The post Op-ed: What I Learned from White Oak Pastures—and What Other Farms Can, Too appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>I got my butt whooped playing corn hole at White Oak Pastures. It wasn’t the quick beating that made the game memorable. That could happen anywhere. It was the fact that I was standing in the street in Bluffton, Georgia, a town of 113 people, drinking beer and playing in an organized tournament with at least 20 people.
My husband John and I moved from San Francisco to Iowa in 2019 to take over his family’s fifth-generation, 540-acre farm, raising cattle and goats on pasture through rotational grazing. What drew us to Southern Georgia was a four-day retreat with the Center for Agricultural Resilience (CFAR), an offshoot of White Oak Pastures (WOP), a large farm known for its commitment to regenerative agriculture. About eight attendees—including a few professors, a tech employee, a veteran-turned-farmer, a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employee, an organic pesticide salesman, and my cattle-rancher husband and I—toured every part of the operation, from the fields to the kill floor, and listened to talks by those at the forefront of the business as well as those in the farthest back office.
The goal of the $2,000 event (which my husband and I attended as guests of the farm) was to talk at length about the endeavor—about the financial, ecological, and social successes and challenges White Oak has experienced over its 30 years—and to give attendees a peek into the business decisions that have made the farm what it is today.
After generations of growing corn, cotton, and peanuts and raising cattle on the land in a “centralized, commoditized, and industrialized” fashion, said Will Harris, the owner of White Oak Pastures, “we spent 25 years figuring out how to make a successful exit. We learned a lot.”
Harris and his family transitioned the farm to a more environmentally sound and resilient system slowly and often haphazardly, they told us. The 3,000-acre operation—while certainly not perfect (and not claiming to be)—is today home to more than 30,000 animals, including cows, sheep, rabbits, and ducks who graze and browse on the farm’s heavily managed fields. Progress in improving the land is monitored using the Savory Institute’s Ecological Outcome Verification system, and the farm has worked with researchers to determine how much carbon, if any, is being captured by their system.
Will Harris. (Photo courtesy of White Oak Pastures)
But the farm also took on large financial risks to capitalize on the business opportunities it felt were available to them. WOP built its own multi-million-dollar slaughter facility and manufacturing areas to utilize every part of the animal. Some hides are tanned (off-site) and made into wallets at WOP, while others are dried into dog chews. Tallow is repurposed into lines of branded lotion and foaming hand soap, and the farm runs a store on site to sell its wares. The farm also serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily at its own restaurant (largely made with their own meat and vegetables), runs an e-commerce site, holds events, and rents cabins.
The business model at White Oak Pastures has morphed over the years, from one highly dependent upon grocery store orders to today’s emphasis on direct-to-consumer sales. Because of the remoteness of the farm, the company had to find outside places to sell their products, delivering to Whole Food Markets and Krogers around the Southeast. Now, WOP has shifted its focus to marketing and shipping orders to people around the country as a way to cut out the middleman.
Our days at the farm were overwhelming at times. After visiting the processing facility and the order fulfillment center where WOP employees pick and package products, it was clear to us that a smaller farm like ours would never be able to accomplish a fraction of what they have over the years. My husband and I would never have the time or money to invest in a business as WOP did, and both of us are too risk adverse to take on the kind of debt Will Harris did to grow his farm.
But by the last day, our attitudes had shifted. Instead of comparing our operation to WOP, we saw the components of their business that we could grow on our own. White Oak Pastures had made decisions based on their priorities, skills, and focus: We could do the same. CFAR was not a “do-it-like-us” course; WOP gave us insight into what regenerative agriculture could look like on the ground and a menu of ideas to pick from. The staff modeled true transparency in the food chain—an honest sharing about a company’s challenges and successes, including a close look at exactly how their soil is improving and a rundown of the challenges of processing and marketing enough poultry to make a separate facility worthwhile.
“Most farms have $3 million in equipment and three employees. We [at White Oak Pastures] have 164 people, and $10 of equipment.”
Yet, even more importantly, I realized while at WOP that “regenerative agriculture” requires generations; there can be no lasting change in agriculture without people to take over and to carry on the improvements we have made. While Will Harris focused on improving the soil and the lives of his animals in his 30-year transition of the farm, he also inadvertently created jobs and invested in his community. Not long ago, the only thing you could buy in Bluffton was a stamp at the post office. Now, the town is actually increasing in size (and holding corn hole tournaments) in a place that was long ago rendered inconsequential by the conventional agricultural system.
