Best Food Writing 2013 (26 page)

Back in the saddle as chief dining critic of the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
John Kessler only occasionally can steal time for long-form feature writing, like this in-depth profile of a cutting-edge meat producer. Knowing all the stories along the food chain—that's what makes Kessler such a vital voice.

I
t took a mere 20 minutes from the time the coal-black, 1,100-pound heifer ambled through a raised door into the slaughterhouse until two sides of beef, hanging on hooks, disappeared into the cooler. The cow entered a small chamber with high, grass-green walls that enclosed her like a shoebox around a loafer. She looked around curiously with big, brown, avid eyes—first left, then right, then up at a captive bolt pistol pointed at her head. And that was it. One wall lifted and she collapsed onto the kill floor.

The six men working inside this small abattoir—no bigger than a studio loft apartment—made quick work with knives and saws, the first cut straight into her heart, stopping it cold. Soon, one fellow delivered this still-warm organ on a rolling steel cart to a white-coated USDA inspector who eyeballed it closely and ticked a mark on his clipboard.

Will Harris III, the owner of White Oak Pastures, drew a knife from his belt holster, neatly bisected the heart and cut a cube from its center. “Sweetest meat you'll ever try,” he said, popping the red morsel into his mouth. It was not yet 9 a.m.

With his 240-pound frame and Stetson hat capping a sun-creased
face, Harris looks like the kind of hardcore cowboy dude who'd think nothing of a little raw offal for breakfast. Yet despite the country-road gravel in his voice, he doesn't always sound the part. He loves to quote George Washington Carver on the order of nature and Michael Pollan on the dangers of industrial food production. He takes enormous pride in the organic certification that his pastures and vegetable garden have received and in the new solar panels he is installing.

Others have taken notice, too. Harris' farm has become a way-point for Florida-bound tourists who stock up on his grass-fed meats. Hungry humans take their meals in a newly completed open-air dining pavilion just down a hill from the abattoirs called “Pasture to Plate.” For now it serves as a lunchroom for his employees, who sit by beating fans along two picnic benches. Soon, it may welcome visitors, visiting chefs and culinary students who want to experience life on a working farm. Like he does many nights, Harris plans to meet his family here and microwave the leftovers for dinner.

Row by row, Harris is breaking the mold on farming in Georgia. His organic grass-fed cattle are slaughtered with methods animal welfare advocates call commendable, and steaks from his beef are cooked and plated in Atlanta's finest restaurants. Whole Foods prominently features White Oak Pastures beef in its stores. And Harris, with 85 employees and what seems like half of Early County working for him, is now doing for chicken what he's done for beef: raising pasture-fed birds and slaughtering them more humanely.

But 15 years ago White Oak Pastures wasn't anything like this and Harris, a fourth-generation Georgian farming land owned by his family since the Civil War, seemed destined to farm the same way his father had, and his father before that. Harris' father—a harsh, unyielding man—pushed the farm as far as he could, pumping any and all chemicals into the earth and into the animals to turn acreage into meat. Armed with an animal science degree and a quick mind, Harris set out to best his father, and he did.

But then, one day, without consulting anyone, he just stopped. He stopped feeding his cattle a mixed ration of grain and powdered dietary supplements they digested poorly, and he stopped implanting estrogen pellets behind their ears. He stopped buying bull semen and instead bought bulls. He stopped loading weaned 7-month-old calves into 53-foot-long double-decker hauling trucks to travel 1,400
miles in their own filth to a feedlot. Soon, he stopped spraying his pasture with pesticides and fertilizing them with ammonium nitrate, and as they turned brown and died, he knew he was risking everything. But he kept going.

“The thing is, those fields were already dead,” Harris says as he climbs into his beat-up 1995 Jeep Wrangler to make the evening rounds of the property. As he does every night, he brings a double-barreled shotgun and a bottle of Yellow Tail shiraz along for the ride. The sun slants with a hot, eerie stillness as the Jeep chuffs over a green hill and a flock of speckled guinea fowl, which look like giant potatoes with tiny heads and stick legs, disperse.

