The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (52 page)

The kaleidoscope of varieties made a mockery of the idea that wheat is generic and anonymous, that it doesn’t have as much diversity or potential for flavor as a tomato. The possibilities seemed endless, which I suppose is the point of keeping all these potential lines going. More diversity, more opportunity. It was, when I stopped to think about it, the aboveground manifestation of what Jack argued should be happening belowground. In healthy soil, the diversity of microorganisms helps ensure healthy plants—but exactly how that happens is a bit of a mystery. Looking out at these wheat varieties, I felt that same sense of mystery underlying all the possibility.

My hope that Barber wheat would become the most desired in the world suddenly felt naive. In the best scenario, Barber wheat would do what all of the wheat I was looking at had the potential to do: thrive in a specific environment and remain open for selection on the most local of terms. It was Borlaug in reverse, really—breeding for greater distinction rather than dumbing down wheat in an effort to make it grow everywhere.

Steve’s field—and the community of farmers, bakers, chefs, millers, brewers, and breeders that orbits around it—is a new kind of botanical ark, one that preserves the past by allowing those genes to thrive in the future. It dares us to re-create our relationship to wheat, to do what we all really want for our children, which is to provide them with the genetics to succeed while at the same time celebrating their distinctiveness.

I wanted a bird’s-eye view of the diversity, just as, a few years earlier, I’d gotten a look at the
dehesa
from a rooftop. Back then, I’d seen how farming could sculpt a landscape—the pigs leading the dance of grazing cattle and sheep, the enormous oaks interspersed among the famously lush grasses, and the community of homes and churches dotting the landscape. From that perch, I’d seen how interconnected it all was.

Steve’s experimental plot didn’t require a rooftop for me to see that the real connective power wasn’t in the field. It was in the way he’d fashioned the Bread Lab. In opting out of building what he
should
have built—a laboratory focused only on creating new wheat varieties—Steve enlarged the vision. He complicated the picture. The Bread Lab functions like those rich striations of
jamón ibérico
fat Eduardo held up to the light. It keeps all the disparate parts together. It also forces them to mingle.

John Muir, who described how everything in nature is “hitched to everything else in the Universe,” would not have said the same about our current food system. Because our food system is disconnected. It operates in silos: vegetables here, animals there, grains somewhere else—each component part separate from the others and unhitched to any kind of culture.

Steve devised the Bread Lab to do the work that wheat, a social crop, always used to do: create community. He forces the socialization a little, much as Klaas and Mary-Howell’s grain mill forces the community of Penn Yan farmers to exchange ideas. He clears the way for connections to happen. He helps the hitching.

Steve’s work is not merely the difference between the tabletop monocultures of Kansas and a field like this one. It is the difference between an antiquated system of agriculture and the possibility for a future of delicious food.

E
VER
SINCE
I started cooking professionally, I have been sensitive to the evening hours between 5:30 and 7:00, from the late spring through the first weeks of fall. Photographers and film directors call this the golden hour, the magic time in the day when the sun is low in the sky and the light turns soft, diffusing over everything it touches.

Chefs miss out on the golden hour because most professional kitchens don’t have windows. But I’ve never heard a chef grumble about missing this time of day. I’ve never heard one even mention it, though I think about it all the time. No one warned me that my career, which is to say most of my life, would require that I not only miss the most magical time of the day but also that I feel the
most stressed
at the most magical time of the day. The first orders of the evening arrive at the pass just after 5:30 p.m., as the cooks finish their preparations and launch into dinner service. Our pressurized little world gets much more pressurized during those golden hours we cannot see.

The first time I visited Stone Barns, four years before the center opened to the public, it was late in the day. I walked into the former milking area, which was already slated to become Blue Hills’s kitchen. It wasn’t the size of the space or the plans for its transformation that gripped me. It was the south wall, with its five sun-drenched windows. They looked out on a courtyard surrounded by the collection of Norman-style stone barns.
Windows
,
I said to myself, as if this were all that mattered. This kitchen would have windows. I felt like the luckiest chef in the world.

