Within the website you posted about the organic meats is an interesting newspaper article I'm going to post, because it discusses local, sustainable agriculture as part of the belief system of the rancher who is offering this meat for sale. I personally think it is sad to take such good care of animals and still eat them, but I realize that is a minority opinion and am at least happy that they are not confined and suffering:
Rare and well-done
Old-fashioned methods help Thundering Hooves sow success
ED MURRIETA; The News Tribune
Published: June 22nd, 2005 12:01 AM
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Joel Huesby doesn’t behave like the sort of person who would tip a cow, much less tilt Big Beef’s windmills.
He looks a stranger square in the eyes, offers a lean hand and introduces himself as a “holistic manager” and “sunlight harvester” who raises livestock in a low-stress environment with no growth hormones, antibiotics or other hallmarks of the virtually monolithic meat industry.
Wonkishly idealistic yet mild-mannered, Huesby is just a fed-up, fourth-generation farmer from the Walla Walla Valley who won’t take a lot of things any more.
“A lot of people in the cattle industry, which is where I grew up, are price takers,” Huesby said recently over omelets in Seattle. “The packer says, ‘All right, this is what I’m giving you and that’s it.’ The cattlemen have never liked that because they have no control over the marketplace. And the packers, who are few, say, ‘Take it or leave it. We’re the only game in town.’”
Twelve years after returning his family’s wheat fields to pasture, Huesby is sowing an old-fashioned network of sustainable livestock production, meat processing and direct-to-consumer sales that he says benefits farmers and consumers by localizing and protecting the food supply at a time of rising food and oil costs, agricultural diseases and terrorism concerns.
“If it’s not within 300 miles of our farm, we don’t want to do it,” said Huesby, who sells his family’s certified organic Thundering Hooves brand frozen beef and poultry at Puget Sound farmers markets, at a church parking lot in Seattle and from the Walla Walla butcher shop his family purchased last year.
“The average distance products go from the farm to the final consumer is 1,500 miles,” Huesby added, riffing off another of many industry figures locked and loaded beneath his Stetson. “That’s fine for widgets and gizmos and bananas and coffee. But I think we should make our food supplying circle much smaller than it is now.”
While a few small farmers like The Meat Shop of Tacoma and Whispering Springs Farms in Thurston County pasture-finish, butcher and sell their own meat, none match Thundering Hooves’ plan of having its own on-the-farm slaughterhouse and a grass-roots distribution network similar to those of farmers who deliver fresh organic produce to customers’ homes. There’s even a Thundering Hooves franchise glimmer in Huesby’s eye.
“It is very unusual,” said Leslie Zenz, director of the state Department of Agriculture’s Small Farms and Direct Marketing Program. “Producers haven’t been geared toward that type of production. Infrastructure is not really available. There are very few USDA processing facilities in the state that will process for an independent producer.”
An on-farm slaughterhouse approved by the United States Department of Agriculture is the linchpin of Huesby’s plan. Under the USDA’s self-policing policy, Huesby needs only to complete a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points plan, a detailed facilities and operations safety manual.
Huesby expects USDA certification by September, but he’s already worked out his slaughterhouse stats.
“Take the Tyson plant in my own county,” Huesby said, referring to the mega-meatpacker’s production line capacity, which a Tyson representative confirmed. “There’s 2,300 head of cattle processed there in a single day by 1,700 or so employees. That’s about 1.3 beef broken down into primal cuts per person per day. That’s no more efficient than my little plant doing six head a day with a couple of employees.”
Huesby laid out his annual goal of 1,000 head of cattle, zero middlemen and family members doing most of the work.
“I was talking to the meat guy at QFC yesterday,” he said. “The average price, if you take ground beef through steaks, it’s probably $7 a pound. We know there’s about 400 pounds of retail meat on one carcass. So $7 times 400 is $2,800. Then throw in another couple hundred dollars for the pet foods and byproducts markets. That’s $3,000. Take $3,000 times 1,000: That’s $3 million of gross sales from a little-bitty plant.
