Custom meat options popular with consumers

As many consumers have become more aware of how and where the food they purchase is produced, farmers have stepped in to meet the demand for local food in many ways. One niche market that farmers have stepped into is direct to consumer meat.

There are two ways for farmers to offer direct to consumer meat, according to Stone County Extension Agent Tyler Caston. One is known as “custom exemption,” where the farmer sells an entire animal, or a share of an animal, to the consumer. The farmer then sends that animal to a state certified butcher, and the consumer usually picks up the meat from there. Several local farmers have done this, reserving a number of animals out of their larger herd, and mainly working with an existing local customer base.

There are disadvantages to this, from a consumer’s point of view. It generally requires the consumer to pay a lump sum of money, which can sometimes seem unaffordable. Small families or single people may not consume enough meat to make up even a quarter share of an animal. And many people don’t have the freezer storage space for such a large quantity of meat.

Several area farmers have chosen to go a step beyond this, and offer specific cuts of meat to consumers. Meat sold this way is required to pass a USDA inspection, and facilities for this are less common than the state facilities, but changes in the landscape for both the farmers and the consumers have helped make this route more viable.

A long tradition
Wayne Harlan of E&M Farms Custom Beef in Onia does both: shares of animals and individual cuts of meat. He has been offering direct to consumer beef for 18 years, and he is a regular at the Stone County Farmer’s market, where he partners with chicken and pork producer Blaze Hardage of The Farm in Arkansas in Big Flat. Together, they are able to offer the “big three” meat products: chicken, pork and beef. Harlan also offers delivery to customers all over the state. But, he says, “We sell the bulk of it right here in Stone County.” In addition to the farmer’s market, Harlan places ads in the newspaper, and he has customers who have been with him for years.
Harlan recalls the specific incident that caused him to choose the direct to consumer route: “For years, we butchered our own beef. And we ran out, so we were buying meat at a grocery store for three, four months. And we were selling our cattle at the sale barns. We had supper, let’s say, a Sunday night, using our store bought [beef]. And the next day, we went to the butcher shop and got our newly butchered beef. That night, we had it for supper. Well, that day, we sold our calves at the sale barn. And when I ate that meat Monday night, I asked my wife, I said, ‘Why did we just sell them calves? Because this is so much better, people will pay for this.’”

“If you’re wanting taste and texture and marbling, something that you’re gonna find in the best restaurants, that’s what we have,” Harlan says. “Our beef is being sourced from prime calves, roughly about 18 months old, fully finished on local Arkansas corn.”

Harlan emphasizes that for him, it’s not just important what goes into his beef, it’s what does not go into his beef. “Our meats have no pesticides, no herbicides, no antibiotics, and no hormones,” Harlan says.

It’s a message that resonates with farmer’s market shopper Patricia Huyler, who stopped by Harlan and Hardage’s booth to ask about chicken. She says she prefers to know where her meat comes from. With grocery store meat, she says, “I don’t feel sure about them not having the hormones and the antibiotics.” She is also concerned about the treatment animals face. “It’s not fair to the chickens to keep them in tiny little places their whole lives,” she says.

“Plus, they’re nice people,” she says. For Huyler, as for many local meat customers, knowing your farmer is important.

In addition to communicating value to the consumer, Harlan has found that communication with butchers is also essential to being able to deliver the best product to his customers. “The verbiage of the different cuts are different all over the nation, and people move here, and they want this particular cut, like a tri-tip.” Harlan says. In order to communicate with the person who is actually cutting up the meat, “we document the life out of it on paper,” he says.

From consumer to producer
Blaze Hardage grew up on a typical “industrial” farm in Texas, then went off to college and became a chef.

“I just loved food, learning about it, and cooking,” he says. “I started noticing that when I would order meats, all the different stuff that was in them. It just really started bothering me where our ground beef was coming from.”

After Hardage got out of the restaurant business, he went into the ministry. He and his wife were also following natural farmers online, and they started making what he calls a “dream plan.”
“We just felt convicted to raise farm grown, fresh, local meat,” he says.

Hardage said that at first he was advertising to many different locations, and shipping to many locations. “We’ve now stopped that because locally, within Arkansas, they’re buying all of our meat.”

Another part of the overall picture for Hardage is seeing the regeneration of the land with this type of farming. “I wish you could see our land, where we move our chickens, and we move our pigs, because it has become so pretty, and so full of grass, and things that weren’t growing there,” he says.

Hardage says that he looked far and wide for a beef producer to partner with, and tried beef from many places. “When I visited Wayne, and I got to see his farm, and meet them, and see his animals, it blew my mind. He has an unbelievable operation.”

“He was doing [meat] bulk, and I convinced him to do it by the cut,” Hardage said, adding that a lot of people can’t afford the up-front cost for a whole cow.

Changing landscape
In addition to a changing consumer landscape, where people are more concerned with what goes into their food, and with more humane treatment of animals, there have been practical changes that have made it easier for farmers to offer meat locally, instead of going through the corporate food system.
One change is an increase in the number of options for the required processing and inspection of meat. Ashley Huyard says, “That’s one good thing that came out of COVID, is there’s a lot more USDA inspected facilities.”

Caston said the same is true of certified butchers. “More of those have popped up more recently,” he says.

Of course, the landscape of beef prices is also constantly changing, and with the recent increase in prices, some farmers who were offering the “custom exemption” meats are choosing to send all of their cows to market, instead.

At current prices, “You could sell a 300 pound calf for $1,500,” Caston says. He said farmers have to make the calculation of whether to hold onto their animals and continue to invest in them, or take their payday earlier by selling them at the sale barn. Whatever the weight of a cow is, it tends to yield around half that weight in meat, so high prices for cattle can change the calculation.

Ashley Huyard said that during COVID, cattle prices were down at about a dollar a pound, “whereas, the price in the grocery store, if anything, went up. The [meat] packer was capturing all of that margin while they were starving the producer to death. So, I think anytime anyone markets their beef direct to consumer, they protect themselves toward a downturned market.”

Hardage considers himself a convert from industrial farming, and that he encourages others to get into meat production. “We don’t have enough local growers to support all the community,” he says.