Keepin' It Local, Folks.

Eat My Words
By Karin Edmondson

“I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.”
—Sherwood Anderson

Simple. Simply. Simplicity. These three words are oft heard in the frenetic, sensory-inundated clutter of our modern society. Apparently, our collective yearning for the simple life was so palpable that magazine editors trotted out Real Simple, a magazine dedicated to simplifying and streamlining our lives with useful (albeit frequently obvious, far from mind-blowing) hints and tips about what to do with laundry, cooking, cars, kids, husbands, wives, pets, plants, relatives, midweek meals, missing socks. In the news lately is a refreshing trend in architecture: away from the grossly outsized monuments to conspicuous consumption dubbed McMansions and towards something called a WeeHouse, small, contained, neat and realistically sized (who needs vast, echoing Sopranos-esque entryways?) that leave a minimal environmental footprint on our already traumatized earth—dwellings that tread lightly upon the land. Even Town and Country recently featured a modern home in glass, steel and burnished coppery wood that emerges gloriously from the midst of a forest meadow, a literal tiny ‘jewel box’ of a house. Dwell magazine consistently features compact, sustainable, green homes in editorials. Folks are realizing that less really is more, and that in actuality, we are quite capable of living full, happy lives—not just “get by”—with a few, simple things. In farming, a similar deconstructivism is occurring as small-scale livestock farmers, old and new alike, are returning to the basic elements of earth, grass, water and air to sustain and nourish their animals.

Slope Farms
The town of Meredith in Delaware County sits amidst rollicking hills and fields, some of which are striated light and dark green from forage crops, others vibrate and shimmer from the caress of the wind across swaths of native meadow grasses. Slope Farms in Meredith would seem aptly named for the surrounding topography; however, Ken Jaffe says, with a smile: “It is named for our former home in Park Slope, Brooklyn.” Ken and his wife Linda have been raising cattle—crosses of Angus, Simental and Hereford—purely on pasture and mountain spring water for three years now. Ken and Linda, continuing a tradition of New Yorkers traveling to the Catskill Mountains, had a main residence three miles down the road from the farm. The couple plans a summer move into the expansive farmhouse—painted a pale buttercup yellow—that overlooks 97 acres of pastures and pond. As a doctor with his own family practice for 25 years, Ken gradually became interested in the “biochemical properties of fats in meats, the good fats like CLA versus the bad fats.” (Ken is currently working toward a degree in public health at Columbia University.) The cattle at Slope Farm are fed entirely on pasture, their only supplement a mineral block. In the winter they are fed forage (stored grass) and have barn access although “they only ever use it when it is bitterly cold and precipitating. They don’t seem to like the cold and rain mix.”

Ken utilizes 30 pastures in his rotational grazing strategy. Essentially, Management Intensive Grazing, or the less severe sounding rotational grazing, involves moving (walking, herding) livestock from one pasture to the next, or rotating them through pastures. Rotational grazing provides optimum nutrition for livestock since every two to three days they feast on fresh pasture. Livestock also self-fertilize the pastures, and because they are frequently moved, pasture over-fertilization or burn does not occur. Overgrazing and depletion of soil nutrients is never a problem either. The cattle adapt really quickly to rotational grazing. “They tear into the new pasture. It’s quite exciting for them. They learn to associate me with something good.”

Adopting a farm management program of rotational grazing also minimizes the hours that Ken needs to spend actually farming. Every two to three days he will walk the herd from one field to the next. As Ken and I stand at the juncture of two lush fields, one off to our right and the other to our left, he says: “My biggest decision most mornings is: which field to turn them out?” Rotational grazing is low-input farming. Low-input refers to petrochemicals. With rotational grazing the animals fertilize and harvest the fields themselves. The only time they leave the farm and travel anywhere is to the harvesting facility, formerly referred to as the slaughterhouse.

A community activist and part of the Alliance for Meredith, Ken believes that pastured meat could be a viable economic model. “It’s still hard to compete with conventional meat on price, but the major selling points of grass-fed meat are the positive impact on health, taste quality and environmental benefits.”

Ken sells his product—retail cut and packaged—to specialty stores in Manhattan and also directly from his farm. He would be pleased to sell locally in bulk, say a whole steer or calves. Meat from Slope Farms is also served at the Beaver Kill Valley Inn. For more information or to place an order, please e-mail Ken at slopefarms@delhitel.net or call him at 607 746 2294.

