Spring

Six years ago my husband Ken returned from a trip to the Davis Square farmer’s market with an armload of frozen meat—skirt, sirloin and flank steaks, hamburger patties, and one-pound packages of stir-fry beef. His explanation? “I met this really cool guy who’s selling naturally raised beef.” Really? In my husband’s vocabulary the word “met” often translates into “encountered for the first time and had a detailed conversation about an obscure topic of mutual interest.”

The man was Jon Konove of River Rock Farm. Ken and Jon had a mutual dislike for the feedlot system that is the predominant model for raising cattle in the United States. They talked about how River Rock Farm was raising pastured cattle on a mixture of grass and grain, about the effect of recently enacted legislation regulating the use of the term “organic” in food labeling, and finally, why Jon and his family had made the decision not to pursue organic certification for their beef. Whether they discussed all of this during that first encounter I can’t say. But I do know that for years Ken was given to introducing some speck of agricultural arcana with the phrase “John Konove and I were talking…” Tragically, Jon was killed in an automobile accident in 2006.

We have remained devoted fans of River Rock Farm beef. We like knowing the people who produce what we eat. If we can see the animals that will eventually become our food, even better. The business is too small to supply Rialto with meat except as specials, but when it comes to my family shopping dollars, the portion I spend on beef goes to River Rock. If we want to splurge, stocking up before an annual trip to the Cape for example, nothing beats a River Rock Farm dry-aged, three-inch Porterhouse steak for grilling. We order it ahead of time and then pick it up at our farmer’s market.

I chose River Rock as a destination for our Guerrilla Grilling team a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to see for myself how the farm was doing since Jon’s death, and to give my staff a close up look at how some of the animals we choose to eat are treated on a representative family farm in Massachusetts.

Seth and Joanna McDonough and Joanne Johnson took over as farm managers in January of this year. The young couple previously managed a vegetable farm together and wanted to get experience with cattle so River Rock seemed a natural fit for them. Joanne also teaches art in the local school system and at one point during our tour she stopped to bottle feed a calf whose mother is having problems producing milk. “Seth does most of the work,” she says, a claim that he denies. With his pony tail, beard, and cammo baseball cap, their shared muddy boots and the nursing calf they look like a farming couple straight out of central casting. The desire to own their own farm someday is a big part of their motivation. “It’s great work, and it’s outdoors. I like working hard,” Seth says. He laughs. “You have to like working hard, and not making money.”

Making money was the last thing on Ron and Kay Konove’s minds when they purchased the 100-year-old working farm in Brimfield in 1993 as a weekend retreat and as a home for Kay’s horses. Most family farms in Massachusetts are less than fifty acres—River Rock has twenty-eight. As you pull into the driveway, you’re nestled between a small farm house above and a red barn below. Your eye travels down a dirt road past the barn down into a valley outlined with fences that contain a few horses, clusters of steers in muddy pastures and a mother cow with her baby. Chickens roam freely.

The Konove’s wanted to keep their farm active, but they didn’t set out to establish a beef business. Initially they only wanted to raise a few Angus beef steer for their freezer. In 2002 their son Jon postponed his entry into veterinary school to help them with their cattle, which had expanded from those early steers into a “beef program” with a herd of twenty. He moved onto the farm several months later, veterinary school disappeared from the radar screen and he spent the next four years overseeing the treatment of the cattle, as well as marketing, delivering and selling River Rock beef all over the Boston area. He became a fixture at farmers’ markets, well-known and well-liked (especially when cooking samples on the portable grill at farmers’ markets).

Jon was invested in River Rock Farm as both a farmer and a family member, with a motivation to work around the clock. His death required some rejiggering of how things got done to make the job of farm manager doable for an outsider. The man who delivers hay to the farm was hired to make the weekly trip to the slaughterhouse with steers. On occasion, the farm even gets a little volunteer labor. Louise (in the blue vest below), whose high school son Nathan (with the red headband) works part-time on the farm during the school year, comes around once a week just to pitch in, simply because she enjoys it. She’s been doing it for years. “She’s the farm super star,” Seth says, “She can do anything.” Anything can encompass caring for the farm horses to her current undertaking—repairing pasture fence lines.

