Jennifer Zyman
7/22/2009
It’s a sunny spring day, and I’m clinging to my seat as Will Harris III cracks jokes in his epic South Georgia drawl while expertly maneuvering his battered white Lincoln Navigator over the bumpy green fields of White Oak Pastures, his Bluffton farm. Jenni, the middle child of his three grown daughters and his right-hand gal, points out ripe blackberries near a gator-filled pond. Without hesitation, Harris swings the car over. We jump out and stuff sweet berries in our mouths as Jenni warns us to watch out for snakes. As we resume our ride, I turn to Harris and tease, “Who needs a spa when you can have days like these for free?”
But life on a cow farm isn’t always sunshine and blackberries. After his father gave him control of the farm in 1995, Harris, a fourth-generation cattleman, wanted to make some fundamental changes. Raising cattle had changed substantially since post–World War II America, and Harris could no longer bear to watch the livestock he’d raised leave his farm literally stacked on top of one another in a tractor-trailer that would carry them for thirty hours without food or water. “It was like raising your daughter to be a princess and then hauling her off to the whorehouse,” he says.
Harris took control of his end of the business. First, he turned his thousand acres of farmland into the largest organic farm in Georgia. Then, last year, he finished construction on an on-site, USDA-inspected processing facility—the first of its kind in the U.S. Harris’s seventeen employees slaughter ten to fifteen cows from his herd each day, as opposed to large-scale meat plants, where, according to Harris, 400 cows per hour are typically processed in sixteen-hour shifts.
Both the farm and the facility are guided by the philosophy of Harris’s hero, George Washington Carver, who stated, “In nature there is no waste.” Technology and design certainly play their integral parts in the operation, and Harris likes his gadgets. He shows off a new machine that will soon make grass-fed beef hot dogs. He even receives automated text messages on his cell if one of the plant’s refrigeration units rises above the correct temperature. But the heart of the business remains connected to the land that Harris’s family has lived on since 1866. He does everything he can to ensure his hormone-free cows have a good life: They are always allowed to roam freely, and they feed exclusively on grass. Come slaughter time, they are led through a maze that keeps them calm and then rendered senseless by a captive-bolt pistol, an instrument used for humane killing.
The important payoff behind all this autonomy and conviction rests in the end product. Harris’s meat has a clean, heightened beefiness with less exterior fat than grain-fed beef but a perfect amount of marbling. Harris recalls an event at a Whole Foods when an octogenarian pensively chewed a sample of Harris’s beef before finally saying, “That tastes like a long time ago.”
Despite the stunning quality of his beef, Harris still produces more than he can sell: His beef costs a few dollars more per pound than other brands, and industrial farms continue to dominate retailers’ meat cases. His beef is available regionally at Publix and Whole Foods stores, but he directly credits Whole Foods, which buys whole carcasses from White Oak rather than just the choice cuts most retailers demand, as keeping him “cash positive.”
While Harris’s team may handle ten cows per day, the Swancy family at Riverview Farms in Gordon County brings eight to ten pigs to restaurants and markets per week. And unlike White Oak’s streamlined facility, Riverview’s Swancy family relies on a local butcher. The Swancys would need to produce substantially more meats and vegetables to fulfill the demands of chains such as Whole Foods, so the family cuts out the middleman by selling directly to restaurants (including Bacchanalia, 5 Seasons Brewing Company, Aria, The Porter, and Muss & Turner’s) and through farmers markets. They’ve also built up a loyal Community Supported Agriculture following. “Our customers want a little dirt on their vegetables,” says Charlotte Swancy. “They feel a connection to their food, and we feel connection with the customers.”
Riverview Farms sits at the grassy foot of a precariously winding road in Ranger, Georgia, a little more than an hour north of Atlanta. When I arrive, I spot Charlotte Swancy’s familiar, shiny brown bob peeking out from behind a truck where she and a handful of workers are packing the last boxes of the week’s CSAs. Charlotte met her husband, Wes Swancy, while they were both studying chemistry at the University of Georgia. In 2000, after Charlotte graduated, the young couple moved to Ranger to help Wes’s struggling family farm. Wes’s parents, Carter and Beverly Swancy, purchased the farm in 1975. Carter had always been a minimalist when it came to fertilizers and pesticides, but Charlotte and Wes convinced him there was a market for organic products. The change proved ultimately to be the right step: It gave them entry into the organic-only Morningside Farmers Market and brought the family’s efforts to the attention of discerning local chefs and home cooks.
Among the livestock and organic vegetables and grains the farm produces, Riverview’s Berkshire pork—the Kobe beef of the pig world—garners the most praise. The meat is superbly marbled, with a touch of sweetness. Due to the fat content (an absolute selling point with so many overly lean varieties on the market), the pork doesn’t need to be brined; it remains juicy no matter how simply you treat it. Favorites include the hulking bone-in pork chops wrapped in white butcher paper, the buttery Italian sausages, and the pork butts perfect for a slow-cooked ragù.
Today, Riverview’s 180-acre farm dwarfs its original ten acres, and the Swancys’ intensely hands-on approach makes for an exhausting life. As Charlotte leads me around the sprawling farm that is compartmentalized by animal pastures and vegetable plots, she explains how much effort it takes to get their product to market. From collecting pigs for slaughter to personally driving meat deliveries and setting up on Saturday mornings for the farmers markets, no day is ever the same. Though he has an entirely different approach to the same laudable end goal, I remember the same weariness behind Will Harris’s eyes. But it’s also easy to see what fuels them both: The stewardship and commitment to their animals yield worthwhile and utterly scrumptious results.
White Oak Pastures, whiteoakpastures.com
Riverview Farms, grassfedcow.com
Photograph by Jennifer Zyman
This article originally appeared in the August 2009 issue of Atlanta magazine
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