Grass-fed Meat from Wal-Mart?

This is an article that I wrote for www.beginningfarmers.org

The other day I read a particularly thought-provoking post on the blog Honest Meat (Note: this post was removed by the author, I don't yet know why. Cached version here.). The post discussesed the entrance of a new competitor into the local and pasture-based foods market in Northern California. The new entrant, Belcampo Meat Co, is a 10,000 acre, vertically integrated farm focused on producing a wide variety of pastured meats. It also happens to be owned by Outpost International, which appears to be funded by at least one very wealthy individual (Todd Robinson). It’s not exactly Wal-Mart, but based on Wal-Mart’s recent moves it’s only a matter of time.

Small farms could never compete with the marketing prowess and enormous scale of such a competitor, right?

This article is not about whether Belcampo’s (or Wal-Mart’s) actions are right or wrong, it’s about how you, the small family farmer, can prepare your business for the realities of competing with large, well-funded businesses.

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When Old Texts Go Bad. The Cow: Dairy Husbandry and Cattle Breeding


The Cow: Dairy Husbandry and Cattle Breeding by M.M. Milburn

I mentioned previously that I've been reading a lot of old farming books. This past weekend I came across an example of "old texts gone bad", as I like to say. These are instances where clearly the author's day and age got the better of his beliefs. I always wonder what madness we believe in today that will be ridiculed in the future, but for now I'll just do my best to avoid the madness of years gone by.

In this particular instance I was reading "The Cow: Dairy Husbandry and Cattle Breeding" by M.M. Milburn. The book was printed in 1852 and is available for free courtesy of Open Library or Google Books online. There's lots of old texts available for free on the internet, you just have to track them down. Usually, they're more helpful than more recently published books. However, Milburn went off on a tangent about 50 pages in that really makes me wonder just how much of his other information I should trust.

It starts when he writes "Some very grave facts have been arranged and classified to show that when a pure-bred animal has once been impregnated by one of another, such impreganted animal is thereby for ever afterwards a cross, and may be expected to produce a cross-bred, and no more pure-bred young."

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Farm Products, What to Charge: Marketing, Price, Calculating Costs, Strategy and Much More

Cross-posted from beginningfarmers.org, an excellent resource for beginning (and existing) farmers.

The following is a fantastic guest article that really gives a comprehensive look at what to charge for your farm products. It provides useful information and great insights about marketing, price, calculating production and labor costs, and much more. For even more on this topic, it’s really worth checking out the excellent Farm Flows posts at www.littleseedfarm.com. Also, be sure to take a look at the links at the end of the article on marketing and price, as well as our Business Planning Page. Thanks to Scrapple for sharing his extensive knowledge on this topic!

As beginning farmers we’ve found it very helpful to interact with other beginners and share our cumulative knowledge as we all learn together. Starting a farming business is a daunting task and it helps to learn from others as we proceed down this path. One of the questions that comes up most frequently when chatting with other beginning farmers is how to price your farm products. This can be a very confusing proposition for someone with limited business experience and little financial background. Even for those with experience it can be a confounding problem. Having a background in business and economics and the experience of operating two profitable (although very small) businesses in the past, I thought it would be helpful to share an overview of some of our thoughts about pricing strategy.

What is your vision for the farm?


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