Zach Harris wants you to come out and taste the passion that feeds Harris Farms and the Farmhouse Butchery in Chatham.
“We want places for people to come who appreciate where their food comes from, the quality behind the food, and the story behind that,” he says.
His story starts about the time he was 16. He’d grown up visiting his grandparents on their farm, and found he was drawn to hunting and farming, horses and livestock.
He attended Danny Ward’s Horseshoeing School in Martinsville before determining that a farrier’s life of traveling labor would likely wreck his body, his back, and his chance for a homelife.
Frequently while out on rides, he passed a ranch in Chatham that had a few head of cattle but needed a lot of upkeep.
“I offered them that if I bush-hogged it, would they let me keep a few cattle here?”
He started with 25 head and a cow-and-cattle operation. After the cattle price boom in 2015 – and bust in 2016 – he decided to take a chance and expanded into beef. His herd grew to 100, and is up to more than 300 now. He’s tending several farms on more than 1,250 acres.
He’s delivering more than 5,000 pounds of artisanal beef cuts a week to restaurants in Norfolk, Fredericksburg, Virginia Beach and beyond.
And on his runs to deliver his beef to the beach, he returns with fresh-caught fish, shrimp and scallops which join the hand cut beef, artisanal ice cream, eggs, Virginia wines, and other hand-crafted food and drinks on sale in the Farmhouse Butchery five days a week.
“It’s a boutique style butchery. If you want that exact style rib-eye cut, there’s a butcher here who can do things that you just can’t get at the grocery store,” Zach says.
People come in every day to discover the goodness from near and far – Roanoke, Greensboro, Raleigh, and Chatham.
Zach has a goal to take the Farmhouse Butchery out to the people, to towns and cities where people are hungry for home grown, hand-crafted food.
It all starts on the Harris Farms, where Zach starts his days at sunrise doing herd checks before taking his young brother to school, and often ends it with a turn carving in the butcher shop.
Along the way, every season and every day, are plenty of surprises.
And that’s just the way Zach and his family want it.
“We like to say that we’re cattle from conception to consumption,” his father, John Harris said, only half-joking.
