By Terence Corrigan Tennessee Correspondent BELL BUCKLE, Tenn. — Whit Lee’s home in Bell Buckle is where his father, Austin Whitfield Lee, and his grandfather, Joe Estill Lee, were born. Whit’s great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Lee, bought the place nearly 150 years ago. “We never got enough money together to move out of here,” Lee said, laughing. Whit’s full name is Austin Whitfield Lee, Jr., named after his father. Whit runs a beef operation, with a couple of hundred cows on several area properties. Whit’s mobile “office” is his aesthetically challenged Ford F250 pickup. Whit recently started a new business venture, a direct-to-consumer beef company, Garrison Valley Farms, a partnership that he and his wife, Rosalie, entered into with Claudia and Don Curl of Wartrace. The cows the Curls and Lees run are primarily grass fed and the resulting beef is dry cured at the processing plant they use: Cheery Meat Company in Chapel Hill. Dry curing involves hanging the beef for two to three weeks in a cooler – not freezing it – before it is butchered. Larger volume processing plants wet cure their meat, a process that involves storing it in plastic sleeves before it’s cut up. Dry curing results in considerably less water weight in the meat but wet curing takes considerably less time. The direct to consumer business model that Lee and the Curls have established is “popular right now,” Lee said. It’s proving successful in large part because an increasingly larger segment of the population insists on knowing where their food is coming from and how it was raised. Farmers selling food directly to consumers is nowadays called “farm to table,” but Lee said it’s not a new concept. “I’ve been selling whole and half cows for years,” he said. The difference now is that the animals are processed at USDA approved slaughterhouses, a requirement when selling to the general public. Although farm to table meat has cachet, Lee is not snobbish about it or critical of the more traditional methods. Most beef cows are fattened up on a grain diet for 150 days at feedlots. “They’re feeding a lot of people lots of meat,” he said. Some people look down on what are commonly called “factory farms,” but Lee counters that criticism by posing a question: “do you want to go slop hogs every day?” “We’re never going to compete with Kroger or Wal-Mart or the Iowa beef processors,” Lee said. Lee also handles his cows differently than he used to. He’s quiet and moves slowly as he cuts out a couple of cows for artificial insemination. Cows raised with minimal stress produce better beef, Lee said, and the new, quieter and gentler handling methods “lowers the stress on us, too.” The new methods come from research done by Temple Grandin, on how to humanely handle livestock. The old ways of handling cows involved considerable violence, Lee said. “The only time they came to the lower barn was when they were going to be beat on, killed or cut,” he said. “Coming down here was not a good thing for them.” The Curls and Lees started into their joint venture to establish a viable business their children can carry on with. Lee hopes that at least some of his descendants will continue to live and farm here. The Curls, too, are a family that’s lived and farmed in the Garrison Valley since the late 1800s. “If you don’t have three generations buried here you’re not from here,” Lee said. Captions Whit portrait the choice As he gets ready to artificially inseminate two cows, Whit Lee questions whether farming should be defined as a lifestyle choice. Whit feeds the cows Whit Lee feeds the cows. Lee’s cows are primarily grass fed but the regular feed is used mostly as a training tool, to get them to come in when the pickup arrives. |
