They were three young cows no one wanted. Skinny, thirsty, and feral, they lived on an overgrazed field on Martha’s Vineyard. Yet, here on this island, “Someone’s trash is someone else’s treasure,” says Johanna Douglas, who goes by Jo. “That’s classic Vineyard.”
Douglas had always wanted to be a cattle farmer, and this was her chance. “Cows are my thing. I went into high school knowing that,” she says. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in sustainable agriculture and food production at Green Mountain College. “Now I’m a farmer because I love to be outside, to work with animals, to create something from the land that follows the natural rhythms of the earth. And everyone needs to eat.”
But cattle require lots of land, which Douglas didn’t have. So instead, she launched her life as a livestock farmer with pigs, calling her business Fork to Pork. Starting in 2019, she began purchasing 40 piglets each spring, bringing them to the Vineyard to live on 3 acres of woods she leases from the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank. There, the pigs happily root and wallow all summer long. They dine on barrels of leftover scraps Douglas collects in her pickup truck every day from local restaurants: carrot tops, beet greens, yesterday’s doughnuts, and, their favorite: scrambled eggs and oatmeal from the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital cafeteria.
On the Vineyard, most of that food waste would otherwise be shipped off-island as trash, adding to the 30 percent to 40 percent of America’s food supply the US Department of Agriculture estimates gets hauled to landfills or incinerated, eventually contributing to the warming of the planet as methane. By collecting food waste to feed her pigs, leasing land for $10 per acre per year, and working mostly on her own seven days a week from spring to fall, Douglas made a profit in her first year as a farmer — a rarity in agriculture.
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Every August, Douglas takes her full-grown pigs to Rhode Island for slaughter and processing. Then, she brings her island-raised pork back to the Vineyard, where those same local restaurants turn it into chops and porchetta for diners, proudly featuring Fork to Pork on their menus.
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Frank Williams, head chef at Beach Road Restaurant in Vineyard Haven, was among the first to collaborate with Douglas. “She started out small, then it exploded. As one of her first customers, I told her this is going to be huge,” Williams says. “A lot of chefs had been yearning and waiting for this, then she came along. Jo’s a pioneer.”
As a pig farmer who still dreamed of cows, Douglas knew she’d need more acreage to raise cattle — a plot of land in the most expensive real estate in Massachusetts. To help preserve the island’s heritage, the Land Bank collects a 2-percent fee from many real estate transfers, using that money to purchase land to conserve as open space, including leasing some of it to farmers for agricultural use. In 2023, when the Land Bank offered 5 acres of fenced pasture, Douglas applied and got the lease.
“Then, it was time to look for some cows,” she says. It didn’t take long. At the ice rink where Douglas drives the Zamboni and coaches JV girls hockey in the winter, a mom mentioned there were three cows that could be had for cheap. Neighbors knew them as “the cows that get out,” as they regularly escaped their field to wander the sandy lanes of the Katama neighborhood, looking for grass.
All Douglas had to do was catch them.
Douglas bought the cows and got her trailer ready. She enlisted the help of her “farm-assist” (and then-boyfriend) Chris Del Prete, the local pharmacist in Edgartown. Del Prete told his pharmacy technicians about the cows, and the three women asked that the cows be named after them: Melissa, Anna, and Ashley. And so, they were.
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“A lot of people, especially farmers, say if you’re raising meat animals, you should never name them,” Douglas says. “I believe you should name them because then you have a deeper relationship with them. If you choose to eat meat, someone needs to raise those animals.” And, she believes, they should have “their best lives until their last day.”
Douglas wasn’t always a carnivore. Before becoming a livestock farmer, she carefully considered the ethics of eating meat. “I was a vegetarian from the age of 10 until I was 21, but I realized that even vegetarians are never separated from animal products,” she says. “You can pretend that you are, if you’re vegetarian or vegan, but technically you aren’t.”
