Kansas farmers help heritage breeds make a comeback

The Kansas City Star, Wednesday, November 30, 2005

By Anne Brockhoff
Special to The Star

First came organic, then heirloom. Now Kansas farmers are taking a heritage turn by bringing pork from old-fashioned and increasingly rare breeds back to the plate.

These are the pigs of America's past. They're black, red and white, with spots and splotches and wattles. They're big and slow to fatten, and they're completely out of step with a modern pork industry that favors lean, fast-growing pigs.

So what's driving their return? Part of the answer: Meat from heritage breeds like Berkshire, Duroc, Gloucester Old Spot, Large Black, Tamworth and Red Wattle tastes good. Really good.

"The breeds are all extremely flavorful, especially when compared to other pork," says Dan Swinney, executive chef at Lidia's Kansas City.

Heritage pork tastes nothing like "the other white meat." It's juicer, a deeper red and, well, just porkier. And that's exactly what will save the breeds from extinction, says Todd Wickstrom, co-founder of Heritage Foods USA, formerly the marketing and sales arm of Slow Food USA, which is dedicated to preserving local foods and culinary traditions.

Chefs might buy heritage pork once because they're concerned about sustainability, biodiversity or the future of the family farm. They'll buy it again because it taste good, creating a market incentive for producers to keep raising more of these special animals.

"When you want to save a panda, the best way to do that is to put it in a zoo. But if you want to save the Red Wattle pig or the American Bronze turkey, the best way is to eat them," Wickstrom says.

Swinney put heritage pork on Lidia's menu about two years ago, buying it from suppliers in Iowa and California. He switched to Heritage Foods when he discovered much of its pork is raised in Kansas.

Doug Metzger of Metzger Family Farms near Seneca, supplies Berkshires and Tamworths; Larry and Madonna Sorell raise Red Wattles on their Lazy S Farms near Glasco; and Craig and Amy Good of Good Farm outside of Olsburg have Durocs. The meat is processed at and shipped from Paradise Locker Meats in Trimble, Mo., just north of Kansas City.

Each breed is distinct, but they all take six to eight weeks longer than their conventional counterparts to reach market weight. Their meat has a finer grain, so it holds moisture better and is more highly marbled. That means there's more intramuscular fat, which is a good thing, says Mario Fantasma, a butcher who runs Paradise Locker Meats with his wife, Teresa, and sons Louis and Nick.

"That's where all the flavor comes from," Fantasma says.

Heritage Foods farmers also adhere to strict production standards. That means pigs are raised on pasture or in pens with deep bedding and outdoor access. It means they eat feed that's free of animal byproducts and growth-stimulating antibiotics or additives. It means the pigs live like pigs.

"These hogs we have are free range--they're outdoors, they're on dirt, they breed naturally," says Sorell, who hopes one of his nine children or 23 grandkids might someday want to take over the farm.

Here a wattle, there a wattle

Sorrell is a third-generation farmer and a long-time hog producer who began raising Red Wattles in 1999. They were so scarce that he had to scour the country to add to his herd of one boar and two gilts.

"We've been in Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Minnesota, South Dakota, Pennsylvania. We bought what breeding stock they were willing to get rid of," Sorell says. He and another nearby grower now own almost 70 breeding hogs, or about 90 percent of all the Red Wattles in the United States.

The Sorells also raise Belgian draft horses, Jacob sheep and heritage chicken breeds like Minorca and Delaware, and they added American Bronze turkeys to the list after meeting Frank Reese Jr. or Good Shepherd Ranch in Lindsborg.

Reese in one of America's premier heritage turkey breeders, and he's passionate about his Narragansett, Black Spanish, Bourbon Red and other birds. When Slow Food USA launched its heritage turkey project in 2002, Reese supplied most of the 1,000 Thanksgiving turkeys the organization sold.

Demand continues to grow, and Reese and six partner-growers sold more than 6,000 birds to Heritage Foods in 2005. The venture's success not only resuscitated several old turkey breeds, it fueled demand for other heritage meats and put Kansas at the forefront of a culinary movement as important as any in recent decades.

"Organic food started in 1971 in Berkeley. Heritage foods started in 2002 in Kansas," says Heritage Foods co-founder Patrick Martins.

Kansas-bred heritage meats have been featured in the New York Times, Time, Newsweek and Saveur. They're on the menu locally at Lidia's, Cafe Sebastienne and Room 39, and across the country in restaurants including Mario Batali's Babbo in New York, Alice Waters' Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and Michael Tuohy of Atlanta's Woodfire Grill.

"These Kansas farms are menu items at the best restaurants across the country," Martins says. "Kansas is the DOC of heritage foods," he says, comparing it to Italy's denominazione di origine controllata, which guarantees the origin and production standards of wine.

Rising stock

Heritage quality doesn't come cheap. A package of four 10- to 12-ounce pork chops costs $42, while a 9-pound smoked Tamworth ham is $95. Part of the price, of course, goes toward processing, shipping and overhead. The rest actually goes to the farmer.

