If, as Wendell Berry has famously said, “Eating is an agricultural act,” and if, as several popular books have persuasively argued, agriculture is an environmental act, then it follows that each piece of food we consume—whether cheese doodle or spinach salad—has an environmental impact.
Whether that impact is good, bad or neutral depends on how we choose our food. That much was made clear in books by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver that prompted a national conversation on the value of eating sustainably and helped propel the word “locavore” into the public consciousness.
That puts Eliza MacLean MEM’96 in the right place at the right time. MacLean is the owner of Cane Creek Farm, a lively operation in Alamance County that has become known in particular for its pasture-raised pork.
Cane Creek pork—particularly pork from MacLean’s small herd of heirloom Ossabaw Island hogs—is featured on the menus of fine restaurants throughout the Triangle and Triad as well as grand New York restaurants like Daniel. Slow food visionary Alice Waters made a pilgrimage to Cane Creek Farm to visit the Ossabaws after sampling Ben Barker’s preparation at Durham’s Magnolia Grill. Chef Andrea Reusing at Chapel Hill’s The Lantern once created a six-course “nose to tail” meal, including dessert, featuring the Ossabaw. MacLean has been featured in at least one book, speaks at workshops about her farm and practices, and frequently welcomes reporters to her farm. An hour-long interview by NPR’s Frank Stasio in September 2007 led to 5,000 hits on Cane Creek’s Web site in 24 hours.
What is particularly impressive is that MacLean’s farming career began only about six years ago.
“A Deadhead with an Art Degree”
MacLean always thought she would work with animals, but her plan was to become a large-animal veterinarian, not a farmer. After a detour as an art history major at Mount Holyoke College, she moved west to San Francisco, in order to establish residency and apply to the veterinary school at University of California at Davis. She worked in emergency veterinary clinics, volunteered for the Marine Mammal Center, followed the Grateful Dead, took up endurance sports—and didn’t apply to Davis.
Instead, she eventually enrolled in the environmental toxicology program at Duke, determined to learn more about the environmental causes of animal disease, a subject that captured her interest when she worked with marine mammals with tissue damage or growths attributable to toxins in the water.
After receiving her master of environmental management 91, MacLean stayed at Duke and managed Rich Di Giulio’s toxicology lab, bought a few goats, planted a garden at her farmhouse near Mebane, continued to consider veterinary school, and competed in triathlons and ultramarathons, a hobby she had taken up in the Bay area. Then she became pregnant, and the idea of children sharing her life shaped her next steps.
From ultramarathoner to single-parent farmer
In 2000, with twins on the way, MacLean was ready to settle into a career based on her studies at the Nicholas School. “I’d already decided I didn’t want to do the Sierra Club or one of those nonprofits because I didn’t want to work 60 hours a week,” says the woman who admits to donning a headlamp at midnight to check on her animals. Frequently.
“Farming became a necessity,” she says, because she wanted to work and be at home with the children. Through volunteer work at the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, she met Chuck Talbott, who ran the pork operations at North Carolina A&T University. He was involved in putting pigs back in pastures and woods, using the heirloom Tamworth hog—a big red pig that produces great bacon—as a model. And he needed help. MacLean began working for him part-time.
In 2003, she brought her first pigs home. She had Tamworths and Farmer’s Hybrids, along with a menagerie of chickens, ducks, turkeys and goats, which she was raising outside, a more humane way of farming that also, many believe, produces tastier products. She became the first pork purveyor at the venerable Carrboro Farmer’s Market, right around the time the Adkins Diet put meat back on the dieter’s menu, and is still one of the few meat vendors there.
The Ossabaws came later that year, when New York Times columnist Peter Kaminsky began looking for pork comparable in flavor to the sublime Ibérico ham produced by pigs grazing on acorns in the mountains of Spain. The liquidy fat produced by the acorn diet, woven into the musculature of the free-ranging swine, produced a flavor wholly different from the typical supermarket ham.
Kaminsky’s quest for an equivalent American ham led him to the discovery of Ossabaw Island pigs, a breed descended from Ibéricos that had been left on an isolated Georgia island by Spanish colonists. Over the years, the Ossabaws had become feral, and few had attempted to breed them for meat.
Through contacts with ChuckTalbott, Kaminsky brought small herds to Cane Creek Farm and another family farm in South Carolina. His ambitions for pork that tastes like pork were realized, as he recounts in his book Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them. In one memorable scene in that book, a restaurateur in Brooklyn begins preparing sausage and ham from an Ossabaw that MacLean has trucked there. Star chef Daniel Boulud is summoned for a lunch of seared pork loin. He chews, muses, and, Kaminsky reports, says, “‘I think I’d like a glass of red wine with this.’ Daniel rarely drinks wine during the workday unless the food is special.”
