Word: ranch
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...sourcing - as well as a simple enthusiasm for the taste adventure. Just as Americans flocked to garden nurseries this spring to scoop up tomato plants and seeds, now they are sharing tips on where to find the best pork bellies (try local farmer's markets, online sources like Niman Ranch or local Asian and Mexican markets...
...hard to drive down a residential street in Miami Gardens, Fla., and not see two, three, four houses in foreclosure. Some have been on the auction block since last year; they are once handsome, pastel-colored ranch houses that are now surrounded by waist-high weeds or boarded-up windows. "The tarp on that busted roof is about to disintegrate, it's been there so long," says Andre Williams, a Harvard-educated real estate attorney and Miami Gardens city councilman, pointing at one of the houses and shaking his head at the state of the solid middle-class, African-American...
...model for how the new paradigm could work is Niman Ranch, a larger operation that Bill Niman founded in the 1990s, before he left in 2007. (By his own admission, he's a better farmer than he is a businessman.) The company has knitted together hundreds of small-scale farmers into a network that sells all-natural pork, beef and lamb to retailers and restaurants. In doing so, it leverages economies of scale while letting the farmers take proper care of their land and animals. "We like to think of ourselves as a force for a local-farming community...
Other examples include the Mexican-fast-food chain Chipotle, which now sources its pork from Niman Ranch and gets its other meats and much of its beans from natural and organic sources. It's part of a commitment that Chipotle founder Steve Ells made years ago, not just because sustainable ingredients were better for the planet but because they tasted better too - a philosophy he calls Food with Integrity. It's not cheap for Chipotle - food makes up more than 32% of its costs, the highest in the fast-food industry. But to Ells, the taste more than compensates...
Environmental Impact: Living with the Land To prevent his ranch from becoming overgrazed, Niman shifts his cattle around the land, ensuring that the grass has time to recover between feedings. The result is a surprisingly low-impact hamburger, since grass doesn't need chemical fertilizer to grow and its presence helps prevent soil erosion. There's no need to clean up manure - with Niman's low cattle density, the waste just fertilizes the land...