Word: farm
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...State Farm Insurance...
...dreamer, and his dreams have been fueled by a Rockefeller-size budget, but Barber is no purist. Stone Barns is an organic farm, but Blue Hill doesn't serve only organic food. The fruit, for instance, is almost all grown with chemical inputs. Organic fruit is available from California - which doesn't suffer from the Hudson Valley's humidity - but Barber prefers to buy locally. That's partly because the fruit tastes better without being trucked across the continent and partly because Barber wants to encourage non-industrial, regional agriculture. That means he lives with some pesticide residue...
...Other compromises are made with the farm's livestock. Stone Barns is raising roughly 450 turkeys this season, and most of them are Broad-Breasted Whites, the conventional breed you can buy in a regular grocery store. The Whites are distinguished by their genetically huge breasts and - as a consequence - their inability to have sex with one another. (Virtually every turkey you have ever eaten could not copulate without human aid.) These turkeys are a freak of human engineering, so what are they doing at an idyll like Stone Barns? Ditto the Cornish/Rock Cross chickens, a quick-growing, large-breasted...
...difference at Stone Barns is that the chickens - and the turkeys, and the pigs, and the lambs, and the calves - eat the farm's grass rather than fattier, less healthy grain feed purchased from a supplier. The grass is carefully maintained by rotating the animals on it - veal calves eat the tastiest grass and drop their manure on the remainder. Chickens then come in and clean the calf manure by foraging in it; they also eat some of the less desirable grass. Chickens leave their own manure, which helps the grass rejuvenate. Unlike animals raised in feedlots and pens, Stone...
...Barns' complexly symbiotic, intensely managed system could work on a large scale. Not because it would necessarily require a Rockefeller to fund it - as Pollan points out, there are other ?grass farmers? around the country who are succeeding with the help of proselytizing websites like eatwild.com. But not every farm will have a Dan Barber behind it - an obsessive, a guy who won't come in from the rain so he can show you the compost pile...