He casts a steady hazel-eyed gaze on visitors and avows he truly loves the animals—not just his dogs and horses, but also all the mooing, baaing, clucking and quacking things that roam so freely over the thousand acres of his storybook pretty farm. These are the same creatures that will one day find themselves headed for the two slaughterhouses on site. They are the lifeblood of this whole operation, and Will Harris is their badass Old MacDonald.

“Let me tell you a story,” Harris says, which in his south Georgia accent sounded like “stirry.” He had more than 1,000 acres to cover this evening. There was time to tell it, and it was a good stirry.

Tough Love, History Guide a Young Farmer

Harris shakes his head as his Jeep lumbers over the four-lane divided highway the Georgia Department of Transportation has been building through the center of White Oak Pastures. “Here's your tax dollars at work,” he mutters.

Getting the cattle from one side of the road to the other would be no easy feat, so GDOT agreed to build a tunnel under the raised highway. One good thing came from this mess: When bulldozers cut into the pasture abutting the road, they uncovered a clearly distinct stratum of soft, brown topsoil above the hard, red clay. “Fifteen years ago, this wasn't here,” Harris says.

Nor were the other markers of healthy organic soil: the mushrooms that sprout so suddenly on the pasture after a night's rain; the black dung beetle that scurries from a cow patty when Harris crushes it with the toe of his leather boot.

But in 1866, when his great-grandfather arrived, the land was
even richer. James Edward Harris was a Confederate who assembled and conscripted his own cavalry to fight the Union soldiers back from central west Georgia. After the war, the bank repossessed the farm and freed the slaves, who joined their former master as sharecroppers. Together, they traveled to homestead this new property in Early County—about as far south as you could go in this part of Georgia before the forested red clay hills give way to the flat landscape and sandy earth of the coastal plain.

Every Saturday the Harrises butchered enough meat—one cow, two or three hogs and several chickens—to last the family and the sharecroppers through the week. They raised their four children in a simple two-story log cabin, among them Will Carter Harris, who most likely took possession of the family farm upon his father's death in 1909. The younger Harris married Beulah Bell, the sheriff's daughter and a formidable woman who had a reputation for working black farm hands harder than anyone in the area. They built a new home next to the log cabin.

The family stepped up their production of beef, pork and chicken to sell in nearby Bluffton. They butchered the animals before dawn and made near-daily deliveries. They also opened a commissary beside their house where they sold dry goods and cigarettes alongside vegetables and meat.

The beginning of the Great Depression was doubly hard on the farm, as Will Carter Harris was rapidly losing his eyesight to cataracts. According to family lore, Beulah one day hopped in the family's Model T, drove to the schoolhouse and withdrew her only child to come work on the farm. He was 8.

Will Bell Harris spent his days riding around in a horse-drawn carriage with his father. He was the bossman's eyes, and his mission—reinforced over and over by both parents—was to inform on farm hands and cowboys who weren't pulling their weight. He learned to be feared from an early age.

This third-generation Harris grew into a big man, tall and heavyset, with a dour disposition. As one of his granddaughters recalls, “He was always very quiet except when he was cussing.”

Harris wasn't just a good cattleman, he was a local legend who could produce more meat per acre than anyone around. He got rid of the hogs, chickens and crops, and focused solely on cattle.

“My daddy was a man's man and he was a profane man,” Harris recalls. “You could cuss around Daddy when Mama wasn't there, but if you cussed at him, that became disrespect.”

When he was 12 years old, Will Harris III learned the distinction. He was helping his father corral some cattle that had escaped through an open gate and were wandering all over the road. His father, frustrated with his son's progress, gave the stud horse the boy was riding a surprise crack of the whip. When the horse bucked, Harris exclaimed, “Goddammit, Daddy!” before he could stop himself. The cattle could wait: His father ordered his son down off the horse and whipped him. He never made that mistake again.

