Arkansas' Grass-Finished, Slavok Zizek-Spouting Farmer

Ragan Sutterfield embodies all kinds of unexpected juxtapositions: semi-professional birdwatcher, poststructuralist theory enthusiast, agrarian thinker, Arkansas pig farmer.  Might there be something funky in the local water?  Ragan leases land from a Berkeley astrophysicist, a Rockefeller, and a neighbor who makes the podium speakers used at the U.N.  What’s going on in Morrilton, Arkansas?

Morrilton is emphatically not a hippie enclave in the mold of Asheville or Missoula.  The road signs are ridden with bulletholes, the trailers look like—and might contain—meth labs, illegal cock fighting abounds, and allegedly, land mines and grenades safeguard acres of marijuana in the Ozarks, not far away.  There’s only one grass-finished, Wendell-Berry-spouting meat farmer for miles around, and it’s Ragan. 

In high school, Ragan and a few of his friends used to get together on weeknights at the Waffle House and discuss philosophy; reading John Dewey inspired them to write a manifesto against education.  All of them left Arkansas after high school, but nearly all of them have or plan to come back.  “In high school I developed the communitarian ideal,” says Ragan, thinking back on the philosophical discussion group.  “But it wasn’t until college, when I started reading Berry and Wes Jackson and what they’d written about becoming native to a place, that I started considering farming.” 

He began by apprenticing with a local Katahdin hair sheep breeder, Ed Martsolf, something of a farming celebrity himself (also Ragan’s girlfriend’s father).  A year’s worth of work there earned him a small flock of lambs, which he sold to local restaurants and at the farmer’s markets.  He took on pigs next—Gloucester Old Spots, threatened with extinction but mighty tasty—building up a small herd by virtue of his two bristly, mean-looking boars, who answer to the names Plato and Aristotle.  Next Ragan acquired a few Charolais-Angus beef cows.  Now he’s started a Chicken Club, where people pay $175 and receive sixteen chickens over four months.  Finally, he’s bought 300 free-range laying hens, and sells their eggs along with other local farmers’, mostly old ladies and kids with 4-H projects.  The farm covers 80 acres of leased land and several hundred animals. 

“As a young farmer, you can’t get a loan to do anything interesting. The only money you can get is for row crops and cow/calf operations, both of which are heavily subsidized.  I hate subsidies; I want my farm to be market-driven and independent.”  So far, Ragan’s not bought land, only animals, as buying land is a tremendous burden on young farmers. He cites an Amish saying, ‘build the barn before you buy the house,’ and explains that once the farm is set up he’ll purchase acreage.  The investment in equipment has been equally minimal—an old farm truck with over 250,000 miles and an ancient tractor.  “Plato and Aristotle can dig a four by three foot pit in no time,” says Ragan.  “So I’ve been thinking about using the pigs to replace my tractor.  Why use technology when the animals are happy to do the work?”  Leasing the land has ended up cheaper than the interest on a mortgage, and a college friend studying for a PhD in economics has helped him figure out upon which credit cards to place debt.    

Farming is only half of Ragan’s work.  He writes nearly as much as he farms, with a blog on Plenty magazine’s website, book reviews for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, an article on grass-finished beef for Chow and a piece on what to know about your farmer for Gourmet magazine. Not to mention the entry on Slavoj Zizek for the Encyclopedia on Christian Civilization and a proposal to an Oregon publisher for a book on agrarian philosophy.  And the man reads twice as much as he writes: The Stockman Grass Farmer, Acres USA, the New Yorker, Farming magazine, Arts & Letters Daily, Faulkner, Zizek, Pollan.  Thinkers drip off his tongue when he speaks: Badiou, Chomsky, Lacan, Alistair MacIntyre.

Ragan’s day usually starts around 4 a.m., when he gets up to write. Breakfast consists of eggs from the chickens and sausages from the Old Spots.  He’ll check on the animals, mend fences, wash and cart eggs, deliver to Little Rock, and check on the animals again before bed many hours later.  “Companion?  NPR is my companion.  I’ve gotten to know all the reporters real well,” he laughs.  He teaches a few classes (on Zizek and Badiou) at local colleges and high schools, and is the chairman of the board of an interest group that has worked to create a Department of Agriculture for the state of Arkansas, which lacked one until a few months ago. 

“These days, people go looking for opportunities rather than creating them at home,” says Ragan.  “So rural areas just get brain-drained.” We pass the first building on the outskirts of Little Rock, a massive Wal-Mart.  “When people who knew me in high school see me back in town, they ask me what happened.  They figure something must’ve gone wrong. They can’t imagine that someone who left would come back…to farm.” 

Farming’s gone through hard times in Arkansas.  After Tyson, an Arkansas company, artificially lowered prices, many small pig farmers went out of business.  “Thankfully, I’m not trying to compete with Tyson,” says Ragan.  “The farmer’s market fortunately opens me up to a whole different group of people.” 

Ragan thinks the future lies in heritage breeds.  “The industrial-food industry has figured out how to do organic,” he notes.  “They’re working on figuring out how to do local.  But it’s impossible to farm heritage-breed animals or heirloom vegetables on a massive scale.  I think heritage breeds are where people will look towards next for authenticity in their food.” 

In Little Rock we go for lunch at a new restaurant called Imagine, which sources nearly all of its produce and meat from Arkansas farmers, and visit Hardin’s Mercantile in the River Market District.  Jody Hardin, a fifth-generation Arkansas farmer, sells his family’s produce alongside other farmers’.  “My lease agreement specifies that I have to sell popular items like bananas, tomatoes, avocados, pineapples and oranges beside the rest of my merchandise,” says Hardin.  “But in a year we’ve accumulated 180 CSA members, and the baskets are doing real well.”  November’s includes spinach, turnip greens, spaghetti and acorn squash, pecans, Arkansas black apples, short-grain brown Arkansas rice, sweet potatoes, fresh pasta made with Ragan’s eggs, and a gorgeous Adama chicken—nary a banana in sight. 

The Arkansas boy gone thinking man is highly susceptible to the written word.  After he read Thoreau’s quote “Water is the only drink for a wise man.  Wine is not a noble liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea,” Ragan drank only water for a year.  But if his head’s in the clouds, his feet are planted firmly aground.  “Farming is romantic like marriage is romantic,” says Ragan.  “Sometimes it is.  Sometimes it isn’t.”  (should this be the last paragraph?)

In the future, Ragan hopes to set up a dairy for cheesemaking with heritage-breed cows; perhaps pair up with a vegetable farmer and put together CSA baskets; make more charcuterie.  He’s currently experimenting with a local (ex-Chez Panisse) chef at the Boulevard Bakery in Little Rock to make Arkansas prosciutto.  “Our very scientific technique?” says the chef.  “Two hams require the weight of six heavy cans of pork-and-beans, for as long as necessary until they feel ready to the touch.” Ragan would love to start smoking and curing more meat, and put a CSA meat box together.  And he’d love a little more down time.  Is anyone surprised?

In October and November 2006, I meandered circuitously between San Francisco to Miami under the auspices of Minnesota-based nonprofit Renewing the Countryside, interviewing farmers, ecologists, musicians and activists for a book on youth revitalizing rural landscapes all across America.  Hero-bosses Jan Joannides and Brett Olsen have allowed me to post my interviews here, but look for them in the Youth Renewing the Countryside book, due out in the spring of 2008.