Ask For Change
Meat as a Wedge Issue
By Mike McConnell, Vice Chairman of Niman Ranch and a founder of the Husbandry Institute
Americans love meat. We eat more than 65 billion pounds of it each year; that’s more than 200 pounds for every man, woman and child. Americans also love cheap food. We spend the lowest percentage of our income on food of any nation in the history of the world.

The combination of these two facts is devastating. In 1950 there were more than 1 million hog farms in the U.S. In 2004, the country was producing more pork than in 1950, but the number of farms had shrunk to a mere 65,000. Today, industrial hog operations cram up to 100,000 hogs into closed factories, with slatted floors under which manure can be flushed into multi-acre cesspools.

The effect of the disappearance of the family farm on the social fabric of the nation is difficult to quantify. But driving down country roads in rural America and seeing farmhouses just abandoned as families have given up and moved to town, one realizes that a profound shift is taking place. Schools close, forcing school children to bus further and further to regional facilities. Town centers and locally owned stores shutter from dwindling populations. Only the regional Wal-Mart benefits as families are forced to drive hours each week just to supply their necessities.

The long-term effect of this removal of a population from the land, of the destruction of local communities by concentration of land into the hands of fewer and fewer people, is difficult to assess. But in 1787, two years before the ratification of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison:

“I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”

There is no question what the framers of our nation had in mind – a country in which the majority of its citizens were in touch with the land, and living in local communities. And they were right. The gradual dissociation of the American electorate from the affairs of its government has coincided with this shift from a largely rural to a largely urban population.

Behind the drive for cost cutting is another fact: the food industry is fast becoming controlled by a few mega-corporations. According to a study by the University of Missouri, in 2002 only four beef packers controlled 81 percent of the beef processed in the country. Four pork packers controlled 59 percent of the hogs processed. And only four companies controlled 46 percent of the hogs produced. Retailing had also become highly concentrated, with five companies controlling 38 percent of the nation’s food retailing – and the drive for further concentration has only continued.

The net result of this concentration for those farmers who remain on the land is that the formerly wide variety of options to market their food has shrunk radically. You may produce the finest-tasting pork in the country, treat your land as your home and heritage, manage your farm as if you swam in the local stream and drank water from your own well. But when you go to market, you can only sell your livestock (or your grain, or your beans) into a commodity system controlled by a few large corporations. And they tell you what your meat (or grain, or beans) is worth. You can look it up in the Wall St. Journal on the Commodities page.

I grew up on a farm and I understand the challenges of competing with these conglomerates. So when I met Bill Niman in 1996, I saw a possibility that I had not seen before: creating an alternative distribution through which family farmers could reach urban markets and reach buyers who put a premium on the care they took of their animals, of their land and for the superior quality meat that they could produce.

Bill had been raising cattle in the San Francisco Bay area for more than 15 years, and over that time a number of bay area chefs had come to appreciate his beef, not only for its flavor but for the way it was raised. As demand for his beef outgrew his own herd’s ability to supply, he began marketing the beef of a few friends whose values he shared, and also the pork and lamb of a few like-minded ranchers.

The question we asked ourselves: could this be scaled to be more than a “feel good” local effort, and be made into a system that would provide a meaningful alternative distribution system for family farmers. We knew there was a need; we did not know if we could build a viable alternative. The odds were certainly stacked against us. At every step of the way, our costs would be higher: the farmers’ too because he or she was raising animals humanely, not using growth hormones or daily fed antibiotics. Processing would cost more on a small scale; transportation would as well. At least in our early stages, our meat would have to cost double what the commodity markets were paying. Was there a market for this kind of meat?

The question of long-term business viability is still unanswered, but we definitely made progress. In 2005, Niman Ranch sold more than $50 million of beef, pork and lamb to American chefs and retailers. More than 500 farmers and ranchers now market their livestock under our brand. One out of every 150 hog farmers in the country now depend on Niman Ranch to reach the market.

But this is in an overall market in which more than $12 billion worth of pork was sold. And our 600 head of cattle harvested per month, while gratifying to us, is miniscule in the face of the 1.7 million cattle coming out of America’s industrial feedlots each month.

So, is the cup mostly empty or partly full? That’s where you come in. Because in the nearly ten years I have been working on this issue, one realization has become central to my thinking: Restaurants and retailers don’t think that Americans care – about humane husbandry, about family farming, about water quality, about greenhouse gases, about sustainable rural communities. They think all we care about is price.