“Organic vegetables require animal manure, or bone meal and other byproducts of the slaughterhouse industry. Inorganic processes in commercially raised vegetables are grown with pesticides and fertilizers that leach into our water system and kill a lot of wild animals,” she explains. “I came to the realization that I would rather be fully aware of what I’m eating than pretend it’s not actually happening.”
One bright spring morning, Douglas and Del Prete parked the trailer in the field on Meeting House Way in Edgartown where Melissa, Anna, and Ashley had lived their whole lives. From inside the trailer, they offered the cows a bucket of grain, and Melissa walked right in to get some. They drove Melissa to her new pasture and came back for the next cow. Anna was suspicious, but a bucket of grain and a push from behind got her into the trailer, too.
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But Ashley? She was having none of it. “We were trying to herd her into the corral, and she was like, nah, this is not happening,” Douglas says. “She did a little fake where she ran at us then dodged us and booked it. It was a next-level hockey move.” It was getting dark, and Douglas wanted to give Ashley time to calm down — they’d try again the next day.
Early the next morning, Douglas woke to a string of voicemails and text messages from her fellow farmers:
“Are any cows missing?”
“There is a cow down by Turkey Land Cove.”
“A neighbor saw a cow on TLC road last night around 8:30.”
“There’s a new cow in our herd at Slough Farm. Is it yours?”
Ashley, Douglas realized, had escaped her pasture in the night and gone looking for Melissa and Anna. “If she had taken a left on the road, she probably would have found her friends,” Douglas says. “Instead, she turned right.” Ashley hoofed past the driveway of Barack and Michelle Obama’s summer home, past David Letterman’s backyard. Then, at Slough Farm, “She joined their herd of heritage breed cattle,” Douglas says.
Ashley’s maneuvers impressed Julie Scott, executive director of Slough Farm, an educational farm foundation that practices small-scale sustainable farming. “The gates were closed, meaning she jumped over a rail fence and an electric fence. It made no sense that she was there.” That afternoon, Douglas met the Slough Farm team at the field to fetch Ashley out of their herd. They set up a 5-foot fence to form a chute toward Douglas’s open trailer. The herd, accustomed to being moved to new pastures daily in a farming practice called rotational grazing, calmly entered the makeshift corral, bringing Ashley with them. From there, she could be separated from the rest and herded into the trailer.
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But suddenly, Ashley jumped the 5-foot fence. “And not from a running start or anything,” Douglas says. “She just stood at the fence, then jumped it, and took off. None of us had ever seen a cow jump a fence like that.” Ashley busted right through the electric fencing and was gone. Now, the Slough Farm team needed to fix the fence, put their cows back where they belonged, and get on with their busy day. And Douglas still needed to catch Ashley.
The next day, Douglas went for a bike ride to think through the problem of her wayward cow, who had since rejoined the Slough Farm herd. Just ahead on the side of the road, she saw a man named Cicilio Rosa Neto riding an ox. Rosa Neto, a former cowboy from Brazil, is often seen with his oxen Titanic and Chilmark, lumbering through the streets of Vineyard Haven. Twice a week, he rides Chilmark to the beach, where the ox stretches out on the warm sand to take a nap. (Titanic goes on Sundays.) Rosa Neto naps there, too, resting his head on the broad cushion of his “cow-ch,” as Douglas likes to joke.
Douglas hailed Rosa Neto and explained her predicament. “I had no clue what Cicilio was going to do, but he was my only hope,” she says. They agreed to meet the next afternoon.
At the appointed time, Rosa Neto arrived at Slough Farm with Chilmark, who ambled off his trailer and into the field. As the cows came over to greet Chilmark, Rosa Neto lassoed Ashley — she “freaked out,” Douglas recalls. Unfazed, Rosa Neto dropped his end of the rope until the heifer calmed down. Then, he tied the other end to Chilmark’s halter and led the ox to the trailer, Ashley very reluctantly in tow. Douglas and the other farmers were finally able to push her in and close the gate.
