In Praise of Grazing
In 1996, when Ralph and Kimberlie Cole bought 100 acres on the scenic Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee, neither of them knew a thing about farming. At the time, they were drawing their paychecks in Oak Ridge, some 45 miles away, where Ralph oversaw a lab that studied soil contamination and Kimberlie worked to minimize pollution for the Department of Energy. But the two scientists shared a nagging desire to lead more self-sufficient lives. "We became aware of how much we had to work to buy the products we needed," says Kimberlie, "and we decided we could produce more of our own things and not be such consumers."
The Coles chose their plot for its sweeping green meadows and its gurgling stream flanked by laurels and hemlocks. But the soil was shallow and vulnerable to erosion -- the sort of sandy loam that, they quickly realized, didn't lend itself to large-scale fruit and vegetable production. "We just liked it aesthetically," Kimberlie remembers. "It wasn't until we moved here that we started thinking, what are we going to do with this?"
Raising organic cattle might not have seemed the obvious choice for two vegetarians, but soon after they purchased the land, the Coles ordered some chickens through the mail. "We didn't know what to do with the roosters," Ralph says, "so we decided to butcher one and try to eat it." It took them hours to figure out how to butcher that first bird, he says, but "we fried him that night and it was the best thing I'd had in 17 years."
By 2002, the Coles were selling beef, chicken, turkey, pork, and lamb directly from West Wind Farms, and in 2008 they hung up their lab coats for good. Over the years, they've meticulously grown their herds of cattle and sheep, feeding them nothing but "good clean grass" and using rotational grazing -- a way of systematically moving the animals for feeding -- in order to avoid soil erosion and cut short the parasite life cycle, thereby keeping flies and worms to a minimum.
Now a sprawling 650 acres (550 of which they lease), West Wind was among the first operations to have its meat certified under the Department of Agriculture's national organics program. Most of the Coles' customers buy at farmers' markets within a 200-mile radius of their home, but the couple also sells to such upscale restaurants as Blackberry Farm, in nearby Walland, and Felicia Suzanne's, in downtown Memphis. "I would put their steaks up against the best grain-finished beef any day," says Jeremy Barlow, the owner and chef of Nashville's Tayst Restaurant, a locavore favorite.
"The beauty of red meat," Ralph says, "is that herbivores like cattle and sheep are harvesting grass, which is a crop, but it's a crop that people can't use. So they're using a resource people can't use to make food that people can utilize."
These days the Coles' commitment to sustainability extends well beyond their livestock. They grow enough produce to feed themselves and supply a local community-supported agriculture (CSA) program; they use rainwater to meet all their farming and personal needs; and they've minimized their carbon emissions by converting their delivery truck to run on natural gas. This past summer they installed solar panels, which, in addition to powering their heavy-duty freezers, generate leftover energy for selling back to the grid. (They don't own a TV or DVD player, though Kimberlie admits they did buy a dishwasher -- "but only after we saw that it uses less water than hand-washing!")
"It did take some time to get here," says Kimberlie, looking out over the land they've nurtured over 15 years. "But our product is sustainable, our cattle are eating grass in the sunshine," and the steady demand suggests they're doing something right. After all, she says, "if it didn't taste good, people wouldn't want it."
