Hello, Beautiful!

By raising his pigs the natural way, an Indiana farmer has defied the industrial style of animal production and found a high-end market for his gorgeous pork with some of Chicago's top chefs.

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Although Bayless doesn't toot this particular horn very much, Chicago chefs consider him a leader in the use of local food and support of local farmers. In high season, Bayless estimates, about 85 percent of what he serves is grown within a five- or six-hour drive of Chicago. His Frontera Farmer Foundation, now in its fifth year, has made grants of more than $350,000 to help local farmers buy equipment, develop marketing channels, and extend their growing seasons.

Bayless says he was interested in local food when he opened Frontera Grill in 1987; he tells a funny-sad story about naïvely trying to buy local strawberries at the South Water Market. In the mid-nineties, after his restaurants were firmly established, he asked his staff to turn his preference into a priority. Much of this work was taken up by Tracey Vowell, who was then a managing sous-chef and later became managing chef, the equivalent of chef de cuisine in Bayless's kitchens. (About two years ago, she left the restaurants for an organic vegetable farm she had started near Kankakee.)

Vowell remembers when Greg Gunthorp started coming around. She was buying eggs from a Michigan farmer named George Rasmussen, and at the time Rasmussen and Gunthorp were making their deliveries together in a sort of joint sales effort. "Every week I had this guy standing out behind my restaurant, killing time waiting for the other guy to do his delivery, and I got to know him, and the fact of the matter is he's one of the sweetest people you'll ever come across. Even though he wasn't selling things to me, we started developing a strong relationship." Vowell and Bayless both stress the importance of personal connection with their suppliers. Designations like "organic" and "free-range" don't tell them much about the way food is grown; they'd rather talk about it. "Greg seemed like a really good farmer," Vowell recalls. "His whole family has lived right in that area for so long. They're settled in; they know their land. They grew up with it. It's in them." She looked him up on the Web and found he was also something of a proselytizer. "He had made a little bit of a name for himself as a noisemaker on the Internet talking about sustainable agriculture, and why the world doesn't need confinement-pig operations. I thought, Not only is this guy thinking the right kind of things and wanting to do the right kind of things, but he's a little bit outspoken about it."

Rick Bayless was also impressed with the guy standing out in the alley. "He comes off as a sort of farm boy kickin' in the dirt, but he is anything but that."

The Frontera people had just one problem with Gunthorp: He was a pig farmer, and they already had one (Tom Mueller of Maple Creek Farms in Pewaukee, Wisconsin). "When it comes to supporting farmers, they're extremely loyal," Gunthorp says. "I could not talk them into even trying my pork."

What Vowell wanted instead was chickens. At the time she was buying from a supplier that was close to home but too big for her taste. They were "nameless, faceless," and she wanted a chicken farmer she could look in the eye. "I really liked Greg, and I really wanted to see him succeed. So I kept going back to him saying, 'Greg, chickens. Need chickens. Don't need pigs. Really need chickens.'"

Gunthorp had never raised chickens commercially, but he figured he could learn. And he did learn—over a couple of years and through numerous misadventures, most of them having to do with slaughtering and processing. To sell his meat outside Indiana, Gunthorp needs a USDA-inspected meat-processing plant. There are plants that will do the work for him, but they won't do it the way his finicky chef customers want. He tried becoming a partner in a processing operation in Michigan, but that effort failed for a few reasons. Finally he achieved a feat that is nearly unheard of for a small-scale farmer: Through powers of wit and sheer persistence, he threaded his way through a thicket of regulations and an army of bureaucrats to finance and build a fully functional USDA-inspected slaughter and processing operation on his own property, including what used to be his garage. Today he's selling about 20,000 chickens and 6,000 ducks a year to Frontera Grill and Topolobampo—virtually all the duck and chicken they use. He doesn't think he would be in business without them. Bayless still won't buy his pork, but Gunthorp knows he is safe if another chicken farmer starts hanging around in the alley. And he's counting on Bayless to help him take the next step in his business plan—to seasonal production.

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Photograph: Kevin Banna

This article appears in the June 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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