"You see that price, but it's not because somebody's trying to get fat off the farmer. The money's going to the farmer," Fantasma says.

The concept is nothing short of revolutionary. Most commercial hog farmers raise their animals and then sell them for the going price, no matter how high--or low--it may be. And when hog prices get really low, as they did in 1998, many farmers go out of business.

"Hog prices just went down and down and down. They got to 8 cents a pound. It was just disaster," says Metzger, who farms with his wife, Betty, his son, Mark, and his daughter, Marilyn Wiegand, and her family.

Theirs was a diversified operation, with beef and dairy cattle, hay and grain. While Matzger had been raising hogs for more than 50 years, he refocused after the market bottomed out. He bought some Tamworths in 1998 and built up the purebred Berkshire herd he'd started when he was in high school. Metzger started selling Berkshires for export to Japan.

Then, Metzger met Reese and started raising heritage turkeys and selling pork to Heritage Foods.

He plans to expand his operations, but "we don't know how big this market will get," Metzger says. "Once chefs at the higher-scale restaurants find out about Berkshire meat, that's what they want."

Craig and Amy Good's operation has been shaped by many of the same industry changes as Metzger's and Heritage Foods offers a similar opportunity for change. The Goods returned to the family farm in 1981 and began selling Duroc and Yorkshire breeding stock to other producers. The number of buyers has fallen in recent years, however, due to low prices and the trend toward larger and more vertically integrated operations.

That prompted them to find a new focus: producing hogs that simply taste better.

"My true goal is to breed hogs genetically superior in eating quality," Craig Good says.

They will continue providing boars and gilts to other producers, but they hope to also sell most of the pigs raised for meat through Heritage Foods.

"I'm not going to play the big guy's game," he says. "But if I can find a niche and provide something consumers want, and that allows me to stay in business doing what I love, then I want to continue doing that."

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Heritage animals draw attention of big-city chefs

Salina Journal, Saturday, August 13, 2005

By David Clouston

Glasco - These little piggies have found a niche market.

Lazy S Farms, which has already landed in the pages of Time magazine for its "heritage" livestock, was the host Friday for a group of New York City chefs who visited the farm to check out its Red Wattle pigs.

Heritage animals refers to lines of farm animals unchanged by genetic modification. Madonna Sorell owns and operates the farm near Glasco with her husband, Larry. For about three hours Friday, their guests toured the couple's hog operation and asked questions.

"They came out basically to see the farm, to make sure we were raising the pigs in a humane way. They were very impressed. They really seemed to be happy," Larry Sorell said.

The Sorells' pigs aren't raised in confinement or given groth hormones or stimulants.

The couple have about 100 head of the Wattle Pigs, so named for the wattle (loose folds of skin) that hangs on each side of their jowls, Madonna Sorell said. The farm ships pigs to a locker north of Kansas City about once a month for slaughter and processing, her husband said.

Among the visiting chefs Friday were Jason Denton, one of the founders of Lupa Osteria Romana in Greenwich Village. Lupa, specializing in traditional Roman cuisine, was named "Best New Non-Bistro" in 2000 by New York Magazine. Also in the group was Mark Ladner, one of the founding partners of Otto Enoteca Pizzeria in West Village.

In addition to the pigs, the Sorells raise turkeys, Katahdin sheep, Jacob sheep and seven breeds of chickens, all of which are considered heritage animals. Their meat is marketed by Heritage Foods of New York City. The couple also sell meat through the Salina Farmers' Market and the Prairieland Food Co-op in Salina.

Time magazine featured the couple's livestock this past June in an article about heritage animals.

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Eat Them or Lose Them

Time Magazine, June 13, 2005

By Margot Roosevelt

Down a dirt road, amid rolling hills of alfalfa, Larry and Madonna Sorell's 40-acre spread looks, smells and sounds like any other Kansas homestead. The weathered wooden farmhouse. The whiff of manure. The cacophony of grunting, gobbling and bleating. But the livestock at Lazy S Farms are no ordinary farm animals. Rooting about in the fields are Red Wattle pigs, a breed thought to have been imported from New Caledonia in the 1700s and practically extinct until a wild herd surfaced in Texas. The turkeys are Standard American Bronzes, which were Thanksgiving fare for more than a century but have now been reduced to some 950 breeder birds. The lambs are Katahdins, a subspecies developed in Maine and named for the state's highest peak.

Fifty years ago, such breeds were common on family farms. But with the intensive post-World War II industrialization of American agriculture, they all but died out, surviving only on isolated farmsteads for local consumption. In the past five years, however, a new market has spring up for now rare varieties, thanks to a lively network of big-name chefs, conservation-minded farmers and slow-food devotees. Like heirloom tomatoes and antique roses, so-called heritage meats are attracting discriminating customers and fetching top dollar.

For Larry Sorell, 65, a fourth-generation grain planter, raising rare animals began as a lark. But as he learned more about the threat to the survival of traditional varieties, he came to see his hobby as a high calling. "If a breed goes extinct, all the genetics go down the tube," he says. Besides, he adds as he waters a passel of squealing piglets, "I just love to watch 'em grow."

