Biogeochemistry ON THE FARM
Eliza MacLean MEM’96 Puts Nutrient Cycling to Work on Her Alamance County Farm
by Lisa M. Dellwo
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 last year 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 degree, 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.
photo captions: pigs are stars of show; Eliza MacLean; chickens remove bugs and parasites