River Haven Farm
Tommy Hutson is a hard man to reach. After several unsuccessful phone attempts, first at appropriate times of day and then at increasingly brazen hours of day and night, I had to track him down in one of his hayfields just to schedule an interview but alas, our timing and schedules were off. The second time I arrived unannounced at River Haven Farm in the hopes of an interview, it is after six o’clock in the evening and he has just begun the milking process but graciously invites me—highly inappropriate Reefs and all—into the barn for an impromptu interview.

“I’m a redneck Delaware County boy. I like my tractors and pick-up trucks,” says Tommy with a smile. Tommy Hutson, all smiling, charming, loquacious 58 years of him, is a seventh generation dairy farmer. He has a herd of 108 Holsteins on 380 acres of prime Delaware County farmland. Some of his cows’ names: Susie, Pooch, Julip, Jerry, Dusty, Dallas, Zilly, Basil, Eva, Lola. He grows alfalfa hay, corn and grass hay along with oat and barley for grain and straw for bedding. “Farming is my passion, there is an emotional draw, an artistry, a respect for the land. Farming is like an addiction for me. I don’t justify it or explain it. It always was an honorable profession. I’m not going to get rich farming but then when we face our maker, it’s not going to make any difference.”

Tommy’s deep, inherent respect for the land is evident in many ways, some esoteric, such as when he compares farmers to artists and that their “work is never appreciated until they are gone.” In today’s food culture that is dominated by industrial agriculture and feedlots and anonymous farmers in a far-flung global economy, the threat of extinction of the small family farm is not a spectral perhaps, but a corporeal reality. Steve Wilson from Dairy One who tests the milk (for levels of fat, protein, somatic cells and milk urea nitrogen) at River Haven Farm states simply: “This fall Delaware County lost 40% of its farmers. Milk prices are so low and cost of production are so high that the farmers like Tommy who are debt-free and made it through still had to dip into their savings or retirement. With land prices so high, they won’t go through that again. They’ll just sell the farm.”

Tommy’s partnership with the Watershed Agricultural Council is a very real manifestation of his love for the land—so much so that he “worries about the land and how he treats it and what he gets back from it.” Tommy is now in his fourth year on the WAC Executive Committee. He was one of the first farmers to participate in pilot programs to reduce organic pollution in the reservoir system by planting buffer strips: permanent rows of vegetation that filter out impurities in runoff. In 2002 Tommy also placed his farm in a conservation easement in perpetuity that will prevent the farm from being subdivided or sold off for development, ensuring wildlife habit protection, clean water and also, the rural genius loci, or sense of place of the region.

In 2006 Tommy was awarded the Steward of the Land Award from the American Farmland Trust. In addition to farming in a sustainable, environmentally manner, Tommy also manages 57 acres of hardwood forest. He also consults with other farmers in reference to WAC’s easement programs (and his one-on-one consultations have resulted in many applications) and shares his wealth of experience by speaking to visitors and the media and hosting on-farm demonstrations. He also has an unofficial sort of mentoring program for area youth. “I learned some valuable things working on the farm. There is a sense of responsibility when you are 17 years old and operating a piece of $100,000 equipment. When we were growing up on the farm, we didn’t realize we didn’t have much. We thought we had everything.”

In addition to dairying, Tommy recently began “dabbling” in pastured beef—Hi-Ho’s, short for Highland Holstein crosses. The cattle are fed a grass-based diet supplemented with forage ( harvested grass hay and corn silage) and a little bit of grain. Retail cuts and whole animals are available for purchase.

I ask Tommy if he drinks milk.

“Yes. And I eat a lot of ice cream and cheese.”

Tommy’s favorite ice cream flavor?

“Chocolate marshmallow.”

River Haven Farm is located on Back River Road in Delancey in Delaware County. For more information or to place an order for grass-fed beef, please call Tommy at 607 746 6862.

For recipes on grilling or cooking with grass-fed or pastured meats, grab a copy of The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook by Shannon Hayes, available through Sap Bush Hollow Farm, www.sapbush.com, Heather Ridge Farm, www.heather-ridge-farm.com, and Amazon, www.amazon.com.