I grew up watching sides of beef marched through the back door of our family’s butcher-grocery shop on Shelter Island.
Balanced on the strong shoulders of white-coat clad delivery men on their weekly visits, they were hung on hooks in the frosty walk-in, where my stout and sturdy father, Michael Zavatto, would systematically break them down to their primal cuts — steaks, chops, roasts, butts, ground beef. We were a small, family shop; if you didn’t order ahead or we didn’t have what you wanted in the walk-in or neatly packaged and preserved in the freezer case up front, that was it. When the fresh supply was up, it was gone.
As an apron-clad teenager working behind the counter, and without too much deep thought about it, it just seemed like logical supply and demand. But a few years ago, that ingrained notion was challenged by a trip to Costco. I had a lot of company coming for the weekend, all showing up at different times, and planned to make a slow-cooker full of pulled pork for sandwiches my friends and family could graze on.
Hitting up the big box store, I stood deciding over a proliferation of pork butts to purchase. My eyes lifted and I looked at the sea of meats in front of and all around me, and I realized: The very next day all of it would be replenished to keep up with demand.
Where did it all come from?
The experience didn’t turn me into a vegetarian (I bought the butt), but it did make me think more carefully about where my meat comes from, how it’s raised, what that process does to the land, the people working in those plants, and my own complicit behavior in creating that endless demand to fill refrigerated cases in Costco and supermarkets. It seemed so far afield from the mom-and-pop ways of my dad’s shop.
But there are indeed better options here on the North Fork; really good ones, in fact. Small, enterprising, hardworking people who’ve decided to farm cattle (and sheep and goats) for meat and who are doing it in a way that’s healthy for the animal, regenerative to the land and creates the kind of circular economy that makes sense in smaller communities.
Even better: the meat is delicious, full of the kind of flavor and rich texture that speaks to its thoughtful origins. And oftentimes, you may even get to meet the farmer in charge of it all — a far cry from the cases of Costco.
Carnivore’s Dilemma
“What the slaughterhouse taught me was how not to do certain things,” says Bill Ackermann, owner of North Fork Grass Fed, the farm he runs with his wife, Gwen, in Cutchogue. Ackermann’s path to the pasture started when he eschewed a free ride to Columbia University for college in the Midwest, where he could immerse himself in two of his passions: football and farming.
“I literally put myself through college working on farms,” he says. Ackermann found that the Midwest slaughterhouses paid better than produce, so it was here he labored to fuel the fees of his undergraduate degree.
For Carol Festa and Tom Geppel, the owners of Southold’s 8 Hands Farm, the life-changing moment came from watching the 2008 documentary film “Food, Inc.” about the growth of corporate control of American farming and a brutal look at the health and safety of both the animals and workers in the agricultural industry.
“We had a real eye-opener because we thought we understood food until we saw that documentary, and we’re like, ‘oh, this is not good,’ ” says Festa. “This is what we’re supporting?”
Through that film, they also were introduced to the work and writings of Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Swoope, Va., a farmer who advocates for and teaches better farming practices. “We thought, ‘oh my gosh, I can’t believe this is how the animals are being raised; that can’t be good for human health and it can’t be good for our food system.’ ”
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the issues of our current large-scale food system into sharper focus for both suppliers and consumers, with supply chains breaking down everywhere from the farms to the slaughterhouses to the processing of meat to its transportation and sale. As supermarkets had to revert to limited purchasing restrictions, both the Ackermanns and Festa and Geppel found a willing and eager audience forming literal lines outside their doors; a kind of grass-fed, grass-roots Slow Food-esque movement in meat.
“The food system sort of fell apart at that time, and because we were here and we continued to operate as we were, we were able to at least serve the community,” says Festa, “which is really what we were trying to achieve.”
Where the Grass is Greener
Small, family-owned farms of all types used to make up the majority of farming in the United States, and certainly on Long Island, with each farm averaging around 100 acres, give or take. They saw skyrocketing growth between 1850 and 1935, with a peak of 6.8 million farms, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. It was also around this time that the high-volume, one-stop shopping convenience of supermarkets came to the fore, with the first official one, our very own King Kullen, launching in August 1930 in Jamaica, Queens. Demand grew, as did the size of farms.
But with growth came growing pains, especially in cattle farming. While the USDA came to be in 1862 by decree of President Abraham Lincoln, it would take time for science and safety to catch up with population explosion and demand, and to hem in the maladies of poor raising and processing conditions. Restrictions were created for wholesale purchasing and selling of meat raised outside the country, and, after Upton Sinclair’s shocking novel, “The Jungle,” which portrayed inhumane working and sanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry, the requirement of federal inspectors.
Today, all processed and packed meat must fulfill strict USDA guidelines, which is why even on a small scale, farms like North Fork Grass Fed, 8 Hands and Russell McCall’s cattle operation in Cutchogue must bring their cows set for slaughter to a federally certified processor before it lands on a grill or a burger bun.
Both the Ackermanns and Festa and Geppell buy their cattle from farms in Pennsylvania, that land of endless grazing grass, which is an important factor in each farm’s overarching plan: all the cows are grass-fed, start to finish. Grain is never part of the process. McCall, who also favors grass-feeding for his certified organic Charolais herd in Cutchogue, breeds his cows here, and actually came up with a new concept to add to the texture and flavor.
“About five years ago, my son [Brewster] thought the meat on the Charolais was a little dry,” says McCall. Knowing how tender wagyu beef is touted, they imported embryos from a Japanese wagyu bull and breed their beef to be a combination of the two. “We call it Wagolais.”
But the one thing they all share in common is that rotation of grass feeding right here on their myriad farms.
