Meat, local foods and the significance of purchasing off the farm

 

 Changing the way, we purchase foods has always been a dynamic or transitional operation in the United States, as it has been with the rest of the world.  Farmers, ranchers, and other food producers have always run into those whose decisions have great impact on the profit margin of a farmer; coming from laws or other means to control pricing.  Witnessing a change in the food distribution system is one thing but what can prove to be valuable is understanding the history of the food distribution system.  The railroad companies in 1869 managed to make a lot of profit from farmers as they charged a substantial amount to the shipping cost for the farmers. Thus, the grangers were formed; the grangers sought to change how the railways could charge so much for the product and increase the charge at the grain elevators.  "The Granger movement was founded in 1867, by Oliver Hudson Kelley. Its original intent was to bring farmers together to discuss agricultural styles, to correct widespread costly and inefficient methods. Kelley promoted his movement all over the country, but it only caught on in the West. The popularity of the Grangers was "less for its social and educational advantages than for the opportunity it presented for farmers to unite against the monopolistic practices of railroads and elevators and to institute for themselves cooperative methods of buying and selling." Historically there are a lot of corporate methods to secure the best profit from farmers and ranchers.  Usually it is a simplistic approach, one that states we are giving you the best price we can based on our own economics; essentially under paying while overcharging the consumer later.  Probably one of the most common business practices of corporate America is to create markets that essentially rigs the system, and ultimately making it difficult for smaller operations to exist or grow.  This creates an inequitable situation and often goes unnoticed by the public.  Outside of the meat industry, for example, look at the supermarket, using the word supermarket on purpose in this case, go to the shelves and what you will see are specific brands only.  Toothpaste is a perfect example; you will only find two brands.  Why is this?   This is clearly an example of two corporations making sure there are no other brands on the shelves and working with the supermarket to ensure their product is the only one available. This scenario in the meat industry is a bit different, but not by much, you won’t see on a label with local farm name or anything like it; you will see the corporate name of the meat.  In other words, local farms cannot get their product into the supermarket; they cannot connect their farm brand in the large box store.

It is why large food distribution centers, processors and other manufacturers of food do not like the local supply chain it limits their ability to control the pricing structure and limits their range of exploitation. The pandemic of 2020 has exposed some real problems with our food supply especially in the meat industry.  The United States has only 4 meat packing plants; consider this for a minute, the United States covers 3.8 million square miles, and we only have 4 meat packing plants.   The 4 meat packing plants raised the price of meat at the start of the pandemic, capturing more profits as Americans were looking to stock up their freezers just in case the pandemic took a horrible turn for the worse.  The packers used supply and demand as their reasoning to raise prices.  Never mind farmers did not see a single increase in their profit margins.  Never a good look to raise prices on consumers in a pandemic, the producers faced another problem, COVID 19.  With only 4 plants in the United States, it was inevitable that the pandemic would arrive at their front doors.  It did and plants had to shut down.  Now, not only were farmers not getting a fair value for their animals, but they also now had nowhere to take their animals.  The move towards locally raised, grass fed, free range, and humanely raised livestock has been an ongoing movement for some time now; it has grown so much we see the concept in large operations, and it will continue to grow. This is because the consumer demands it and whether it is conceptually accurate or makes a difference, consumers demand this type of animal husbandry.  The same type of consumer now wants to purchase meat from locally sourced or farms/ranches near their location, and they might even want to learn more about the products being raised for consumption, they are not willing to accept the idea that they do not need to know where their meat comes from. Corporations tend to grow and along the way discover they forgot about the one reason they are so successful, their customers.  Creating laws that takes away transparency in farming is an interesting concept, based on the need to hide farming practices that are considered to be less than community friendly and or troublesome animal husbandry.  Just like the extreme of the PETA movement, there are extreme folks in the agriculture industry, those folks closed their doors to the community, not just to hide what they were doing but to manage a biosecurity system of housing extreme numbers of animals under one roof. Small family farms have never felt the need to hide their operations, and in fact have hosted dairy breakfasts, farm days and other events on their farm, they are a proud group who have nothing to hide. Agritourism is real and growing; its something we are interested in at Grey Woods Farm. 