“Most farms have $3 million in equipment and three employees,” WOP’s director of operations, Brian Sapp, told us. “We have 164 people, and $10 of equipment.”
While that is clearly an exaggeration—the processing plant alone at WOP is worth several million dollars—the point was not lost on us. A new John Deere combine to harvest corn can run a farmer $500,000, in addition to the cost of the seeds, sprays pesticides, and semi-trucks to get the product to market. At WOP, the Harrises made that same kind of investment, but it was into a system that kept people at the core of the business—using humans to move cattle, process meat, cook and serve food from the farm, and even design wallets and backpacks.
Managers at WOP spoke of a commitment to the farm in ways I had never heard farmworkers speak about their job; they used the word “family” and referred to the farm as a place where they are allowed to make mistakes and take ownership of their work, be it in the garden, the pasture, or the pack house. “We all know that people will show up when you need help with your herd,” said Briget Hogan, the farm sheep manager. “To me, that is true resiliency.”
Many farmers around the world are convinced that our practices need to be more aligned with the needs of the planet and that working with nature—instead of using chemicals, machines, and seeds to battle against it—makes for healthier animals and land. You would also be hard pressed to find anyone in the U.S. who feels rural towns should go the way of the dodo; to many, they are the heart of the American Dream. But perhaps many of us have completely overlooked the power of job creation in agriculture—particularly sustainable agriculture that relies on humans to make a farm run—to revitalize our emptying rural communities. Putting as much food on people’s plates as cheaply as possible should not be our only goal in agriculture. It should be to nourish our nation along with the rural communities that grow it.
The community created by WOP is by no means perfect. While there are many Black employees at the company, there is a clear issue in the lack of managers of color at White Oak Pastures. And as CFAR participants, we also interacted mainly with those in management, giving us little understanding as to what an average employee at the farm feels about their position or the operation as a whole.
But as I stood in the street, throwing bean bags everywhere but in the corn hole and chatting with 20- and 30-somethings from around the country who have flocked to this tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I couldn’t help hope our own farm will be able to build a fraction of the community what WOP has. They have created true livelihoods in a place where none existed.
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]]>The post What the Meat Industry Can Learn from the Downfall of Belcampo appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Belcampo did it all. The nine-year old company raised livestock on pasture on its 27,000 acre farm in northern California, slaughtered animals in its own processing facility, and sold the meat in its own high-end butcher shops and restaurants in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and for a time, New York City. Belcampo also shipped meat around the country to customers willing to pay the hefty per-pound price (a 2.5 pound package of ribeyes sold online for $119.99 or almost $48 a pound, before shipping)—all in the name of good land and animal stewardship.
Then, last summer, the company was accused by former and current employees of selling meat brought in from elsewhere and sold as their own. Employees alleged that beef from Tasmania and Mary’s chicken were unloaded into the case and labeled as Belcampo meat; other former employees reported similar scenarios in different shops. After a short internal investigation, the company admitted that a small amount of meat had in fact been sold this way at their stores. Belcampo’s vertical integration from farm to fork, marketed as the key to total transparency, was in fact opaque.
Then, in mid-October, the company abruptly announced the closure of their e-commerce, restaurants, and retail shops. It’s not clear how the meat-labeling scandal impacted the company’s bottom line or whether the business was already in trouble. But as someone who raises grass finished beef and recently wrote a book about the challenges of making a profit farming, it strikes me that the demise of Belcampo offers an important moment for reflection on the industry at large.
Doug Stonebreaker, the founder and former CEO of Prather Ranch Meat Company (PRMC), another 30,000-acre operation in Northern California, has spent a lot of time thinking about what it will take to get more consumers eating beef from animals raised on pasture, at a time when the vast majority are not.
On a recent phone call, Stonebreaker was sanguine about the lessons Belcampo has to teach the rest of us in the industry. “Instead of saying, ‘That model can’t work,’” he said, “we should look at what mistakes might have been made and keep forging ahead.”
Pasture Raised Animals are Truly Slow Food
The Belcampo model tried to overcome one of the most basic laws of raising animals entirely on grass: it is a slow and unpredictable business. Although almost all beef cattle are raised on grass for the first six to nine months, most are then taken to feedlots, where they eat grain—predominantly corn and soy—that fattens them up in 16-18 months.
In a pasture-based system, however, you cannot finish cattle quickly (it takes 24 to 30 months), and there is no way to raise livestock in mass quantities. Plus, on pasture, each animal needs far more space than they do when they are standing around in a feedlot, and even with the 27,000 acres Belcampo had, there are only so many animals one could raise and herds one could manage. And, depending on the rain (which falls sparingly in California), the health of your soil, and the variety of plants you have in your pasture, the speed at which the animals grow is largely up to Mother Nature.
