Posted by David Hamilton on January 11th, 2010

The Bundoran Farm team just visited with a friend, Collins Huff, of Gryffon’s Aerie.  Collins and his wife Ramona run one of the most remarkable grass-fed beef operations in the country, and it happens to be here in Albemarle County.  As if on cue, Collins’ visit to the Baldwin Center was presaged by a feature on GA and other local Richmond-adjacent food producers in the Washington Post.

Lots of people are attracted to local food production, for reasons of health, taste, environmentalism, economic justice or sentimentality, but for a lot of them, the local attraction only extends to the plant kingdom (or maybe fungi).  Beef has, for a lot of enthusiastic carnivores, been kind of difficult.  Grass-fed beef has suffered as long as I’ve known about it from the reputation for being insufficiently tasty, relative to the grain-fed variety.  No more.

When we first met Collins, the first thing the team did was buy a couple of steaks (a flatiron and a ribeye, as I recall).  We hammered them on a hot grill at the office, and served them to our regular management meeting with a bowl of Leif Riddervold’s Bundoran-grown shitake soup.  I can tell you that I’ve been to pretty much all the great steakhouses and you will not find a much better ribeye steak than this one.  And I bought it out of a freezer.  A freezer in a garage.

Gryffon’s Aerie solved the grass-fed “problem” by building their own herd (it took about a decade, though I’m sure it felt longer) of milking Devons and a few other varieties.  Genetics of these cattle are more in line with the Argentine pampas-grazing style Collins and Ramona are attempting to emulate.  Results are, well, juicy.

Check out GA’s site, learn about the incredibly cool work they’re doing (check out “Ramona’s Bully Pulpit…”, and join the company of just about every celebrity chef you’ve heard of.  They’re all fans of this operation.  Save the drive to a top DC restaurant, and order a steak for a special night at home…

Filed under: Agriculture, Baldwin Center for Preservation, Education and Inspiration