In the state of Wisconsin, local economies started to thrive in ways never thought possible.  Small local butchers started harvesting animals for farmers and farmers started to direct market their meat directly to the consumers.   The only problem for the farmers was soon realized, as booking dates for animal harvest were filling up fast, and now we had a new problem, not enough butchers to clear the demand.  Butchering meat is an art; historically it has always had a love hate relationship with consumers, for obvious reasons.  Good butchers, truly good butchers are the kind of people that can take the whole animal and produce some amazing foods.  The world of barbeque or the world charcuterie are some great examples of what a good butcher can produce; have you ever enjoyed prosciutto or a great smoked brisket; it starts with the farmer raising the perfect animal for either and moves to the butcher who knows just how to cut that portion for the act of perfection in the barbeque world or in the 2-year pursuit of the perfect Italian ham.  

Moving forward we are now seeing a renewed interest in local foods and not just at the popular farmers markets but all around the state.  We have several social media sites where farmers are sharing their products and they have removed the middle person in the process.  Other farmers have built and received permits to sale their products off the farm or they are connecting consumers to the processors they are using locally, the consumer picks the meat up at the butcher’s business, pays the processing fee and whatever the per pound cost for the meat to the farmer.  This is good news, and we need to not only keep this going we need to strengthen the process and end the monopoly owned by 4 meat packing companies.  We have been selling meat at Madison College in our Artisanal Modern Meat Butchery program and the number on question we get, where did the meat come from.  Consumers want to know. 

Let's now go back to 1869 and look at some of the similarities, "The social turmoil that the Western farmers were in was mainly a result of the complete dependence on outside markets for the selling of their produce. This meant that they had to rely on corporately owned railroads and grain elevators for the transport of their crops. To make matters worse, "elevators, often themselves owned by railroads, charged high prices for their services, weighed and graded grain without supervision, and used their influence with the railroads to ensure that cars were not available to farmers who sought to evade elevator service."

Today ranchers and farmers have only 4 choices to get their animals harvested and to market through the 4 meat packing companies. Small farms and even small ranches might still be able to use a local processor, but large ranches and farms do not have that option, small processor cannot handle that many animals. How did we get to this point and why are we in 2022 allowing 4 companies to run the meat plants?  To further exasperate the problem, the shipping of the animals to processing plants is on the farmer or rancher.  The cost of transporting live animals is not cheap! The four locations are Tyson Foods Springdale, Ark. Daily slaughter capacity 28,700. U.S. market share 25 percent, Cargill Meat Solutions Corp. Wichita, Kan., JBS USA Greeley, Colo. Daily slaughter capacity 28,600, National Beef Packing Co., LLC Kansas City, Mo. Daily slaughter capacity 14,000.

When the big box stores started running low on meat supplies, we witnessed a massive price increase and a lack of choices to purchase. In Wisconsin we saw an increase in local purchases and meat was being sold off the farm or through local processors.  Even today, post pandemic, or somewhat post pandemic, we hear from people who already purchased a quarter steer, half a steer or a whole steer, and I am pretty sure they are satisfied with their purchase and can feel confident in doing so again.  Connecting the farms with more consumers is by far the better path, one and could provide a better source of proteins for the home.  

Just as sure as I am writing this blog, we will find legislation that will work to denounce the local food chain and work to make it even harder to sell locally.   The movement thus far has grown exponentially over the years; we have more farmer markets, and we are seeing an incredible amount of sourcing locally online. Just recently labeling laws were changed, due to treaties with other countries, but the labeling laws were removed to allow meat from other parts of the world to come into the USA with identifying their source.  Wait! What? Yes, it was changed under the threat from other countries claiming this would create an unfair market.  I find this interesting, knowing what I know about countries selling cheese, or wine.  Did you know, for example, it is illegal to call Parmesan cheese not produced in Italy Parmesan, or to be more specific, Reggiano-Parmesan.  I believe consumers should have every right to know where their food comes from and furthermore, they should demand that knowledge. 

Food should not be political, and it should be available for consumers to choose where they are going to purchase it from.  Farmers and butchers in a local setting can be a match made in heaven!  Consumers having the choice of purchasing from a local butcher shop and knowing that the meat they are enjoying came from farm not far from their home, can know that they too fed the farmers family and the butchers family. Kinda makes sense!