Full Belly Files | From Gourmet Pork to Subsistence Farming

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[Quick Correction: Last week’s Full Belly Files was missing a critical paragraph when emailed, so here is the full version posted online in case you didn’t see it.]

At a time when supporting honestly raised, regionally grown, sustainably minded food is on the lips of every self-respecting restaurant lover, why is it essentially impossible to make a stable living off of working the land?

In the case of one Buellton farm, which rose to prominence raising the exact kind of gourmet pork that source-conscious chefs seek out, the rigamarole of regulations combined with high costs and low market prices is forcing them out of the pig business. Instead, they’re shifting to subsistence farming as a model for survival, exploring how harvests of buckwheat, barley, amaranth, acorns, spelt, squash, corn, cactus, and many other crops can support modern human existence.

“This is not just my story,” said Bruce Steele, who owns Winfield Farm with his wife, Diane Pleschner-Steele, together raising the largest registered breeding herd of swallow-belly Mangalitsa pigs in the country for more than a decade. “It’s all of us.”

Bruce Steele and Diane Pleschner-Steele of Winfield Farm

Over the next six months, they’ll be winding down operations, selling off the last of their once-celebrated chops, ribs, and sausages to restaurant chefs and home cooks. “This doesn’t work,” lamented Bruce on the porch of his drying shed one recent morning as bright sunshine recharged the solar-powered property. “Nothing you can do will ever work,” he continued, to which Diane added the caveat, “in California.”

Bruce’s farming saga goes back to the 1860s near Moorpark, where generations of his family tended beanfields that evolved into orange groves. When he was at Camarillo High, he’d visit his grandparents and extended family in Oregon, where they’d moved to grow hay and potatoes while practicing plenty of traditional food preservation techniques.

“They were all babies of the Depression,” said Bruce, who is 70 years old. “That had a huge mental impact on those who went through that time.”

He enjoyed the lifestyle, especially gardening with his Aunt Shirley. “I always wanted to be a farmer — that was maybe my first mistake,” he laughed. “My grandfather said, ‘If you ever want to make any money, don’t do this! If you buy land, buy water!’” (It’s no coincidence that Winfield Farm has riparian water rights along the Santa Ynez River.)

But he also loved fishing, and marine biology classes led him to pursue hard-hat diving as a career, originally intent on working the deep-water oil rigs. No one took him seriously at 18 years old, so he wound up back in Ventura County, settling into life as an urchin diver in 1973.

The route from his house in Camarillo to Anacapa Island and back was easy, and he’d stash away $100 a day after covering his current and future expenses, selling urchin for 8 cents a pound. (Today, the popular spiny treats can fetch $10 a pound.)

“It was like a banker’s hours!” he exclaimed. He kept at it after moving to Santa Barbara in 1976, building a life and well-known garden on the Mesa, and was still diving for urchin regularly until about a decade ago. “In my heart, I’m still an urchin diver,” said Bruce, who was a major player in the development of the rules and zones that govern fishing today. “I still have a permit.”

In 2000, he used urchin income to purchase 30 flat, occasionally flooded acres between the Santa Ynez River and Highway 246, just west of Buellton, and named it Winfield Farm after his dad’s middle name. Bruce and Diane — who worked for two decades as the head of the California Wetfish Producers Association — started farming a wide variety of common row crops like tomato, melon, and squash, selling them at their farm stand every summer.

The farm generated a massive amount of compost, which is where the pigs come in. But not just any pigs: the almost extinct Mangalitsa breed from Hungary, discovered after the Iron Curtain fell with only around 100 pigs remaining.

Like the Ibérico breed of Spain — whose jamonistas are credited with rediscovering and restoring the Mangalitsas — these pigs produce incredibly marbled, intensely flavorful meat. “They’re the only pigs other than Ibérico that can be called pata negra,” said Diane of the top-shelf “black foot” designation, which Bruce feeds a special malted barley spiked with chestnut powder. “If you feed tannins to these pigs, it changes the fat composition,” he said of such nut powders, citing recent research out of Serbia.

