Transforming How Food Is Grown
Chuck Lacy, a former president of Ben & Jerry's, is developing alternatives to corporate agriculture.
Sage Sohier
Chuck Lacy gets friendly with one of his Red Devons.
Chuck Lacy
Rotokawa Cattle Company
"What's big?" asks Chuck Lacy, surveying the breakfast menu at a café in Burlington, Vermont. Standing 6 foot 8 and sporting a full gray beard, a tattered beige barn coat, and a well-worn Red Sox cap, Lacy is an outsize presence wherever he goes. A former president of Ben & Jerry's, Lacy, 54, helped drive the ice cream maker's 1,000 percent growth during his eight-year tenure there in the late '80s and early '90s -- and created the template for the for-profit business with a social mission, a then-radical notion.
For the past 10 years, Lacy has been on another mission: to transform the business of beef. In 2001, Lacy and partner Ridge Shinn co-founded the Bakewell Reproductive Center in Hardwick, Massachusetts, and began selling bull semen, fertilized embryos, and breeding stock to farmers specializing in grass-fed beef. They soon realized that success would require fresh blood, literally. Most American cattle, bred for half a century to fatten in feedlots, just didn't do well on grass.
A worldwide search for animals that did -- and that could tough out New England winters -- led Lacy and Shinn to a herd of Red Devons owned by a New Zealand rancher named Ken McDowall. In 2003, they brought back 12 pregnant heifers to found a herd in Vermont. Five years later, McDowall announced plans to retire and disperse his herd. Lacy and Shinn agreed there was just one thing to do -- bring the roughly 100 animals to America by airlifting them on two 747s. Arriving in Los Angeles, the shaggy-coated herd, which included several pregnant cows, was greeted by 110-degree summer heat and Shinn, who took them up the coast to acclimate on a ranch where they were kept cool by misters in specially built shelters.
Now settled in Massachusetts and on a new partner ranch in Pennsylvania, the herd is growing. So is Lacy's influence. Between the breeding operation -- renamed Rotokawa Cattle Company, after the ranch in New Zealand -- plus a processing and distribution company called Hardwick Beef, and a couple hundred cattle Lacy keeps himself in Vermont, he is now a big player in a growing market. "There aren't many times in life when you just find yourself in front of the right parade," he says. "We're trying to re-create a food system that has been decimated by large-scale agriculture. We're never going to be on a list of the fastest-growing companies, but if we sell 20 bulls a year to 20 different farms, that can make or break the movement."