My wake-up call came in a meeting with a well-known Bay area chef. He said, “I think what you guys are doing is important. I really believe in it. But that’s a personal choice I am making. My customers don’t really care.” And then it hit me: Of course that’s what he thinks. Because his customers aren’t telling him otherwise!

All too often, when we walk into a restaurant, or we walk into a retail store, we check our values at the door. If we had had the time, money or ability to go to Whole Foods, we would have. The fact that we are somewhere else means we have given up, at least for that shopping trip. The fact that we are not eating at a restaurant well known for their commitment to social values, means we have given up on striving for something better, at least for that meal. As a result, chefs and retailers are buying as if you didn’t care. Because you didn’t tell them.

The average American is no expert in meat or meat issues. So it can be daunting to think about asking questions about the meat a chef is serving or a butcher is selling. But more and more people are seeing that it is important to do so. Working last year with a new organization, the Husbandry Institute, I developed a short list of questions that could be published on a wallet-sized card. A broad coalition of groups are now supporting the Ask for Change campaign – a campaign we kicked off at the Waterkeeper Alliance national conference last June.

The wonderful and terrible thing about living in a capitalist society is that business will respond to consumer demand.

And so, as Waterkeepers across the country employ the powerful stick of whistle blowing and suing polluters, each of us can simultaneously brandish the complementary carrot of expressing our demand for humanely, sustainably-raised meat. We can shop at stores that feature them. We can tell our grocers that we want them to stock sustainably-raised meats, not just in the meat case but in the deli case as well. We can make asking the waiter in a restaurant how their meat was raised, and by whom, part of our routine.
In short, we can tell those who sell to us that we want them to offer something that hasn’t damaged the Earth. If you don’t know what to ask, use the card that came with this issue of Waterkeeper magazine, or download an Ask for Change card from www.askforchange.org. Because if we don’t tell them, they won’t know.

If everyone who cares about our water, about our air, about humane husbandry, about the family farmer, speaks up and puts their dollar behind their words, the American meat industry will organize itself to serve that demand. The one beautiful thing about Big Ag is that it is agnostic about these issues; if they can make more money not destroying the Earth than by destroying the Earth, they’ll gladly do so.

But you’ve got to tell them.

White Dog Café, Philadelphia
By Judy Wicks

I had no idea about how pork was being raised in this country until I read John Robbins’s book Diet for a New America in 2000. I was outraged. I went to the kitchen of my restaurant and said, “Take all the pork off the menu.” I realized that the pork we were serving came from those barbaric conditions. Most of the pork in this country does, unless you seek an alternative. I said, “Take off the bacon, the ham, and the pork chops – until we can find a humane source for our pork.”

We asked the farmer who was bringing in free-range chicken and eggs from Lancaster County if he knew a farm that raised pigs in the traditional way, and he did. He started bringing in a pig every week. Now we get two pigs a week, whole pigs. This means we have to find a way to use all the parts, which is actually quite a good thing environmentally and a creative challenge for our chefs.

Eventually I was able to find acceptable sources for all of our meat products – our beef, pigs, lamb and chicken – mostly from small farms in our area or from Niman Ranch, which buys from small farmers. When I finally got that taken care of, I thought, well, I’m finished now; we have a cruelty-free menu. We’re the only restaurant in town that can say it, so we’ve cornered the market.

But then I said to myself: Judy, if you really care about how those animals are treated, if you really care about the small farmers who are being driven out of business, if you care about the environment, if you care about rural communities, if you care about the consumers who eat meat full of antibiotics and hormones, then you will teach your competitors to do what you’re doing. That was the next step for me, and it was a huge one because as business people we’re taught to be competitive and to want our restaurant to be the best restaurant.

So I started the White Dog Café Foundation. Our first project was to provide free consulting to our competitors – the chefs and restaurant owners of Philadelphia – to teach them the importance of buying humanely raised meat from local family farms.  I asked the farmer who was bringing in two pigs a week if he would like to expand his business. When he said yes, I asked what was holding him back. He said he needed $30,000 to buy a refrigerated truck. I loaned him the money and he bought the truck and now delivers to restaurants all over town. Since then the Foundation has provided grants to farmers to move from indoor to outdoor farming, to expand herds with heritage breeds and buy a second refrigerated truck. There are now actually two farmers delivering to us with trucks we helped them buy.