Biogeochemistry ON THE FARM

Eliza MacLean MEM’96 Puts Nutrient Cycling to Work on Her Alamance County Farm p. 2

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.”

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