This Aspen Times feature on the good work of CMC sustainability studies student Merrill Johnson, who is reducing waste, upcycling, and creating locally-sourced and sold food on her family’s farm, was published last summer. We’re reprinting it belatedly in Enews as it escaped our media monitor. Enjoy the read!
Merrill Johnson never planned to be a farmer, but at 25 years old she is running a ranch, raising endangered heritage pigs and contributing to the sustainability of the Roaring Fork Valley. Much like a tomato pulled from the vine tastes much richer, she’s trying out a theory that pigs raised on organic fruits and vegetables taste better than something shrink-wrapped in plastic on the supermarket shelves. Johnson has developed an earth-conscious business model to bring better products to consumers while reducing the environmental impact of waste in the valley.
Less than a century ago small farms covered this valley, and it was not unusual to see a 500-pound hog foraging the land for its next meal. But these old breeds, known as “heritage,” have fallen out of the mainstream because the modern food industry wants a pig that can grow fast for supermarket shoppers. These heritage pigs were bred for taste, hardiness, mothering ability and efficiency. With fewer than 300 registered breeding hogs living today, the Large Black is listed as endangered by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.
But it didn’t start with pigs — they were simply another way Johnson saw to improve her family’s farm and reduce waste.
“Really, we fell into farming backward,” Johnson said as she grabbed a bucket filled to the brim with clementines to feed to the pigs. “We started out with compost.”
Adapting out West
The Johnson family, Merrill and her parents Randy and Pam, moved to Missouri Heights from Chicago nearly 15 years ago. They were drawn to the “out west” lifestyle and bought the 102-acre horse boarding facility at Cedar Ridge Ranch.
When the economic downturn struck the valley, Johnson moved home from college at the University of Denver, and the family looked at options to help keep the ranch afloat. While taking a Colorado Mountain College sustainability course on systems thinking, Johnson began to look at the waste on the ranch.
“I saw it as an opportunity, I saw it as a way to increase the sustainability of the farm and my family,” she said. “Through a systems-thinking perspective, which is more emulative to nature’s way than a linear approach, it can be understood that nothing is inherently waste but an input into another system and or another cycle. Composting is one of a multitude of examples of emulating what nature does so beautifully with recycling matter and energy.”
The Johnsons, with the help of family friend Zac Paris, started diversifying the farm, and rather than paying the landfill to dispose of horse manure, Johnson started using it to make compost. Each day the horse stalls are wiped down and the manure is added to the compost, along with discarded sawdust from a local business, rather than having it also go to the landfill. And now Johnson’s Magical Mix, as she calls her compost, is in its fourth year as a company.
“Now we are able to create a reusable product that is needed locally,” Johnson said. “Instead of waste, it is being put back into the food cycle.
“I was doing a lot of projects at school on yard waste and household scraps and then I started looking into commercial waste — how much the food industries, restaurants and grocery stores are wasting,” Johnson said. “And a large percentage of the landfill — over 70 percent of municipal waste — is food waste. And that is the biggest contributor to methane gas.”
In 2012 Johnson traded her homemade compost for five Large Black pigs from Rock Bottom Ranch. She researched the species, understood the need to keep the breed alive and “hoped to raise, happy, healthy pigs that would be consumed locally.”
“The key for sustainability is an animal that can sustain itself. All these guys need is time and love,” she said.
Johnson sought a feasible way to feed the pigs and reduce local landfill intake. She and her mom, Pam, went to local grocers to see if they could haul away fruits and vegetables that had expired and were going to be thrown out.
“When food is disposed in a landfill it rots and becomes a significant source of methane — a greenhouse gas with 21 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide,” Johnson said. According to Feedingamerica.org, an estimated 70 billion pounds of food go to waste each year.
The expired strawberries, mushrooms, avocados and plums are loaded into a truck and brought to the farm where Johnson and her family painstakingly remove stickers, labels, cardboard and plastic containers. These byproducts would have all gone straight to the landfill, but instead, the food will go to the pigs and the packaging will be properly recycled.
Bringing pork up to par
As Johnson dumped buckets of the medley into the pen, she said, “I am not a farmer, but I had the hypothesis [that the pigs] could thrive and grow healthy on a diet of fruit and vegetables from local grocers in addition to foraging in the pastures.”
