A visit to Ayrshire Farm in Upperville, VA

[Fat Guy]

I've just returned from a visit to a remarkable farm in Virginia.

Ayrshire Farm is the brainchild of Sandy Lerner. The story runs that, in 1984, Sandy and her husband were working in a University of California computer lab. They got tired of exchanging files by schlepping disks from one computer to another, so they built a device to connect all the computers in the lab together and manage the communications. Thus the modern incarnation of the local area network was born, and Sandy and her husband founded Cisco Systems in order to manufacture this helpful router-like item. She later sold her share of Cisco and started a cosmetics business, which she then sold to one of the big global luxury brands. In 1996 she purchased Ayrshire Farm.

The farm spans about 800 acres in Upperville, Virginia. If you fly to Dulles airport and drive due west for about an hour and a half you’ll get there. The farm started as a dairy operation in the 19th Century and, in 1921, the manor house (which is where we spent the night) was built. It was one of the first steel-reinforced structures of its kind. The farm and buildings fell into disrepair under the previous owner but after years of renovation by Sandy Lerner they have been restored to better-than-new condition.

The goal of Ayrshire is to be a working model for sustainable, self-sufficient, organic, humane farming. Spending a couple of days there has altered some of my thinking about how farm animals are treated and the appropriate response to that.

The trip was put together by Ayrshire Farm and the Certified Humane program. The Certified Humane program basically fills a big hole in the USDA's organic certification, because organic doesn’t necessarily mean animals are treated all that well. Under the Certified Humane program, which involves all sorts of inspections and regulations, animals get treated about as well as you could imagine. It’s a storybook farm existence, ending in as humane a slaughter as possible.

There were several serious people on the trip -- David Chang, one of the guys from Stone Barns, a writer from Time -- and then there was me. I get on well with the publicist who coordinated the trip so one of the seats in the van got designated for me.

We started with a tour of the farm. We visited the horses (Sandy Lerner is big into Shire horses, jousting and all that), which were the most impressive specimens of the equine world I’ve ever been close to. They make those Budweiser horses look wimpy. We saw chickens and turkeys in various stages of development, several herds of cattle of various heritage breeds, free-range veal calves and heritage-breed pigs, as well as the gardening operation. We spoke at length to the folks responsible for these animals and vegetables, and their enthusiasm was infectious.

After the tour, we had a tasting of several of the types of animals we’d just enjoyed visiting.

In my opinion, the two standout products of Ayrshire farm are the chicken and the veal. The chicken is as good a chicken as I’ve had in any country. To me it tasted as good as Bresse chicken, and better than the Label Rouge chicken that has been making the rounds of US restaurants. It’s great, great chicken. The veal is surprising because, though it is rosy in color on account of not being confined, it is as tender as and more flavorful than any veal I’ve had. If these two products penetrate the New York restaurant market, as I imagine they will eventually, they are really going to turn some heads.

The pork we tried was quite good but not as good as a lot of pork I’ve had. It lacked the marbled fat of truly great pork. And the beef, while tasty, was not competitive with the top tier of the market.

Now, I am hardly unaware of the horrors of factory farming. I have been inundated with literature, videos and pleas for ages. But none of that had much impact on me. My feeling has long been "If you're going to kill it and eat it anyway, who cares how it's treated when it's alive?" What affected me much more than all the factory-farming horror stories was seeing the opposite in action. The respect for animals radiated by every employee of Ayrshire is inspiring and really gets across the message that it does matter how animals are treated in life and at the time of slaughter. That this approach can also produce some pretty excellent products is also nice.

Some people care about organic. The more I learn about organic the less I care about it. Some people care about local. That's another instance where the more I learn about issues like "food miles" the less important I think they are. (Though the system has many flaws as implemented now, in principle I’m in favor of a global, industrial agricultural system in large part because I think it’s good that 90 percent of us don’t have to work on farms, and I like getting fresh produce year-round.) But when it comes to humane treatment of animals I've been having the opposite reaction: the more I think about those issues the more I care about them. So I am going to try harder to buy meat that was humanely raised and slaughtered.

I'm keenly aware of a few issues that limit my buy-in to the type of farming that Ayrshire practices. For one thing, food produced by these methods is expensive. Now some of that is because the marketplace is rigged by direct and indirect subsidies and schemes, and some of it is because industrial farms can externalize some of their costs, especially the environmental costs. But even accounting for all that, industrial agriculture is very efficient and allows even economically disadvantaged Americans to eat meat regularly. Yes, it is responsible for a lot of crappy junk food, but it is also the reason we can eat well and economically at excellent Chinese and other ethnic restaurants. So I’m not willing to rule out all but humanely raised meat from my diet, and I’m not going to push that decision on anybody else, especially not on poor people. But I’m going to try to be more sensitive to this issue, especially when I shop for meat.

Then we had dinner at the nearby restaurant operated by Ayrshire Farm, called the Hunter's Head Tavern. The tavern occupies the Carr House, a 1750 log cabin in downtown Upperville. It’s an appealing structure: as we were driving into town for the first time, I felt like I wanted to eat there before I even made the connection with the farm. Hunter’s Head Tavern is the first Certified Humane restaurant. All the meat either comes from Ayrshire or from other Certified Humane operators. Most of the ingredients are also organic, and the fish is all caught responsibly and sustainably.

As a restaurant, it’s also quite good. While not a temple of haute cuisine, the restaurant serves very good pub fare based on superb ingredients.