The relationships MacLean has cultivated with chefs have created a steady demand for Cane Creek Farm Ossabaw, along with a cross she’s developed with the Farmer’s Hybrid. “She is one of the first farmers in the state to have a successful direct market for her products,” says Jennifer Curtis, director of NC Choices, a nonprofit aimed at helping niche farmers get their products into stores.
One chef who does not get Ossabaws from MacLean is Alice Waters, founder and chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and one of the original champions of cuisine based on fresh, seasonal ingredients. After Waters’ visit, her staff worked with MacLean to explore the possibility of shipping Ossabaws to the restaurant. The cost—more than $700 just for shipping— was prohibitive.
Shipping is one of MacLean’s bugaboos. After her interview with NPR’s Frank Stasio aired in September 2007, she was deluged with requests. “I try to tell people that I serve this community,” says MacLean. “I suggest that they try to find and support local farmers in their own area, or I can work out a pickup or delivery near them. I’m just not set up for shipping.”
Alert readers of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma will recognize in this sentiment an echo of Joel Salatin, the Virginia farmer who flat-out refuses to ship a chicken to writer Pollan. So Pollan goes to the chicken, spending a week working on Salatin’s Polyface farm while researching his book.
Biogeochemistry on the Farm
MacLean also practices rotational farming in a way similar to Salatin. Pens where pigs were raised are turned over to chickens, who feast on parasites and remains of food in the pig waste, effectively sanitizing it for use as fertilizer in gardens that are planted there later. Pigs and goats feed on the remains of the garden, and the cycle starts over again. The garden produce goes to the farmer’s market with her, and helps her to tell the story of how her farm is run without the use of fertilizer and chemicals that strip industrial farm fields of fertility and pollute groundwater and of subtherapeutic antibiotics that must be used constantly in such settings., If all this sounds suspiciously like biogeochemistry, it’s no coincidence. “It’s making the system balance,” says MacLean, who took former Nicholas School Dean William Schlesinger’s biogeochemistry course in the mid-1990s. “It’s a closed nitrogen cycle, with inputs and outputs that come from the farm, not from outside.”
“Everything I studied at Duke applies here,” she says. “Biogeochemistry, hydrology, even environmental economics,” although she admits that a shrewd sense of financial numbers eludes her sometimes.
Farming this way involves a steep learning curve; rather than learning one thing at a time, she had to figure out simultaneously how to raise pigs, chickens, goats, and garden crops, in order to leave chemical fertilizers and pesticides out of the mix. An innate understanding of animal behavior has served her well, as has her background volunteering with marine mammals and at veterinary clinics in the Bay area.
In 2007, MacLean took a huge step, moving 700 animals off of her 11 acres to a 20-acre farm adjacent to Braeburn Farm in Snow Camp, N.C. There, Dr. Charles Sydnor has a herd of pasture-raised Red Devon beef cattle. “He wanted more animals to complete the rotational system, and I needed more land for my animals,” says MacLean who went from sending two to 10 pigs to market weekly in just one year. Their joint venture operates as Wells Branch LLC, although they will each continue to sell meat under their farms’ respective names, “because Cane Creek and Braeburn are locally recognized brand identities.”
The move has created new opportunities, but also some growing pains. Garden beds haven’t achieved their ideal fertility, and the summer’s drought impacted their ability to rotate the animals as frequently as is ideal. But the ability to make cows part of the mix and to have a much wider acreage for all of the animals to graze made the move worthwhile.
The work is joyful but exhausting. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” says the former ultramarathoner. “I wake up ready to go every morning and go to bed feeling beleaguered almost every night. But I sleep well, knowing that I paid attention to every possible detail during the day.” Leaving the farm for four days (as she has done only twice this year) means weeks of conveying what’s in her head to her farm manager—the only paid employee—and to volunteers and interns.
Although pigs are still the stars of Cane Creek Farm, MacLean has brought in heritage turkeys and ducks, more goats, and recently, some sheep. Miniature donkeys give rides to visiting school children (and the occasional small adult). Every animal has a job: the large animals mow, the pigs and goats churn up the dirt like rotary tillers, and the chickens sterilize the soil by removing bugs and parasites. The farm is also home to a handful of trucks, tractors, and a squat four-wheel Kubota vehicle that MacLean uses for visitor tours or quick inspections of remote bits of acreage. That’s why she’d like to add one more species to the mix.
“My dream would be to have 75 acres with barns, animals, and draft horses doing a lot of the work. It would be great to get away from using so many fossil fuels on the farm.”
Lisa M. Dellwo is a freelance writer in New York’s Hudson Valley.