Imagine my surprise when, after just a week of watching that golden-hour light bouncing off the old barns, I found myself turning away from the scene. I realized the windows only made me more miserable: I could see what I was missing.

I was thinking about those missed hours one summer evening not long ago while having dinner in Klaas and Mary-Howell’s kitchen. It was my first visit to their farm in two years. Looking out the back window, I watched the sun splash golden light across a field of emmer wheat.

Chefs, in my experience, seem especially captivated by farms scenes like this. That’s not because our success depends on the quality of what those fields produce (though of course it does) but because in our windowless, turbulent little world, a farm seems like a rare dose of what endures. Watching the wheat field as it played tricks with the fading sun, I felt a sense of serenity and stasis.

But for Klaas, who dines with Mary-Howell in the same seat at the kitchen table every evening, the view elicited an entirely different reaction. For many years, he told me, he’d looked out over his fields with a deep restlessness. He longed for a different view, one that included animals grazing the pastures, which is precisely what came into focus as I stretched for a slice of Mary-Howell’s homemade spelt bread. There were dairy cows foraging one of the fields, and just below a dilapidated barn I could make out pigs rooting in straw. Mary-Howell served the bread with butter made from the cows, alongside three hulking pork chops.

During the previous year, Klaas had expanded the farm yet again by bringing in livestock, something he once had not wanted to do. Blue Hill was slated to buy most of what he raised, so I came to learn about how the animals added to the already robust farm and to understand why, in his late fifties—an age when most farmers scale back if not retire—Klaas decided to
“complicate things just a bit” and engage in a part of farming he knew very little about.

Over dinner, I reminded him that he was already doing groundbreaking, experimental work, not only by managing complex rotations for his soil and propagating important older varieties of grain but also by inspiring an entire community to farm without chemicals and, along with Mary-Howell, providing those farmers with an infrastructure to make it happen. How much better could he get?

He spooned a helping of butter so large onto his bread that I thought he was joking. “I met you ten years ago,” he said matter-of-factly. “Our sound bite then was: Go organic, change the world. It was sort of said tongue-in-cheek, but since then what’s evolved is a better understanding of what’s actually needed to change the world.”

Even if farmers are rotating their crops to support soil health and even if they are preserving vast landscapes for food production, they’re not doing enough unless they’re also feeding the maximum number of people directly, Klaas told me.

“If they’re not doing that, they have more work to do,” he said. He and Mary-Howell had always made a conscious effort to grow as much as they could for human consumption. That’s why they started growing bread wheat in the first place and it’s why they’ve continued to grow crops like kidney beans, even though they haven’t been particularly profitable.

“We wanted to balance the profits with the ethics,” he said. “And now that the bills are paid and the children have grown, we’re able to think more this way. So we looked at our farm more critically and went to work trying to figure out the right balance—feed people, feed the soil, and make a profit. The answer was staring me in the face. I just didn’t see it.”

It wasn’t until Klaas and Mary-Howell traveled to Europe the previous summer that he was able to see. “Everywhere we went we passed animals, cows especially, and then walked over incredibly rich soil—the richest soil I’d ever seen.”

Klaas took Mary-Howell to Laverstoke, where nearly a decade before I
had first met him and the Fertile Dozen of visionary farmers. The former race-car driver turned über-farmer Jody Scheckter now had a thriving farm that fed thousands of people. From Jody’s dining room table, Klaas and Mary-Howell could see grain fields and pastures for cows, chickens, and pigs. There was even a small herd of buffalo. The soil was dark and rich. They ate lunch with everything sourced from the farm.

Jody had apparently listened carefully to the Fertile Dozen’s advice. Klaas was struck by how in so short a time he had “closed the nutrient cycle,” creating a self-sustaining farm wherein the waste from one part became food for another. The crop rotations were finely tuned with the animal rotations. The whole farm revolved around supporting the biological health of the soil.