Do Seth’s and Joanne’s friends ever come to help out? The idea of their friends working on the farm strikes them as laughable. “They like to visit,” Seth says. “I think they like the farm atmosphere,” Joanne adds. They share a look. “But they don’t come to work.”

The work at River Rock revolves around the care of the farm’s steers. Most of the beef in the United States comes from steers, that is, castrated male cattle. The farm buys young steers from “cow-calf operations,” farms that concentrate on breeding heifers and then selling the calves. When they arrive at the farm they’re roughly a year old and range in size from 600 to 1000 pounds; at slaughter, eight or ninth months later, the steers weigh between 1300 and 1350 pounds. The variability in age and size is accounted for by the fact that River Rock buys steers year round, just as they send steers to slaughter year round. Cow-calf operations tend to focus on specific breeds or crosses, so for example while one farmer may only sell Black Angus, another’s calves may be an Angus-Simmental cross, and yet another may offer Herefords.

From Seth’s perspective all of these produce flavorful beef so the particular composition of the River Rock herd is always changing. One of the things that distinguish River Rock Farm beef from the typical supermarket product is the healthy and humane way the former raise their steers. “We have two things going for us,” Seth says, “how our beef tastes, and how we treat our animals.” Part of that humane treatment (and part of what contributes to the beef’s flavor) is the fact that for most of their lives the steers that end up at River Rock Farm roam freely in pastures, eating grass. Most supermarket beef comes from cattle raised on feedlots, fattening on a diet of corn, soy and molasses fortified with antibiotics and hormones to promote rapid weight gain (thus lowering production cost).

River Rock cattle’s grass diet is supplemented with grain for three months before slaughter to encourage marbling in the meat. But their diet contains no added hormones or antibiotics. If a cow becomes sick, Seth isn’t averse to treating it with antibiotics, but only as a curative measure. River Rock describes its beef as “natural;” if they were to pursue a certification as organic any steer treated with antibiotics would have to permanently culled from the herd, which they don’t want to do.

Joanne and Seth keep a couple of breeding cows and their calves to remind themselves of the life cycle that supports them, but as a practical matter River Rock does not raise steers from calves to maturity. “Cow-calf operations tend to be pretty pasture-intensive, at least the ones that offer grass-fed steers in the numbers that we need them,” Seth says. Forty steers, give or take a few, is about what River Rock Farm’s twenty-five acres of pasture can handle. River Rock boards another couple of dozen steers on a farm in Connecticut where they can be pastured.

The River Rock story is still evolving. It started with two steers and grew to around eighty under Jon Konove. Counting the steers sent out for boarding, the farm has about three-quarters of that now. What happens next? The Konove family and Seth are trying to figure out how to dovetail the future with Jon’s vision. What do the customers want? What does the farm want? Seth says, “River Rock customers are people who prioritize food in their lives and are able to pay premium prices for River Rock beef.” Is that customer base changing in the economic downturn? Is there a way to make the meat less expensive? “Grain is the most expensive ingredient in the process, aside from purchasing the animals.” The grain Seth is describing is corn. “If we could grow our own grain, we would save money.” It’s something to consider, just as Jon’s unrealized ambition to bring lambs onto the farm is worth thinking about.

The company is vertically integrated, meaning they raise the steers, arrange for slaughter, dry-age the beef and market the product. While this gives River Rock control over all aspects of the business, it may not be the most efficient way for them to grow. If they were to grow, how would expansion affect the character of the business? All of these are questions for the future. Seth and Joanne are still settling in. ”Basically, what we’re focusing on is a better product.” He only has two things to sell, he repeats, ”How we’re raising the animals and the quality of the product.”

This season, River Rock Farm will have a stand at farmers markets including Lexington, Davis Square in Somerville, Brookline, North Hampton and Harvard (the town, not the university). They also sell to a few restaurants, co-ops and specialty food markets. Check out their website for an up-to-date list of where to find them: www.riverrockfarm.com. River Rock Farm also encourages people to visit them in Brimfield, get a tour of the property, meet the farmers and buy some of that yummy beef. It’s an easy trip down the Pike.