Although it felt better to raise cattle that weren’t drugged up, economically it was hard to rationalize the decision. Sales barns in the Midwest feed into the industrial agricultural system and make no distinction between grass-fed beef and doped up beef. A farmer just pulls his trailer up to the sales barn, drops the cattle off, and the buyers—huge conglomerates like Hormel, Tyson Foods, or Swift—establish the price for that day. Farmers found themselves between a rock and a hard place. Many opted to cut back on hormones and make up the extra cash in town working a full time job.
The key to sustaining an organic, traditional farming operation is to link the small farms of the Driftless with nearby big city markets. Jamie’s man on the ground in cities of the Midwest is Todd Moore, a veteran of Chicago’s punk-rock kitchens and Milwaukee’s best French restaurants. He runs sales and operations for Jefferson Twp., which means he is in a lot of restaurants, speaking with a lot of chefs, passing out a lot of sample slabs of grass-fed beef and pork.
—Sascha Matuszak, writing in Roads & Kingdoms about the distinct geological, agricultural and socio-political identity of the Driftless, a four-state region within the American Midwest that was not scoured by glaciers, and where small-scale farming thrives.
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