Winfield Farm welcomed its first swallow-bellied Mangalitsas in 2013, and the herd grew exponentially in size, reaching about 120 at peak pig. Many restaurants were buying the meat, particularly the late Jeff Olsson of Industrial Eats as well as, on occasion, Barbareño, Barrelworks, and Chef Cameron Ingle when he was at Pico in Los Alamos. (Today, Niner Wine Estates in Paso Robles is the most dedicated buyer.) The Bacara’s chef at the time was also a steady customer, and that’s where Bruce was planning to supply pork for an event about eight years ago when he got a standard inquiry about his liability insurance.

He quickly learned that California regulators frowned on farms that raise both vegetables and pigs. “Pigs and vegetables?” they told him. “You’re canceled!”

According to Bruce, the issue goes back to an E. coli outbreak in the Salinas Valley. “No one really knows what happened,” he said. “But they blamed the pigs.”

Such concern makes sense on the industrial farming scale, but applying such broad regulations to a tiny farm that only sold produce to neighbors? Bruce and Diane felt like unintended targets. It wouldn’t be the last time.

Suddenly, since pork made marginally more income than vegetables, Winfield Farm was out of the veggie business.

Meanwhile, the pork business got harder. COVID killed restaurants for a time, although the direct-to-consumer market briefly exploded. The war in Ukraine, which was a major global supplier of grain, caused feed prices to skyrocket, doubling Winfield Farm’s cost from around $30,000 a year to more than $60,000. Said Bruce, “You can’t just double the price of your already expensive meat.”

Problems arose close to home as well. “Ultimately, my butcher quit,” said Bruce of when the primary Central Coast butchery service, J&R Natural Meats in Paso Robles, shut down operations earlier this year.

That’s triggered processing problems all across the regionally raised meat realm, but it’s particularly tough for pigs. Unlike many other states, which allow pork to be distributed so long as it’s processed according to each state’s health codes, California regulations require pork to attain federal health standards before being sold broadly.

The USDA rules are onerous since they’re aimed at industrial pig farms, but Bruce and Diane feel like they don’t make much sense for small farms like theirs. He said that this is the one law that, if changed to allow state-level approval before distribution, could potentially save California’s small pig farmer.

Instead, the route from Winfield Farms to a plate for this Mangalitsa meat runs from Buellton to Fresno, where the animals can be sparged, all the way down to Glendale, where the USDA-certified Schreiner’s Fine Sausages handles the bacon, ham, sausage, and other smoked meat products. (Smoking is even more highly regulated.) Such transportation is expensive and not very eco-efficient, undermining the critical argument for buying local.

On top of that, California voters in 2018 passed an animal welfare proposition to clean up factory-sized meat operations. The new rules about spacing — which finally went into effect this year after much legal wrangling — didn’t impact operations at Winfield Farm at all, but still created costly confusion and a bunch more hoop-jumping for small farmers. Not only that, but Bruce said that the proposition’s main point of keeping animals out of cages was ultimately relaxed anyway.

[Click to enlarge]: From left: Bruce Steele grinds foraged acorns; Spelt at Winfield Farm

“The bottom line is that it didn’t change anything on my farm,” said Bruce. “It’s paperwork that serves no purpose, developed by a bunch of well-meaning people who didn’t have any idea of what the pig business was about.”

Add to that higher wages and fuel costs than other states, and the writing started covering the wall. “Every single thing is expensive to do here,” said Bruce. “Restaurants won’t pay you what it costs to do this.”

It was time to ditch the pigs.

Bruce and Diane’s interest in subsistence farming goes back to before COVID. On one New Year’s Eve, he told her that they’d do “The Challenge,” which involves living off of their own land and not going to the store for an extended period of time. They made it a month, and that was without any proper planning. They ate a lot of eggs and acorns.

He started exploring the crops needed to do it for a longer stretch, planting grains, more fruits, and hearty vegetables that last longer on their shelves. He’s learning how to grow and process each of them — farming more than a half-acre all by himself, mostly with a rusty hoe — and, perhaps most importantly, how to turn them into food.

