Happy Cows, Good Food, More Profits for Farmers in Kentucky

For more than a century Henry County relied on tobacco to keep its farmers and its economy going.

For most of the second half of the 20th century a federal program stabilized the price of tobacco, guaranteeing those farmers a steady, predictable income. That all changed in the new century after Congress ended tobacco price supports.

Just as all that change was underway, Mary Berry, the daughter of Henry County’s renowned author, activist, farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry, founded The Berry Center to carry on his vision of “prosperous well-tended farms serving and supporting healthy local communities.”

Thinking about how to help farmers prosper, they began with the mantra, “start with what you have.” With tobacco gone, what Henry County had was cattle and pasture.

No state east of the Mississippi River produces more cattle than Kentucky.

So the Berry Center began to think about ways small farmers could make more, and more predictable, money from their cattle operations and landed on the idea of producing veal.

The economics made sense. Typically, weaned calves would be sent off in a tractor-trailer to a feedlot in the Midwest, fattened up and then sold into the industrial meat complex. Cutting out all the middlemen and harvesting them at weaning for a premium product could mean more money going directly to the farmer.

And that’s how Our Home Place Meat came to be in 2017. A pilot program created and supported by the nonprofit Berry Center, Our Home Place took on the challenge of persuading farmers to raise the veal, guaranteeing them a price for it, and finding markets for it.

It was a tall order.

The program began with the principle of guaranteeing a price that took into account farmers’ expenses and added a reasonable profit. “With the market you are gambling,”explained Beth Douglas, who directs the program. “At the beginning of the year we tell the farmers how many cattle we will purchase and at what price. That allows the farmers to plan for the year.”

Plus, the farmers don’t have to invest in different equipment or new barns, they just have to keep raising cattle and, instead of sending them off to feed lots, “we take it to Trackside Butcher Shoppe,” in Campbellsburg (also in Henry County), Douglas said. “So it’s literally not changing anything for the farmer. It’s taking them where they are.”

At the same time, Our Home Place began developing partnerships for marketing the product.









Source: penncapital-star.com

Photo Credit: USDA