Which all speaks to the unpredictability of getting food from field to plate. Although you might not know it by looking at the meat case at your local grocery store, everything has a season, and unless a ranch freezes and stores its cuts (which also has high costs and challenges), it is impossible to have every cut of every animal available for consumers at every moment. Chickens can’t be pastured in cold winter months, and California’s increasingly dry summers mean that cattle there don’t reach their target weight in June, July, August, or September (unless farms irrigate, using precious groundwater to grow grass).
Consumers are fickle, too, wanting steaks in the summer for BBQs and roasts for winter stews, making it a logistical challenge for ranches trying to sell fresh meat and make the most of every whole animal.
Can a Single Farm Service Multiple Stores and Restaurants?
Yet even with these limitations, Belcampo attempted to service not one, but five (and at times more) restaurants with static menus that served traditional foods like sirloin steaks and chicken breasts.
“I just don’t see any way that I could manage my inventory in a way that would make that work,” Will Harris of White Oak Pastures recently told me on the phone. Harris’ farm, which is about one-tenth the size of Belcampo’s California operation at 3,200 acres, but raises roughly the same number of animals due to the higher annual rainfall and lush foliage in the South. White Oak also raises food for their restaurant in the small town of Bluffton, Georgia, and for an on-farm store. “But for us, those operations are in service of the farm, not the other way around,” Jenni Harris, Will’s daughter and White Oak Pastures’ marketing manager, added.
Think about it this way. Each 1,200-pound cow only has only about 16 pounds of tenderloin. That means that in order to serve 100 people an eight-ounce tenderloin steak, you would need to have four whole animals processed. But that would also yield an additional 1,896 pounds* of beef—meat that the ranch and restaurant must sell in order to stay afloat financially and live up to the moral obligation to utilize the whole animal to the best of their ability.
“You have to be processing what you’re raising, and marketing what you’re processing, otherwise you end up with a million dollars of ground beef in the freezer,” Will Harris explained.
“At our restaurant,” Jenni Harris added, “if we have too many beef cheeks—guess what’s for lunch at the restaurant?”
It is a massive inventory challenge to balance what a farm has in stock with what is being served at a restaurant, and to maintain the flexibility to adjust prices and menu items as necessary. Letting the farm dictate what will be for sale in the restaurant and finding ways to utilize unsold items in the kitchen can help an overall profitability.
Vertical Integration and Broken Promises
Belcampo tried to take two of the lowest-margin, highest-risk professions—farming and restaurant ownership—and make them profitable. The thinking was that by doing everything internally, it would remove the middlemen, processors, and distributors, thereby avoiding the mark up that comes with each hand-off up the food chain.
Today, farmers make 14 cents on every dollar spent at the grocery store—the brands, processors, and retailers pocket the rest. A well-run, vertically integrated business (the theory goes) keeps more of that money and makes low-margin businesses more profitable.
Notably, most of the huge agribusinesses that dominate the beef, chicken, and hog markets own very little in the way of land or animals. Instead, companies like Tyson—which, according to its website, produces 20 percent of the beef, pork, and chicken in the United States—contract with farms and feedlots, thereby avoiding the cash—and the risk—involved in owning land, buildings, and confinement facilities. And with a state-of-the-art, 2,499-hog “space” confinement barn costing upwards of $750,000, owning enough animals to slaughter 461,000 hogs a week (the amount Tyson can process) is prohibitively expensive.
It is impossible to know whether vertical integration did, in fact, mean that Belcampo came closer to making a profit than most farms do. In 2020, the median income for America’s two million farms was -$1,248—a more than $1,200 loss. But even with steaks at $47 a pound, farming is expensive business and Belcampo’s high monthly costs in real estate and labor may have detracted from their ability to make a net profit.
Yet the company also marketed their ownership of every part of the food chain as the reason customers could trust that they did everything right; the company’s motto was, “Meat you can trust, from start to finish.” Betraying that trust and getting caught misleading consumers almost certainly hurt the company, but it has also had a negative impact on all of us raising animals on pasture. Reverberations throughout the “pasture-raised” community were felt, even on farms that have worked for decades to build relationships with consumers.
“It is just one more layer of skepticism, and we don’t need that,” Will Harris told me.
