![]() ![]() We hope Doug and Betty work with us for many years to come and that their beliefs of diversified farming continue. His conversational style always brings insight and interesting thoughts to bear. I want to keep working - my dad was helping me when he was 84!” But it’s getting hard to keep up with it all… I need more young people! When I was young, we raised turkeys in spring and sold ‘em all by Christmas. We got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of land. “Save the breeds and make a little money. “We’re here today to save these breeds,” says Doug, who is as down-home as the farm he still works on as he approaches his 84th birthday. His is part of the story of immigrants who came to the New World and made good through old-fashioned values, tradition, and hard work. All those chemicals are part of the reason there are so many cancers around, if you ask me.” Doug has amassed generations of farming secrets having grown so many foods naturally, often calling upon experiences from decades ago to solve a problem that presents itself today.ĭoug comes from a truly great American farming family - Life Magazine once wrote that Doug’s father, who lived to be 104, had more living descendants than any American – many of them farmers. “My buddy and I could clear 100 acres of weeds in a day if we worked through the night, and we did not need any additives to do it. ![]() He believes any talk of sustainability is not real when you raise only one crop or when you use chemicals to do it. “Keep your grain,” Doug insists, “and use it to grow a truly sustainable farm.”ĭoug was never one to use chemicals to grow food. Today farmers are incentivized to grow monocrops of corn and soybean - “that’s all they want us to grow,” Doug explains, “and farmers haul their crops to town instead of using it for something on their own farm.” Doug remembers fondly the days when a diversified farm would grow corn and turn it into whiskey, or when soybeans were grown for the purpose of feeding milk cattle - as Doug did on his farm. “It certainly made their coats look wonderful,” Doug says. He even grew flax one year because he heard it was supposed to help the immune system of the cattle, which he thought it did. Over the years the acres on his sprawling farm have been used to grow wheat, corn, oats, barley, sorghum, alfalfa, and rye. He also raised Aylesbury ducks - a rare heritage breed. Then he tried sheep, but he says he couldn’t get them to breed right. As he got older, he broke into the milk cattle game. As a kid he raised chickens but gave them up when he got into turkeys. As demand grew for quality meat, Doug got into heritage pigs and transitioned his commodity farm to a pastured farm and haven for the rare Tamworth breed.ĭoug has been farming since 1951. In 2001 he took our call and agreed to raise heritage turkeys for us with Frank because he believed that the growing food movement would appreciate the flavor of the birds his grandfather raised. ![]() Doug is famous for adapting to any moment. In an era of specialization Doug is an anomaly. He was the magic man that first introduced us to our processor Paradise Locker Meats, with whom we have worked and grown ever since and he worked together with Frank Reese raising heritage turkeys from about 2002 to 2013.Īt 83-years-old, Doug raises purebred, certified Berkshire and Tamworth pigs on his 1,500 acre farm in Seneca, Kansas, with his wife Betty. Now, 20 years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms, as well as a few others, who together introduced the word “heritage pork” to menus across the country by providing center of the plate pork dishes to hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast-to-coast as well as thousands of homes through the Heritage Foods mail order division.ĭoug Metzger was truly at the ground zero of our business and the heritage food movement. So we committed to selling pork, which can be produced year round, as long as the breeds came from historic genetic lines, just like the turkeys. ![]() For three years our turkey project grew, but naturally mating turkey is a seasonal food and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise birds were looking for a more regular source of income if they were to continue working with us. When Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. ![]()
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