“At those levels, this thing pencils very well. But it doesn’t pencil, for instance, for us going to farmers markets with 50 head.”
Of course, loading twin refrigerated trailers and hauling $20,000 of frozen beef and poultry to a profit 280 miles away has its challenges. Chief among them is convincing enough consumers to change the way they buy meat.
Never mind that Thundering Hooves prices are on par with other grass-fed and certified organic brand meats sold at natural foods markets. Forget meat quality and environmental health debates. Whether Thundering Hooves succeeds boils down to this: Will meat-eaters wait until farmers market day to buy Sunday night’s steaks? Will consumers order and pay online and pick up bulk orders of frozen beef and poultry in a church parking lot or their neighbor’s driveway?
“As soon as consumers are able to get meat from the producer in a way that’s somewhat convenient to them, I think we will see a much broader market for these things,” said Zenz of the state Department of Agriculture.
“Right now it will certainly be considered niche.”
“The key is getting it to where people don’t have to travel across town in traffic,” Huesby acknowledged. “They need to come to us, but we’ll come to them and just meet in the middle.”
“I would say this is a growing trend,” said Zachary Lyons, executive director of the Washington State Farmers Market Association. “In this age of corporate agribusiness, mad cow and issues about food quality, safety and animal welfare, the public is supporting (small farmers) in ever-growing numbers. They know from where their food is coming, how it is raised and by whom. Try getting those answers at a big chain grocery store.”
Huesby is a self-described sinner who sold pesticides after graduating from Washington State University with an agriculture degree in 1988. After returning from the agricultural dark side and confronting the forces of farm subsidies, Huesby bailed out of his family’s wheat business and jumped whole-hog into pasture-finished livestock.
“You either get big or you get out, the plight of the family farmer,” said Huesby, 41.
Today, Thundering Hooves raises and pasture-finishes 240 head of cattle, 2,000 Cornish cross broiler chickens, 70 lambs, a few goats and 50 American Standard Bronze turkeys, a unique heritage breed, on 400 acres 14 miles west of Walla Walla.
Pasture-finishing means animals spend their whole lives on the farm. They eat grass and alfalfa. They aren’t fattened on commercial feedlots prior to slaughter.
“When we concentrate our cattle in the feed lot, we wonder why we have fertility problems on our farms and why we have an environmental problem in our feed lots with all this manure waste,” Huesby said. “It’s quite simple: Put ’em back where they were. This is not rocket science.
“Four-fifths of everything that goes in the front of the cow goes out the back end. Why not let her spread her own wealth? All of a sudden I’ve just eliminated the need for fertilizers.”
As for having his own slaughterhouse near his pastures? “The best place to die is where you live,” Huesby said.
Thundering Hooves currently hauls its livestock 80 miles to McCary Country Meats, a USDA slaughterhouse in Basin City, north of Pasco.
“Economically, it’s a real hardship to be bothering with half a day to haul six head of cattle up there and then go back two days later and pick up the carcasses when all of this can happen right here at home,” Huesby said.
Anna Markholt of The Meat Shop of Tacoma agrees.
“What Thundering Hooves is trying is definitely ideal – they don’t have to rely on somebody else,” Markholt said. “It’s hard for small producers like us and Thundering Hooves to find a facility that will process our products. We’ve been locked out of a lot of wholesale options because we have to rely on somebody else for processing.”
Markholt and her dad, Lee, raise certified organic cattle, chickens and pigs on their farms in Tacoma and Lewis County. They ship them to slaughter facilities in Snohomish County and Centralia. Would The Meat Shop of Tacoma build its own slaughterhouse?
“That’s not gonna happen,” Markholt said. “Number one, we don’t have that capital. Number two, it’s a really dirty, hard job. My dad made that decision a long time ago when he built the shop not to do the slaughter.”
Or, as Huesby said, “It’s not a lonely world, but there aren’t very many people where I am in this whole thing, who have taken things to this level of activity.”
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