Rosa Neto refused Douglas’s offer of payment. “I help people who need help,” he told her. “I used to do this all the time in Brazil.”
Julie Scott praised his smarts. “We’ve used cows to lure other cows, but Cicilio used his ox as a tractor,” she says. “The Brazilian community on the Vineyard has a few cowboys who don’t get to use their skills very often. They’re still an untapped resource for the farmers here.”
The sun was setting as Douglas took Ashley to join the other cows in their new home. “I had this vision of them all together with good grass and water, and I guessed it would be easier than it turned out to be,” she says. “But now they could have a good life for the remaining months they would be living. Born on the Vineyard, these cows would graze on island-grown grass that would create a delicious product that would feed many people right here on the Vineyard.”
Douglas’s new endeavor, Leaf to Beef, had become reality.
Douglas isn’t the only livestock farmer on the Vineyard. The Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society plans events to help local farmers, and in March held its eighth annual Meat Ball. The society buys quantities of locally raised beef and pork, letting farmers top off their annual revenue and clear out their freezers for the coming season.
In the largest turnout so far, 320 diners purchased tickets for this year’s event, raising more than $5,800 to help keep Martha’s Vineyard home to farmers and their animals. Local chef Charlie Granquist and others pitched in, preparing a meatball dinner. Together, thanks to their local farmers and chefs, guests sat down at long communal tables to dine, completing the circle that makes small-scale local farming possible.
“Whether it’s Jo working with restaurants, where we find [some of] the worst of food waste, or the Ag Society educating the farmers, on a small island, everyone needs to play,” Granquist says. “Martha’s Vineyard is an example of a closed food system that works only when we have all the links in place.”
At the Meat Ball, Douglas and Del Prete were joined by her parents, retired Episcopal bishop Ian Douglas and Kristin Harris, a school nurse on the island, who often assist their daughter with farm chores. They dined along with the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital anesthesiologist who plays hockey with Douglas and the metal worker who made the weathervane for her grandmother’s house. “We farmers are the diners’ neighbors and the diners know the faces of the farmers who do the hard work of putting food on their plates,” Douglas says.
To eke out a living farming on an island, Douglas and her fellow farmers need to sell directly to their neighbors — restaurants and residents alike. By choosing to buy locally raised meat, chefs and diners make it possible to raise animals with care and respect in ways that keep the land healthy, too: The soil is tilled by the pigs and fertilized by the cattle — and healthy soil can help recapture carbon, unlike exhausted, chemically fertilized soil. Chef Williams makes a point of taking his staff to Douglas’s farm “so that they can meet her pigs and see how they are raised,” he says.
“What Jo is doing can be replicated other places, but the island mind-set makes the difference,” says Williams, who grew up on the Vineyard. “This is a tight-knit community. We know we can sustain ourselves — if we work together.”
Like Douglas, Williams believes in being upfront about where food comes from. Once, when Douglas was delivering a pig carcass, Williams slung it over his shoulder and carried it down the block, into the restaurant. “Got a lot of looks and questions along the way, but that’s the point: People should see how the food they eat gets on their plates.”
In August, the Agricultural Society will host the 162nd Agricultural Country Fair, where Jo Douglas will enter her cattle, now a herd of seven heifers, for the first time and is likely to win yet more prize ribbons for her pigs. Cicilio Rosa Neto will be leading the parade with Chilmark, and local chefs will feed fairgoers. It’s a chance for residents and visitors alike to join oyster-shucking and skillet-tossing contests and the circle of community that, as Douglas says, “shares in the bounty of this island.”
She feels gratitude for the lives of the animals that provide nourishment. One night last fall, she and Del Prete sat down for dinner and before taking a bite, gave thanks. “We said, ‘RIP, Melissa, Anna, and Ashley,’” Douglas says. “We had a little prayer, and it was very sweet. Then, we were, like, ‘Wow, this is good.’”
Gale Pryor is a writer in Charlestown. Send comments to [email protected].