Nothing is more typical of Klaas, or more estimable, than this: in that moment of humbling irony—the former student surpassing the teacher—he wanted only to return to his farm, because he realized there was
more work to do.

“All during lunch I kept saying to myself,
This is the view I need to have from my kitchen window. This is what’s been missing.”

Klaas and Mary-Howell started small, introducing a few dairy cows to the farm. Their daughter, Elizabeth, was especially drawn to cows and wanted at one point to become a vet. Pretty soon, more cows. Klaas grazed the animals on the cover crops that were meant to benefit the soil, like clover. The cows ate the tops—what Klaas calls “rocket fuel for ruminants”—and the rest of the plant was plowed in, along with the cows’ manure, to feed the soil’s microorganisms.

I was surprised to learn that Klaas’s brothers were also beneficiaries of the new system. Profits on their dairy farm had been declining for years as feed costs continued to rise. Finally, they decided to transition to organic in order to sell their milk at much higher prices.

I wondered if Klaas felt vindicated. After all, his brothers had once scorned his decision to go organic. When I suggested that a “Hey, bro, you blew this one”
wouldn’t have been uncalled for, he merely shrugged. “It’s turned out to be a very good development for all of us.”

Klaas harvests some of his cover crops and sells them to his brothers for high-quality feed. And his brothers, who are required by organic regulations to stop milking part of their herd for a certain period, can send these “dried-out”
cows over to Klaas to graze with his daughter’s cows—adding even more manure to the soil.

“We’re in a symbiotic relationship now,” he said, smiling. “As Joel Salatin said at Laverstoke, the goal is ‘more than the sum of its parts.’ I subscribe to that. I see the wisdom of that now in ways that I didn’t see ten years ago.”

After dinner, Klaas and Mary-Howell laid out several large pieces of cheese that had arrived earlier in the day from their eldest son, Peter, who was interning at an organic dairy in Germany. Klaas praised the farm for its work in renewable energy and raw-milk cheese.

“Cheese is a wonderful value-added product,” he said, hinting that Peter might one day further expand the dairy.

I got the sense that Klaas was looking beyond just Peter. Bringing in livestock, creating an infrastructure for cheese-making, and reimagining how the farm draws its energy are projects for multiple generations. It was Mennonite-like thinking (
When do you start raising a child?
),
preparing for a farm that will sustain the family one hundred years from now.

Over the previous few years, I had seen how the very best farming systems—whether the oak-lined pastures of the
dehesa
or the intricate canals of Veta la Palma—are constantly in flux, adapting and readapting to balance the needs of a healthy ecology with the imperative to feed people. Sitting at the kitchen table, staring out at the view of Klaas’s fields, I could see
evidence of that same evolution. It was (for me, anyway) a peaceful scene, but there wasn’t stasis.

In just two decades, Klaas and Mary-Howell have gone from harvesting a few organic grains to complex rotations that include heirloom wheat, vegetables, and legumes—many of them farmed on newly leased land. They’ve added seed production to the mix, and a seed distribution company to supplement the thriving mill and grain distribution business. And now they’ve created a small dairy.

One hundred years from now, I suspect that Klaas’s heirs will look out on a similar view. If I’m right, it won’t be because anyone fought against change. It will be because each generation embraced it.

Perhaps the most dynamic transformations are yet to come. Klaas no longer thinks of the farm as an entity all to itself (not that he ever really did) but as an interlocking piece of a larger community.

“I’m recognizing more and more that not every farm needs to, or should, do every operation,” he said, a large bite of the cheese punctuating his thoughts. “Which is really the point. Can you build a community where different enterprises fit into each other and make better use of resources? That’s the challenge.” By “challenge,” he meant
his
new challenge for the future—changing the farm, forever striving to make it more than the sum of its parts.