White Oak Pastures works to combat “greenwashing” by inviting people to stay on the farm and visitors can peek into every part of their supply chain; you can walk into their freezers and watch slaughter if you so desire, the Harrises told me. But for smaller farms, like one I run with my husband, those extra steps aren’t possible. We’re hoping to increase our direct sales (particularly now, when consumers have more interest in buying locally), but there is no extra cash to build housing for customers to visit with our cows, and buying our own processing facility is cost-prohibitive. Add to that the fact that insurance for farm tours and pizza nights is virtually nonexistent in the state of Iowa. In other words, consumer word of mouth and trust in our practices is all we have.
Diversifying Ownership
There are also ethical considerations when it comes to the vertical integration. Having a single person or company owning all parts of the supply chain means the continued ownership and consolidation of land and property by the wealthy.
In Belcampo’s case, investment came from Todd Robinson, a retired financial executive who had been buying farmland in Northern California with the idea of raising grass-fed beef.
Currently, 98 percent of land in the U.S. is owned by white people, who also make up 96 percent of all landowners. And, as an increasing number of acres are farmed by larger operations, small and mid-sized independent farms and ranchers are producing less of the overall food in this country than ever before, and making less of the profit.
When one person owns everything, there is a missed opportunity to involve hundreds of thousands of farmers who might want to play a part in changing the food system and benefit financially from doing so.
Rather than investing in land, buildings, and restaurants, all the money invested into Belcampo (an estimated $50 million, although that number seems low for owning so much real estate) could have been used to help farmers already using regenerative practices to scale up, said Doug Stonebreaker. “If your goal is to change the system and build and support communities, with capital you can control the structure of the business instead of necessarily owning land. There are many farmers and ranchers who are totally committed that need capital, those ready to bleed to death trying to make it all work.”
Stonebreaker also sees opportunities for capital investments to help farmers transition row crop farming in the Midwest to grass-based, pasture models, thereby increasing the number of acres in regenerative agriculture. A central company could be used to process and sell the niche-market beef, increasing the prices farmers are paid for their cattle.
“You’d need a crazy balance of entrepreneurship and leadership, coupled with structure and discipline. There would need to be a lot of rules and there can’t be too much ego involved,” Stonebreaker added. “But you could pull it off.”
Larger companies like Belcampo may help to drive interest in and demand for pasture- raised livestock with sizable advertising budgets and frequent media mentions. But diversifying the ownership in addition to the diversity of plants and animals may have been what was missing. As Nobel Prize winner Elenor Ostrom found in her research about shared community resources, working together benefits not only the humans, but also the environment.
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]]>The post End Of The Egg? ‘Fake Egg’ Company Aims To Replace 79 Billion Chicken Eggs Laid Each Year appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Improved laws banning chicken cages is one way to tackle the issue. But for Josh Tetrick, CEO and Founder of Hampton Creek Foods, “obliterating” the caged-egg industry is another.
“We don’t want to take a percentage of the caged-chicken market,” says Tetrick. “We want to end the practice altogether, by making to make our product more affordable and better than eggs.”
Tetrick’s product is, essentially, fake eggs. The company looked at the 22 different ways eggs are used in cooking (ie – emulsification, aeration, binding) and found several ways plants could fill in for the 79 billion eggs laid each year. They came up with a range of substitutes to suit varying needs, like for use in baking and as a condiment for sandwiches.
The results are pretty remarkable. In a side by side taste test with a real live chocolate chip cookie made with egg, I could not tell which was made with a Hampton Creek “egg.” The mayo too, is smooth and thick, without the odd aftertaste of other fake mayonnaises I’ve had. In other words, the plant-based eggs functioned just as they should, by not revealing they were actually not eggs.
Yet Tetrick’s “eggs” may be a hard sell for those shopping the aisles of Whole Foods, where his Mayo will be sold nationally in November. While tiny, often dirty cages may not be what consumers envision when they crack their morning egg, they are also not envisioning scientists in white coats engineering their condiments. “Hampton Creek” may sound farmy, but in reality the product is created in a lab far from any field.
However Tetrick and his staff are quick to point out that taste and happier chickens are not the only arguments for Hampton Creek’s products. Pressing economic and environmental issues are also addressed by substituting plant-based eggs for the real McCoy.
Seventy percent of the cost of real eggs goes into chicken feed, says Tetrick, making his egg substitute potentially more economical to produce and a less of a strain on the environment. While feeding chickens takes 39 calories of energy to create a single calorie of egg protein, yellow peas–the main ingredient in “Mayo”–take only two calories of energy for each calorie of protein.