The fried chicken, fried beautifully and based on that terrific Ayrshire chicken, was probably the best thing on the table, or at least the best of the half-dozen things I tried tastes of.

The fish and chips were also great.

As was the country-fried (aka chicken-fried) steak.

That’s Sandy on the left, not the world’s best photo, blue shirt under white sweater, gesturing with her hand.

The next morning we went and watched chickens being “processed.” The chickens are placed upside down in metal cones, and their heads stick out the bottom. This seems to calm them and they just kind of hang there. Then a guy comes along and slits their throats with at “stunning knife,” which is an electrified blade that somehow uses the current so that the chickens feel no pain. The chickens then expire without much fanfare, and are taken away to be scalded, de-feathered and otherwise made ready to be eaten. The cows and pigs and other large livestock are slaughtered off premises, at a Certified Humane facility a little ways up the road. We didn’t see that, thank goodness.

Then we visited the third leg of the Ayrshire enterprise (the first two being the farm and the tavern): the Home Farm Store. This is a butcher, cheese and gourmet shop in nearby Middleburg, in a building that used to be a bank. To quote the literature, the store sells “Local meats, dairy products, fruits and vegetables, sustainably produced, mostly from Ayrshire Farm, such as certified humane and organic beef, pork, veal, chicken and sausage. The produce is sourced locally from area farms, including the Ayrshire Farm market garden.”

At the store we met Justin Severino, the head butcher and charcutier, who took us through a charcuterie tasting of both dry and fresh items, all of which were highly enjoyable.

And that was that. I wish we could have stayed a month.

[skipper10]

I've just returned from a visit to a remarkable farm in Virginia.

The goal of Ayrshire is to be a working model for sustainable, self-sufficient, organic, humane farming.  ...

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I am green with envy. VIP treatment at the Ayrshire Farms... Did they give you any goody bags? Any treats to take home? Never frozen chicken? Beef tenderloin? Please share, so we can enjoy them vicariously. I can't help wondering how anything from the meatcase in your picture would taste coming out of my oven. I've had Ayrshire schnitzel last year, it was amazingly good, but it also was unbelievably expensive. Last Thanksgiving their fresh turkeys were almost $200 for a large bird, even though large birds are not the tastiest.

Wouldn't it be nice if somewhere in their mission statement they said: our products are great and "affordable" for families, not just high end restaurants?

[Fat Guy]

There was an offer of samples to take home but I was flying from Dulles to Hartford, attending a Passover seder, then driving home to New York City. I just didn't think it was a good idea to carry the stuff around through all that, even if I did manage to get it past airport security. So all I took away were my memories.

[Meanderer]

I see that Ayrshire Farms is offering 10-12 lb. turkeys for $135. Does this reflect the true cost of humane treatment of organically raised turkeys? If so, I don't see Ayrshire Farms serving as a model for many farms located away from a very wealthy customer base.

The farmer from whom I have been purchasing my organic, free-range turkeys has been following humane practices(though I am not sure how they are butchered)and, although I don't know how her breed compares with that raised by Ayrshire Farms, I know it is a darn tasty bird and it cost me something like $35-40 for a 13-pounder. What accounts for the cost differential, I wonder?

[Fat Guy]

Most of the cost difference is probably attributable to the fact that Ayrshire is producing heritage-breed turkeys and has to incur all the expenses associated with being Certified Humane (as opposed to simply saying "we use humane practices") and certified USDA Organic. All that stuff, especially when done on a small, non-industrial scale, gets expensive. I don't think they're gouging; I just think that's the real cost of producing that level of product.

It's my major concern about the approach: a switch to this sort of farming would send the cost of meat skyrocketing. For some people, that's not a big deal: many of us could just eat 1/4 as much meat and be healthier; others have enough money that a 400% increase in meat prices wouldn't mean much. But for the economically disadvantaged, the current industrial agriculture regime -- distasteful as many of its practices are -- provides a way for all but the absolute poorest Americans to put meat on the table at will.

For me, the ideal farming operation is probably something like Murray's. There you have humanely raised chicken that doesn't wind up costing so much as to be a luxury item. It tastes better than factory-farmed chicken, and everything about the way it's raised and handled is better. And production is large enough that it's a respectable model for feeding a nation without needing to transform the US into an agrarian society.

[Meanderer]

The website of the farmer I had mentioned says that she raises bourbon reds and standard bronze turkeys, both of which are heritage breeds. Those turkeys are pasture raised(I've seen them out there), which I assume is considered a humane practice. I don't know anything else that she might do that is either consistent of inconsistent with what the humane certification would require but since certification evidently triples the price of the birds, I tend to think something is askew with the certification system.

[Fat Guy]

Certainly there are cheaper turkeys than Ayrshire turkeys -- the cheaper-than-Ayrshire category would include most turkeys for sale in the US. But like I said, there's a big difference between a single humane practice, such as pasture raising, and Certified Humane, which governs all aspects of handling from cradle to grave and involves inspections and rigorous standards. I doubt it alone can triple the cost of a product, but it does create a large additional expense. There's more information about the Certified Humane requirements here. In addition, the Ayrshire product is USDA Organic, which creates another set of costs. I don't know much about the breeds of turkeys and what it costs to raise each one, but there are different breeds in question as well. I didn't taste an Ayrshire turkey. I will say that the Ayrshire chicken I tried was amazingly good. Whether that, combined with the humane-and-organic certifications, makes it worth the markup over other chickens is a matter of personal opinion.