Will Harris Breaks the Family Mold

Will Harris III, the first in his family to complete college, studied animal science at the University of Georgia School of Agriculture when fertilizers and antibiotics were revolutionizing American agriculture.

After the war, both pesticides and antibiotics became more commonplace, and farmers discovered a fringe benefit with the latter. Not only did antibiotics keep animals from getting sick, they made them larger and fatter when administered routinely.

In 1947 a giant federal munitions plant in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched from making bombs to making chemical fertilizer, and the government began actively promoting ammonium nitrate to farmers as a way to increase crop yields and keep pastures green. Food policy historians, such as Michael Pollan, cite this as a turning point in American agriculture and beef production. With chemical fertilizers came an abundance of cheap grain. By the mid-1950s, Midwestern markets and packinghouses had risen to newfound prominence and were supplying the majority of American beef.

Cattlemen like Harris' father would raise the calves until they were old enough to wean, about 6 or 7 months, and then ship them off to concentrated animal feeding operations—feedlots—to finish out their lives.

In 1959, the National Academy of Sciences assembled the brightest minds in agriculture for a conference at Purdue University titled “Beef for Tomorrow” to discuss the rapid changes in the industry and a two-thirds increase in per-capita beef consumption since the pre-war period. The conference objective read: “Authorities in industry
and government have clearly indicated what this means to the producer of beef—he must produce more, more efficiently.”

At UGA, one of Harris' professors, A.E. Cullison, wrote an influential textbook called
Feeds and Feeding
that detailed formulations for the total mixed rations (TMRs) that were increasingly replacing grass and hay as cattle feed. Because ruminants like cows and sheep don't have the stomach acids to digest the corn and soybean meal in TMRs, they also needed routine antibiotics and drugs to combat acidosis, bloat, heartburn, liver abscesses and the host of other problems that awaited them.

Armed with this education, Harris went to go work for the family farm intent on putting his stamp on it. That proved difficult.

“Mostly what I did was bump heads with my father,” Harris recalls. “We could hunt, fish and eat together. But we were both alpha male, and when we went to work, it was really problematic.”

Then there was Jenni—the middle of the three girls Will and his wife, Von, were raising in a new home they built next to his father's. She tottered around behind her father in a favorite pair of coveralls from the age of 4, accompanying him as he gave feed to the cattle in their confinement pens at the crack of dawn.

“My grandfather and I did not have a good relationship,” Jenni, now 25, recalls. “I was the tomboy, the son my father never had, and my grandfather resented me terribly.”

If Jenni wanted to tag along on the yearly visit to the video cattle auction at the county extension office—an event she says “was like the county fair”—her grandfather wouldn't go.

Alzheimer's disease soon started to mute her autocratic grandfather's bark, and as he slipped into a fog of dementia, her father started to rethink his family's farm.

“There was no epiphany,” Will Harris III says, though he began reading books about the American farming system he wasn't assigned in ag school. He was particularly struck by
The Unsettling of America,
Wendell Berry's 1977 book that argued agribusiness was destroying the cultural and family context of farming. It made him wonder what kind of system his father had prescribed to, and what kind of legacy he was leaving for Jenni and his other daughters.

He also began thinking about animal welfare in a different light. “If you weren't intentionally inflicting pain and suffering on the
animal, it was considered good animal welfare,” he said, reflecting a common sentiment among livestock breeders. “By that thinking, if you chain your kids to the TV and feed them a steady diet of potato chips, you're not hurting them.”

One day as he was sending 80 calves off in a double-decker hauling truck, the thought occurred to him that the just-weaned animals on the bottom would make the cross-country drive with urine and excrement raining down on them.

Harris realized that he had become so focused on taking the cost out of production that he no longer considered the animals.