Sorell's pigs aren't the only things that are growing. Heritage Foods USA, the largest mail-order firm in the business was buying five 200-lb. hogs a month to meet demand. Besides Red Wattles, named for their ruddy hair and folds of neck skin, the company's biannual "almanac" offers 70 products, Tunis lamb to Bourbon Red turkeys. "dozens of delicious American treasures with a long history are on the brink of extinction," says Patrick Martins, co-founder of the company. "We must eat them to save them."

The renewed interest in rare breeds is driven in part by the limited offerings of factory farms in the U.S. Agribusinesses, trying to maximize efficiency in a competitive market, pursue a ruthless genetic specialization, driving the industry toward what ecologists call monocultures--vast numbers of a single variety. According to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC), 15 different breeds of pigs were raised for market in 1930's; today, six of them are extinct. Only three varieties--Hampshire, Yorkshire and Duroc--account for 75% of U.S. production. In the 1920s, some 60 breeds of chickens thrived on American farms; today one hybrid, the Cornish Rock cross, supplies nearly every supermarket. A single turkey dominates; the Broad Breasted White, a fast-growing commercial creation with such a huge breast and short legs that it is unable to mate naturally.

Mass marketing may demand a cow that produces more milk or a duck with a bigger breast. But narrowing the genetics means losing valuable traits, such as resistance to disease and drought, intelligence, esay birthing and longevity. Alarmed at the trend, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is creating a national gene bank in Fort Collins, Colorado for endangered livestock. The urgency has grown since 9/11. "A virus introduced into a poultry plant with 10,000 birds of a single variety is a potent terrorist opportunity," says ALBC executive director Charles Bassett.

But what fires up many old-breed farmers--and draws food lovers from New York to California--is how the heritage meat tastes. Chefs rave about the complex, succulent flavors of Tamworth pork and Katahdin lamb. Martha Stewart has featured a Standard American Bronze on her Thanksgiving cooking show. At Muss & Turner's in suburban Atlanta, chef Todd Mussman puts Lazy S Farm's lean, dark Red Wattle ham on sandwhiches that sell for $11.99 each. "The texture is so silky, it melts on the tongue," say Mussman. He tells customers they are saving not just endangerd breeds but small farmers too. Says Mussman: "People want to feel good about what they eat."

And there's a lot to feel good about. Most of those animals are organically fed and humanely raised in free-range conditions, although that is at least in part out of necessity. Heirloom breeds tend to be unsuited to factory farming; they grow slowly and reach smaller sizes than industrial varieties. At Flying Pigs Farm in Shushan, N.Y., Gloucestershire Old Spots hogs root around in the woods even in the snow--making for a marbled meat that is like other old breeds', high in healthy omega-3 fatty acids. At Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch in Lindsborg, Kansas, owner Frank Reese brags that he doesn't clip his purebreds' beaks or pump them full of antibiotics. A webcam allows customers to spy on their prospective Thanksgiving dinners while the birds are still squabbling and gobbling grasshopppers.

Much of the trade in heritage fare these days is either at farmers' markets or over the Internet. LocalHarvest.org connects consumers to 140 heritage-meat farms, including Peacful Pastures, in Hickman, Tenn., which sells lamb from rare Lincoln Longwools. HeritgeFoods USA.com touts Texas' Thunder Heart ranch, whose bison are killed in the fields in a Cohahuiltecan Indian ceremony. Farmers are even putting up their own websites and shipping directly to consumers. Two years ago, Mary and Rick Putman added Bourbon Reds and Narragansetts, an old New England breed, to their Fresno, Calif., ranch and began selling them at MarysTurkeys.com. Soon, says Mary, "I was on my hotline eight hours a day with calls about heritage turkeys." She sold 5,000 last year, including one to a U.S. soldier in Iraq.

Such efforts have led to a comeback in heritage turkeys that an ALBC report this month calls "amazing." In 1997, from eight traditional varieties, only 1,335 breeding turkeys were found nationwide, including just six of the splendidly black-and-white-feathered Narragansetts. Today the total has grown to 5,363, including 686 Narragansetts. Highland cattle and Shetland sheep and also moving out of the danger zone. And this month Heritage Foods USA began selling rare Barred Plymouth Rock chickens from farms in Michigan and Kansas. "It's been 50 years since authentic chickens have been on the market," says Reese.

How big that market will grow and how much of a premium customers will be willing to pay remains to be seen. Today heritage turkey sells for up to $6 per lb. and Red Wattle pork for $10 per lb., prices that won't fall unless a lot more Americans change their eating habits. Meanwhile, however, the trend is supporting a growing number of small farms that might otherwise have gone under. Since Sorell began raising old breeds, his farm income has doubled, to $40,000 a year, and could grow bigger when his Red Wattle pork starts getting ground for sausages and hot dogs. But profit, he says, is not the point. " I don't like to see things disappear," he says--not small farms or Red Wattles.

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