one that tofu-makers like.) And he plans to have some of his acreage certified as organic. Bill Niman was more positive, saying the move to organic is inevitable and that the main obstacle will be to find a separate elevator to hold certified organic grain, grown by Niman farmers. They would buy back the feed they needed, just as they do now. I began to think Willis’s hesitation only reflected the pessimism that farmers have felt since time immemorial.
The least-expensive organic feed is well-managed pasture; organic dairy farmers make heavy use of it. Pasture was out of favor for years among conventional dairy farmers, but recently they have been turning to it because low milk prices have forced them to reduce costs. Some use “intensive rotational grazing,” which is a fine-tuned version of traditional use of pasture. One hundred years ago, Joseph Harris believed in feeding pigs on corn, milk, and peas, especially through the winter months. But, he said, “Young, well-bred pigs… can be summered in a clover pasture at comparatively little cost, and it is astonishing how fast they will grow.”
The more pasture you use, the less food you have to harvest and haul to the animals. That food also has to be preserved somehow — fermented as silage or dried as hay and grain. You need harvest and transportation machinery as well as storage space. Then, since the animals are concentrated in one place, you have to get rid of the manure. Animals on pasture feed themselves, and their manure drops in the field where it belongs.
Grazing reduces money spent on labor, fuel, and equipment (you don’t need as big a tractor, for one thing). Grazing reduces the amount of purchased feed and the amount of erosion (there’s less plowing, less bare ground), and it reduces the expense of replacing breeding animals (they are healthier and live longer). Grazing also reduces the amount of time workers spend working in and around rank manure.
But to use more pasture, farmers have to switch focus from running machinery and growing crops, both of which they may enjoy, and they have to treat pasture with the same care they give a row crop. They have to set up fences and move the animals methodically from one small section to the next. They have to monitor the length of grass, so it isn’t overgrazed and so each patch reaches the optimum stage of nutritious young growth before animals are put back onto it. A potential problem is that pigs root and can destroy a pasture. The only way to discourage rooting, when it occurs, is to put rings in their noses. (They look like heavy wire staples and make rooting uncomfortable. The AWI discourages their use.) And no matter what, pigs still need more grain than cattle do, since pigs don’t have multiple stomachs to extract full value from a pasture.
Tom and Irene Frantzen raise both pigs and Angus cattle in New Hampton, Iowa. I learned about them through several articles in farming publications, and it turned out that Tom Frantzen and Willis are friends. Frantzen makes heavy use of grazing, moving the pigs onto fresh pasture every four or five days during the warmer months. He moves the cattle onto a fresh strip every day. For a while, he raised Tamworth pigs because the breed is good at foraging. But “Tamworths taste terrible” — lean and dry. Hardly any pig farmers use as much pasture as he does, partly, he thinks, because the mindset of most farmers is crops. But “there’s a few of us rebels around.”
Frantzen began raising hogs in confinement back in 1978, a year after he bought his father’s farm. It seemed like the modern thing. But he became increasingly unhappy, and finally, he says, “I threw the farrowing crates out in 1991.” But it took years to complete the switch to what were more or less the methods he had grown up with. He told me to be sure to write about the evils of gestation crates, slat floors, and lagoons. What’s so bad about the floors? The manure falls through them to get to the lagoons, he answered. The floors are part of the whole package of odor and pollution. “There’s a hundred things wrong with confinement, and I hate every one of them.” He blames confinement for “countless animal health problems.”
Frantzen sells to Niman Ranch, to conventional packers, and last June he began selling some organic hogs to the Cropp Co-op in La Farge, Wisconsin, a $40-million-a-year business that is expanding its sales of organic meats. Frantzen figures organic grain costs just a dollar more a bushel, or an extra $25 a hog. One-third of his pigs are organic. The organic pork, too, must meet the Animal Welfare Institute standards, and it has to be half Berkshire, for marbling and darker meat. Some in the pork industry think Berkshires are too variable and say the breed is less economical to raise. But Frantzen said, “Berkshire is considered to be the best tasting and I think they’re right.”
Price, accountability, and the small scale of the family farm
On a small farm, the farmer observes and responds to individual animals. One person is involved in all the tasks and responsible for results. Supermarket mass-producers as a rule are anonymous. When you shop, whom do you hold responsible for lack of flavor or freshness, sound farming methods, or anything else? Large-scale production generally aims at middle quality and middle price so as to appeal to the largest possible market. The demand for higher quality is smaller, and it is easier to produce high quality on a small scale. In these days of intense pressure to mass-produce at low cost, consumers won’t get the food they want if they don’t find public ways to ask, “How is this food raised?”
High quality doesn’t necessarily cost more. When the producer sells directly and eliminates the middleman, he gets the full retail price. It would help small-farm meat producers to have approved on-the-farm slaughterhouses, like the facilities on a number of poultry farms in southwest France (see “Foie Gras,” A of E 44) — sparkling clean, white-walled rooms in the barn with walk-in coolers. We probably won’t get them in the US. The common alternative for individual farms is to sell their meat frozen, which takes away a large part of the value and taste. The small producers do benefit from the farmers’ markets multiplying all over the US, as if a mirror image of their decline in Europe. Direct selling provides maximum freshness and face-to-face contact with the people who will cook and eat the food. Customers give valuable feedback, especially when some are demanding chefs.
Decent, pleasant farming methods, good flavor in meat, and the supermarket can fit together. Even the family farm can have a place. If it works for pork, maybe it can work for chicken and other meats. A pasture like Paul Willis’s, where you can stand surrounded by green fields, content animals, and fresh clean air, really is the way farming can be. Larry Cleverley, the Iowa market gardener, said about Willis’s pork: “It tastes like the pork I had when I was a little kid.” ●
