Gray Shipley represents the fifth generation of farmers at Shipley Farms and is one of organizers of Good Fields, An Appalachian Food and Farms Festival, which will take place on the farm in Vilas, NC, on June 24. (He’s pictured with his father and grandfather in 2015.) Good Fields will feature a dozen chefs creating dishes that honor the region’s culinary heritage and farming history and will benefit several agricultural nonprofit partners, including ASAP. Tickets are still available here.
What are some of your memories of growing up around the farm?
I actually grew up in Raleigh, so for me the farm was our vacation spot. We wouldn’t go to the beach or Disney World, we’d go visit our grandparents, and there was nowhere better to be. So, the farm for me and my sisters was summers playing in the barn with my cousins, and family meals over holidays, eating the incredible dishes that my grandmother made from ingredients that came almost entirely right off the farm.
What’s your experience now as a partner in managing the farm and business operations?
We relaunched kind of a new take on the family business in 2014 when my granddad, at 101 years old, decided he was bored with retirement and wanted to get back into the cattle business. That was the point that we started the meat side of the business, selling packaged beef to friends and family, and then local restaurants. So, I got to be a business partner with my 101-year-old grandfather, which was incredible, and I get to continue to manage it with my Dad, who grew up here working alongside his dad. So it’s really special to get to work here, applying business practices to agriculture, and figuring out how to innovate to make small local farming work, and to hopefully see this last a few more generations.
How did the Good Fields festival come to be?
We just reached our 150th anniversary. Our farm got going in 1872, five generations ago. So, we started talking about what we should do to celebrate that milestone, and we obviously wanted to do something of a community celebration centered around food. I had the chance to go to Charleston Wine and Food and work alongside Steve Goff a couple of years ago, and saw the model that these food festivals have built, highlighting amazing chefs and the local food culture and bringing a real benefit to their community. So we saw an opportunity, with the chef relationships we have, to do something like that. We decided, this isn’t wine country, but it’s farm country, so let’s make it a “Food and Farm” festival. We can bring in all of these amazing chefs across North Carolina who like to work with our product, and feature what they do, and also highlight the Appalachian food culture we have here in Western North Carolina that is rooted in local, fresh from the dirt, wonderful foods that people don’t really think about when they think about the North Carolina mountains.
One of the aims of the Good Fields festival is to support farmland loss prevention in North Carolina. Can you talk about why that’s such an important issue right now?
North Carolina has lost 40,000 farms in the past 40 years, and Watauga County, where we are, is projected as the number 39 county in the country for share of remaining farmland projected to be lost to development by 2040. Farming is a hard business, especially at small scale. John F. Kennedy once said “The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.” So especially here in the mountains, but also across the state, we’re seeing pastures turning into developments—really nice properties, beautiful homes, amazing serene settings—but in the process, the agricultural communities that this area was built on are going away, one by one. So many family farms are just hanging on, watching progress slowly come for their land, and they’re having the conversation about how long they can keep going, maybe hold on for another decade. Maybe the next generation will be the one that has to make that decision to sell granddad’s farm. So Good Fields is about bringing support back to local farms and to the chefs and restaurants that feature our products, because there’s tremendous value not just in the products these farms produce, but the experience they offer—to come see what’s going into the food that you’re eating, how it affects life and health and environment and community. People want to have that connection to the land that we’ve kind of lost in the last few generations. So the event supports several great nonprofits focused on this issue of preserving farms, but it also introduces new customers and new sources of revenue for small farms.
What are some of your favorite preparations or dishes using Shipley Farms beef and other local products? (Either that you make or enjoy eating elsewhere!)
Saving the hardest question for last, I see! Really, my favorite part is the fat—which it turns out by the way isn’t terrible for you like we’ve been told for 40 years. If I’m doing the cooking, I eat a lot of our steakburgers and our beef sausages. My favorite steak is the dry-aged flat iron. It’s a lesser known cut but is a really tender, flavorful cut with a beautiful spiderweb marbling. When I have time I like experimenting with different cuts and techniques—cooking on coals, or sous vide, or confit where you let the fat do the cooking. A perfectly smoked brisket is hard to get right, but it’s one of the best things you’ll ever eat, with that fat cap just melting through the meat. But I most enjoy when I get to try what our chef partners do with our product. Down your way in Asheville, the guys with the Smasheville burger truck make an incredible Shipley Smashburger. Chef Goff is always doing something interesting with an obscure cut like beef heart or chuck short ribs, so its always fun to go see what he’s doing. If I had to pick a favorite, Chef Danny [Bock, the chef for Shipley Farms Beef and Watauga Butchery] has this unbelievable chimichurri recipe he learned down in Mexico that he’ll marinate a skirt steak or sirloin flap in, and I can’t even describe it.