Traditionally commercial pigs are fed a large ration of corn and soybean, and some other farmers didn’t think a vegetarian diet would suffice. But despite their doubts, she has a herd of 10 healthy pigs, eight of which have reached market weight, which equals approximately 200 pounds of meat.
And her breeding sow, Oprah, is on the verge of having another litter. Oprah is nearly 500 pounds with gigantic floppy, black ears covering her face. She dug her nose around a bowl of grapes, mushrooms and strawberries, and after a few choice bites she wandered over to the pen holding her fully grown brood. They came to the fence to say hello, and then hurried off as dinner is served.
“You hear a lot about grass-fed beef, not so much pork,” Paris said, as the pigs squealed in delight, and snuffled down the organic dinner they had just been fed.
Five of the pigs have already been sold. Heritage pigs are known for their rich flavor and creamy fat. With farm-to-table movement chefs gaining followings in the valley and throughout the nation, breeders are seeing increased interest in the savory “niche” pork and heritage meat.
Pam has been actively working with local restaurants and vendors to keep the meat in the local economy. Carbondale restaurant Allegria, which is known for using local seasonal ingredients, has already reserved half a pig to be used in its slow-cooking methods. ZG Hospitality, the restaurant group that owns Zheng Asian Bistro, Grind and Cuvee World Bistro, has also purchased a pig to use in an “Iron Chef” style progressive dinner between their restaurants.
“The other thing we are trying to accomplish, I think pigs over the years have gotten a bad rap. [What] the pork people are used to is not up to par, not well raised and not healthy to eat,” said Pam Johnson. Commercial pigs take six months to be market weight, but these heritage breeds take 10-12 months — longer to mature but much richer and healthier.
A commitment to keeping it local
Another example of Johnson’s commitment to upcycling, or keeping the food cycle local, is her collaboration with Roaring Fork Beer Co. The Carbondale brewery is giving Johnson its spent grain, which is very nutritious, to feed to the pigs. In turn she is going to produce a beer brat with Roaring Fork’s extra pale ale.
Chase Engel, Roaring Fork Beer Co. founder, explained the importance of working with locals on projects like these.
“We try to do everything as sustainably as possible. We want to reuse anything we can and keep it local. The spent grain is useless to us and costs a lot to dump,” Engel said, adding that he is looking forward to trying the beer brat.
Johnson continues to develop models that benefit the environment and find whole-picture solutions. The next hurdle she is hoping to overcome is the slaughtering process. There are only two USDA processing facilities in the Western Slope region. In order for the meat to be sold commercially, the pigs must be transported to be slaughtered at one of those facilities. But Johnson has a vision of a mobile slaughter unit that could benefit all local farmers.
“We raise them the best we can and I want them to die on the farm they are born on,” Johnson said, “because sending animals outside of the valley to be slaughtered and processed and brought back to the valley is not local.”
By the end of the month, Merrill’s Family Farm pork will be available at Roxy’s grocery store in Aspen and the Annex in Carbondale. Individuals may also purchase half or whole hogs from the farm.
“We are a boutique farm, and we always will be,” Johnson explained. “To let them be pigs is a beautiful thing, not make them live in confinement.”
Adds Paris, “There are no chemicals anywhere on the property. We are creating a whole habitat for the animals. This is not the easy way to do it, but it’s not adding anything to the environment or the community to just buy grain. It is taking away from it. So instead we take local waste, turn it into a reusable product, or convert it to energy for the pigs, [resulting] in lower methane and creating a healthy product for consumption.”
Randy Johnson, a former Wall Street executive, sums up the family philosophy as he holds up a handful of dirt.
“If we don’t take care of this it won’t take care of us,” he said.
For Johnson, “It’s more than just learning to be a farmer. You need to understand weather, soil, husbandry, be able to build structures, work with water and see things out of nothing,” she said.
When asked if it was worth it, Johnson answers with a resounding yes.
“These pigs are helping us to live better by providing us healthy meat, decreasing the environmental footprint of grocery stores, decreasing methane emissions, and taking steps to having an endangered breed flourish once again.”