You may remember from biology class that cows have four chambers in their stomachs, one of which, the rumen, is uniquely able to convert grass — which also contains a significant amount of water and water-soluble carbohydrates, among other benefits — into protein from the process of the cow ingesting it, spitting it back out and then re-consuming the resulting cud. It’s a bizarre and wondrous system that affords the animal a complete diet, and it works.
A cow’s digestive system doesn’t respond the same way to grain, and consuming large quantities of it creates acid-building bacteria in their stomachs, leading to a pretty unhappy and unhealthy cow without intervention; one who winds up needing, among other adjustments, to ingest supplies of sodium bicarbonate (think: Cow Tums).
“If you’re doing your job right, you’re not a livestock person. You’re really managing the grass,” says Festa. “The way our industry has evolved to sort of force an animal, whose stomach is uniquely designed to extract nutrition from grass, to now have them eating something that is so not what they should be eating … You know, they shouldn’t be eating grain.”
Ackermann’s commitment to an all-grass, carefully dictated diet came from seeing first-hand what not to do to a cow.
“One of the places I worked, they had feedlots. And I’m like, this doesn’t look exactly right to have this animal walking almost belly deep in things that they’re not supposed to be walking in. I never liked that, but that was what they knew,” he says. “I also didn’t like all the stress that feedlots put on animals, not to mention all the antibiotics. You read about it now, but this was in the ’70s and nobody was talking about it.”
When the Ackermanns put the pieces of their Cutchogue cattle farm together, it eventually grew to consist of around 25 acres of different plots, stitched together like a patchwork quilt of gently undulating pastures, 12 of which are for grazing.
“The reality of it is, you know what’s going to happen to them. So, why should they be stressed for whatever that period of time is they’re here for?” Ackermann says.
He created a situation where the cows could graze on grass, rotating them from spot to spot, eating what was healthy and living a relatively stress-free life. The only consistent angst appears to come in the form of moony-eyed separation anxiety from the Ackermann’s main bull, “Fat Boy,” a Dexter breed with the permanent job of chief herder at North Fork Grass Fed, and with a clear devotion to Ackermann’s attentions. (Cows meant for slaughter on the Ackermanns’ or Festa and Geppel’s farms don’t get names.)
“I’m dead-set against anything corn,” Ackermann says, “because if you look at the DNA makeup of any kind of herbivore, they never ate corn, ever. That’s not part of their normal process.”
The only “grain” Ackermann’s cows ever see comes in the form of North Fork Brewing and Greenport Harbor Brewing’s leftover mash from making beer. “It’s super pure, high in protein, high in mineral content,” says Ackermann, and all the carbohydrates are fermented out.
He’s in a constant state of land stewardship. He overseeds his acres, mostly a rye-blend from New Zealand, which has a good amount of carbohydrates, as well as three or four types of clover, chicory, a specific alfalfa for grazing and, maybe this year, a sorghum sudangrass hybrid that fortifies the soil and which the cows adore.
Ackermann also adds a bit of molasses to their diets. “[It’s] a prebiotic for the rumenants, in that the molasses actually feeds the good bacteria in their stomachs and then helps them digest. It’s like everything else: There’s an art and there’s a science.”
Living from the Land
Life on a farm is certainly appealing from the outside — the aesthetic beauty of open fields and happy grazing animals, the notion of you and your community eating what you’ve grown and raised. Writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in his beautiful book “The Rural Life:”
“… beyond the literal landscape — the one that has been tilled and planted or logged or fenced or simply let alone — there is the ideal landscape that lives only in the mind. Every day you explore the differences between the two.”
Farming is, of course, hard daily work of not just the mounting tasks at hand from dawn ’til dusk, but in dealing with new problems to solve, new moments of learning and adjusting.
Ackermann had several decades of experience in animal husbandry as well as vineyard management, which he still does as well, before beginning his cattle endeavors. For Festa, who grew up in an Italian family from Queens and worked in sales, and Geppel, an accountant by trade who dreamed of working in the food world, the learning curve was steep — but exciting. Their switch from acceptable white-collar careers to living off the land raised eyebrows at first.
“Both my parents were immigrants. They both grew up on farms. By the time my mom was in third grade, her dad was like, ‘You can write your name, you can do basic math. I need you on the farm.’ So they made a point of never teaching me a thing,” Festa laughs. “Kind of like, ‘you’re going to college and you’re going to have an office job.’ Imagine the horror when we said we’re going to start a farm!”
Festa and Geppel started with sheep, added chickens and, finally, cattle, which they farm on around 70 acres total that they lease or own, rotating the animals diligently to both keep them on fresh grass and allow the land to be restored and re-seeded. They sell their meat at their butcher counter in the giant barn shop and café on Cox Lane. A recent partnering with the young owners of the food truck and catering business, Fyr + Salt, offers dishes gleaned only from what’s raised and grown on Festa and Geppel’s land.
The Ackermanns keep their meat distribution to a tight, curated client list that’s on a first come, first served basis. They also sell items like ground beef to Green Hill Kitchen in Greenport and Greenport Harbor Brewery’s taproom restaurant in Peconic, where the sublime burgers are exceedingly popular. McCall sells his from a self-serve freezer out of his tasting room, where you can head in to grab four-packs of patties or steaks for purchase. Some East End restaurants, like Bridgehampton standbys Sip and Soda and, on occasion, Armin & Judy, also rotate McCall’s ground beef for burgers onto the menu when they can. And his now-famous Thursday burger nights at the winery are a popular night out on the North Fork, with the meat’s flavor and juiciness renowned.
Which, in the end, is the meat of the matter.
“The very first animal that we processed, I purposely wanted to compare it to the grocery store. My son was here with his dog, and we got your obligatory ribeyes — ours and the same cuts from the grocery store,” Ackermann says. “We cooked them and we tried them. We just gave the grocery store one to the dog. Nothing against the grocery store, but you couldn’t even eat it.”
