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A Better Sort of Pig

By MARK BITTMAN [ http://bittman.blogs.nytimes.com/ ]
July 19, 2011, 8:30 pm

In May, I went to Iowa, primarily to learn more about so-called conventional agriculture, those thousand-acre farms growing corn and soybeans, planted, tended and harvested largely by machine. (We have plenty of the other type — what’s variously called traditional, or alternative, or non-conventional — in the Northeast.) But thanks to an auspicious combination of topsoil, climate, topography and weather, Iowa is among the best locales for farming in North America, and I saw a wide range of practices.

In Dyersville, I found Becker Lane Organic Farm [ http://www.beckerlaneorganic.com/ ], a next-generation organic operation run by Jude Becker. (When I told Michael Pollan I would be driving around Iowa, he said I’d be making “a huge mistake” if I didn’t visit Jude Becker; he was right.)

Jude Becker is young (34), hard-working and determined. He began farming in 1997 on land leased from his grandmother (he’s the sixth generation to farm this land), with borrowed tractors and seven pigs. He’s since traveled to Europe to study organic techniques and is now raising 5,000 pigs a year on 300 acres; he has five employees, including a full-time salesperson.

If for no reason other than taste, this is a success story: Becker’s pork is among the best I’ve ever had. But when you see his operation, which is far from small — he’s raising 400 pigs at a time, along with rotating crops throughout pie-shaped sectors of his acreage, in a scheme that seems logical and orderly — you start to appreciate just how practical, ethical and simply beautiful sustainable farming can be.

Becker himself clearly appreciates it. “If I were someone else I would be jealous of me,” he tells me.

Becker, in a way, is part of a natural progression that, commercially at least, began with Paul Willis. Some 40 years ago, Willis — having returned from a stint in the Peace Corps in Nigeria — began helping out on the family farm in Thornton, Iowa, about 150 miles northwest of Dyersville. Starting with a single sow and her piglets, Willis raised pigs the old-fashioned way — outside — but as his business grew, he felt himself apart from an increasingly industrial format: “We were being squeezed: the trend was towards more and more confinement, and it didn’t appeal to me.”

He began wondering whether he could market his more traditional pork as something besides “the other white meat.” And, in 1994, he met the perfect partner, Bill Niman (a friend of mine, a gem of a human and a man who ranks high among those who’ve brought naturally raised meat to the fore in the last 20 years or so). Paul began to organize a loose network of Midwestern pork farmers into what’s now Niman Ranch Pork [ http://www.nimanranch.com/pork.aspx ], which Paul manages. (Bill Niman is no longer involved with Niman Ranch.)

Paul himself is not as active a farmer as he was, but he still brings about 400 pigs to market each year. (I hung out with about 50 of them in Paul’s pasture one gorgeous day; afterwards, Paul and I headed into town for breakfast at the Chit Chat Café.) The Niman Ranch operation is impressive: 500 farmers under contract, 150,000 pigs a year (including Paul’s contribution) are sent to slaughter. This number pales a little when you consider that industrial pork producers kill 400,000 pigs a day, but given that the Niman pigs are treated well it’s a number that matters.

Niman pork is not organic, but it’s “natural” in the old-fashioned sense: no antibiotics, no stalls or crates, the pigs hanging out in groups with unrestricted access to outside; pretty much the way you want your pigs to be treated.

The meat produced by both the Becker Lane and Niman operations is expensive — it costs at least twice as much as conventionally raised pork — and they don’t produce all that much, at least by industrial standards. But if you buy the “less is more” argument — that is, if we produce, buy and eat less meat we can afford to make that meat higher quality: fewer drugs, better-treated animals and so on. That treatment costs money, but as Becker says, “Food isn’t just a pile of stuff to be measured by weight and volume, and there’s a reason industrially produced meat is just a little more expensive than garbage.” It’s a quantity versus quality argument.

That the quality is appreciated is evident from the fact that neither operation can keep up with demand. Chipotle buys all the pork shoulder that Niman Ranch offers them, and much of the rest goes to restaurants and supermarket chains around the country. About half of the non-organic prosciutto made by La Quercia comes from Niman; all of their organic prosciutto comes from Becker Lane. (Both, by the way, are better than almost all of the Italian prosciutto you can buy in the States, and as good as much of the considerably more expensive Spanish stuff.)

To me, the biggest issue is not whether pigs are raised organically or “naturally”; it’s whether they’re raised well. The prophylactic antibiotics and containment that have become routine practice threaten the health and welfare of both pigs and humans; the system also produces pork that doesn’t make very good eating.

While Becker has chosen to farm organically (not easy, because organic grain can be hard to come by), he acknowledges that others have good reasons not to. But he believes there are simple things that can improve all pork production, like getting rid of gestation crates and routinely administered antibiotics. That’s been already done in the U.K., Sweden and Denmark, and it’s scheduled to happen in much of the rest of Europe as well. When more farmers follow the example of pioneers like these, we can do the same.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

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