Chicken feed is also typically made up of genetically engineered soy and corn; plant-based “eggs” on the other hand, give farmers the opportunity to grow more diverse crops like nitrogen-fixing peas. And for those interested in trying to have a smaller carbon footprint on the planet, it is undeniable that plants have far less impact than animals.
“The system of intensive egg production is the antithesis of “natural” and is based on misinformation,” says Tetrick. “One third of all eggs go into products like cookies and dressing, yet no one knows or thinks about where those eggs actually come from.”
If Tetrick has his way, soon a different kind of “egg” will take its place.
Photo by Shutterstock
This story originally appeared on Forbes.com.
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]]>The post Will the Real Whole Wheat Please Stand Up? appeared first on Civil Eats.
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You may have thought you had whole wheat bread before or ordered a “whole grain” pizza at your local shop. But that loaf or pie is typically less than 30 percent whole wheat, with the rest just regular old, bleached white flour.
Now Community Grains—an adventure begun by Oliveto Restaurant in Oakland and Certified Foods of Woodland, California—hopes to slowly change the world of wheat as we know it.
For the last 60 years, industrial wheat has been solely bred for yield and size and refined in huge industrial mills, according to Oliveto owner Bob Klein. But like tomatoes or beef, consumers today are more interested in the flavor and nutrition of their grains too and want to know where their food comes from and how it is grown.
“It’s like we are in the 1970s again, standing in the Safeway looking at rubber tomatoes and thinking we are happy,” says Klein. “But now we know better and we want to be able to evaluate our wheat for taste and texture and to make ‘local’ mean something. We want to re-establish a local grain economy in Northern California.”
To this end, Klein brought together local millers, distributors, farmers and bakers including Steve Sullivan of Acme Bread, California farmer Bruce Rominger, and Joe Vanderliet of Certified Foods. It quickly became apparent there was a desire to grow, mill and bake with local wheat—but how?
So, over the past three years, Community Grains evolved. Last summer, the Rominger farm grew test plots of heritage Italian varieties and will continue next year with rare California wheats. Certified Foods refined a proprietary system of stone grinding wheat into whole grain flour. And Oliveto’s bakers and chefs started cooking,with startling results.
“I used to call whole wheat bread or pasta a ‘hippy experience in your mouth,’” said Oliveto’s Executive Chef Paul Canales, of the gritty texture of whole grain products that tried to cross the 30 percent whole wheat threshold. “So when Joe [Vanderliet of Certified Foods] started claiming we could use 100 percent of his whole grain flour in everything, I laughed. But it turned out, you really could.”
Canales started simply, making 100 percent whole grain penne with butter and herbs and it was delicious. He made pizza and focaccia and they also turned out just the way they should be—chewy, yet crusty. Other bakers, like Craig Ponsford, Master Baker and Chairman of the Board of the Bread Bakers Guild of America, then used the flour for ciabatta, croissants, and even palmiers.
“Before, I honestly didn’t care about whole wheat flour, it wasn’t very interesting,” said Ponsford. “But now, after 20 years of baking, my whole state of mind is changed about
whole grain flour. I am super excited it is whole wheat that actually tastes super great.”
Most “whole wheat” sold at the supermarket is “rolled,” a process of milling that separates the bran, germ and endosperm of the wheat. Only after the wheat is refined are the parts reconstituted, bringing back together the ratio of bran, germ and “flour” desired by the miller.
But with true whole grain flour, the kernel is stone ground whole, preserving all parts of the seed in the proportion nature intended. “For us, whatever goes into the milling process, should come out the other end as flour,” said Klein.
Maintaining the integrity of wheat is not only important in creating a flour with more fiber. Refined flour also looses numerous micronutrients as well, such as Vitamin E, Zinc and Magnesium (see chart 1 Whole v Refined). Even the protein content of whole grains is much higher than white flour. Coincidentally (or perhaps not?) the major micronutrient deficiencies in the U.S. are the same nutrients we take out of our flour in the refining process.
While its nutrient content is clear, the process that makes Community Grains’ whole grain flour so much more user friendly than other stone ground wheats is more murky. Vanderliet insists it is a mix of choosing a good wheat variety, the degree and style of milling, and the final granulation of the flour. In other words, wheat is a complex food, a fact Americans have dummied down by insisting on white flour and chewy “whole wheat” pizza.
For the first few months, Community Grains flour and heritage corn polenta will be available only for wholesale purchase. But until you can bake your own, virtually every piece of bread, pasta and pizza available at Oliveto is made with 100 percent whole grain flour, including the shortbread cookies and they are divine!
Photos: Teal Dudziak
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