“If you can’t figure out how to cook it and make it taste good,” said Diane, “you’re wasting your time.”

He’s learned to use the wind to winnow white-blossomed buckwheat, that “you need to crush the hell out of” spelt, and that one ear of corn amounts to a batch of cornbread. A later attempt at The Challenge lasted about three months, but they’re preparing to go all in, even though they admit the cuisine can become a little bland. (I suggested more hot and pickled peppers.)

“We’re on the verge of doing it right now,” said Diane, explaining that they’re dining subsistence-style “almost every night.” The night before I visited, for instance, they ate a tomato and cassoulet bean soup with pork meat followed by a squash pie for dessert.

The whole project — from a solar-powered tractor to the gritty handwork to the knowledge unleashed in ancient grains to using every part of their land to survive — struck me as fascinating, perhaps only eclipsed by the fact that no one seems to care. When I asked if Bruce had any acolytes out at Winfield Farm learning these ways, Diane responded bluntly, “No one wants to know.”

Her dream is to document what Bruce is up to, while he would like to see a handful more farmers use his land to explore similar crops and invest in the wisdom they offer. Said Bruce, “It’s gonna matter.”

But Winfield Farm pork is not dead yet. They still have about six months of meat to process and sell, which anyone can buy straight from the farm. To do so, visit winfieldfarm.us.

My Latest Drinks & Dishes

The usual rundown of recent ingestible experiences:

After hanging with Bruce & Diane, I stopped by Dragonette Cellars to catch up with Brandon Sparks-Gillis and John Dragonette. We tasted through a flight of recent wines against the 2014s, from the sauvignon blancs to the pinots and syrahs. All were shining, but those sauv blancs really do unique magic over the years.

The latest Just 8 Supper Club at Clean Slate in Solvang went down last week, pairing wines from my own cellar with the inventive and downright delicious cuisine of Chef Melissa Scrymgeour. We have a private one for later this month, and then will be scheduling a couple more of these eight-seat dinners for 2025 soon.

[Click to enlarge]: From left: Just 8 Supper Club’s salmon-pumpkin curry; Veal saltimbocca spring roll at Just 8

My wife and I were invited to the friends and family opening at Bar Lou on Coast Village Road in Montecito last Friday. We were the last seating, which was unfortunate since there was a small fire in the wall between the kitchen and the bathroom. So all we got were drinks and some fried cheese with pepper relish before having to evacuate. They plan to be open again by this weekend, and I can’t wait to return.

Instead, we headed down to Lion’s Tale, the latest bar from the Good Lion Hospitality crew. I settled into a couple brisk martinis — complete with the sidecar extra pours — as well as salads, fries, and a satisfying lamb burger.

We caught the Saturday matinee of Ensemble Theater Company’s Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors at the New Vic. It was funny and really entertaining. We followed that by a proper bar and restaurant crawl: sushi at Wabi Sabi and cocktails from Cooney’s in the Public Market; bottle of cider on the street at Satellite S.B.; a return check-in on the reopened Augie’s, where the food and drinks were solid and the ambiance still great, all culminating in a flight of karwinskii-based mezcal; and lastly, drinks and fries at Gala.

[Click to enlarge]: From left: Augie’s flight of karwinskii mezcal; Augie’s La Niña

Due to generous friends, I took a private plane from the Santa Ynez Airport to the 49ers–Cowboys game on Sunday (as you do), where we learned that the club food on the shady side of Levi’s Stadium (which we enjoyed last year) was better than the sunny-side eats we encountered this year. (Though the spicy chicken strips and burgers were good enough.)

On Tuesday, my son and I took our first bites of La Cantina, serial restauranteur Chris Chiarappa’s new place in the shopping center on the corner of Turnpike and Hollister, near our home. It’s a casual spot, with a centralized bar, many TVs, and a wide range of Mexican cuisine. It should do well there, and I’ll be back for sure.