Innovation on the Farm

(page 2 of 2)

But New Yorkers liked the taste of Flying Pigs' rare breed Black Gloucestershire Old Spots and Tamworth pigs, and soon orders poured in from high-end city restaurants such as Mas, Savoy, and Il Bucco. Today, Yezzi and Small raise 600 pigs. To cut the costs of transportation, they co-founded an organization called Farm to Chef, with a $110,000 grant from the New York Agriculture Dept. The organization links local farmers in their area with chefs in New York City who like to order directly from farms. Chefs place orders for food that varies from salad greens, raspberries, and blueberries in the summer months to root vegetables in the winter months. All the orders are piled into one truck, which delivers to the restaurants. "The chefs like the convenience," says Yezzi.

Dreaming of Cheese

Cheese is another food group that has seen a boom in specialized local production. The American Cheese Society has seen its membership grow 84% in the last three years, to 1,500 producers, sellers, and distributors. Each year, the interest in the Cheese Society's competition for the best specialty and artisanal cheeses gets more intense; last year, the number of entries rose to 1,208, from just 700 in 2005.

Many of the new cheesemakers are dairy farmers who are branching out. Karen Weinberg and Paul Broghard had jobs in New York City when they decided to pursue their dream of making cheeses like ones they had tasted in France. Initially only Weinberg quit her day job, unsure of whether the idea would take off and support them both. They started with just four sheep in 1999. Little by little, they gained confidence that it could be a way of life. Broghard quit his job as a lawyer in 2002, they acquired a cheese-making license a couple of years later, experimented with different cheeses, installed an aging cellar, and now have a full-fledged dairy sheep farm, 3-Corners Field Farm, in Shushan, N.Y.

Along the way they also expanded their farm business. Today they raise 500 lambs for slaughter, milk 140 sheep, and sell yogurt, wool, sheepskin, lambskin, and soap. Their most popular cheese, Shushan's Snow, is a kind of camembert made of sheep's milk. It is featured on the cheese plate at the popular New York City restaurant Gramercy Tavern. Other cheeses, such as a feta and a smoked variety, are available at eight cheese shops and 10 restaurants in the metro area.

On Second Thought…

Of course, not all the innovations work out as planned. Michael Paine has built a vibrant farm named Gaining Ground on 76 acres in Yamhill, just outside Portland, Ore. Each week, 110 families who have paid $490 upfront for the growing season come to collect from the farm's 50 different varieties of vegetables, including heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, greens, and cucumbers. Paine also has two acres planted with apple, nectarine, pear, and peach trees, which he hopes will bear fruit later this year. He has 750 chickens roaming around.

But when he introduced goats, hoping they would eat wild blackberries, they turned out to like the vegetables better. "They were too social and wanted to be on the front porch when people came to collect their vegetables and it was too much to handle," says Paine. "I sold them for goat meat, and don't think I'm getting any more any time soon."

Gogoi is a contributing writer for BusinessWeek.com.