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Ditching the supermarket
May Beef Month helps simplify buying local
May-2022-Farming-Story-Pic-2-Option
Four board members of Meatsmith Co-op are pictured at Prem Meats in Spring Green. From left they are Peter Lamers, director; Heather Oppor, vice president; April Prussia, president; Heidi Hoff, treasurer/secretary.

As the Wisconsin Beef Council celebrates May Beef Month and the 2022 Green County Beef Producers’ Best Burger Contest gets underway, farmers in the region are continuing their efforts to promote their locally-produced products.

At the same time, a new meat processing facility that aims to eventually help farmers sell their products is getting ready to open in Argyle.

The Wisconsin Beef Council notes the demand for such items, stating in a news release that “per capita consumption of beef and veal is nearly 59 pounds a year,” which is equal to “almost 236 quarter-pound burgers.”

Locally, the Best Burger Contest is taking place now through the end of July. Those seeking to partake can eat at one of the 13 locales that are participating to get a voting card. 

To give locals an alternative to heading to the grocery store to purchase their meat for meals at home, some local farmers have already started sharing their stories and highlighting their offerings online.

The Beach family’s operation just outside of Monroe, named ‘Son of A Beach Family Farm,’ promotes its products on a number of digital platforms, along with running a stand at the farmer’s market in Fitchburg. Social media has allowed them to give buyers a look at what life is like on the farm, said Andrew Beach, a former high school social studies teacher who coached football overseas for a time, but missed the farming lifestyle enough to return home to run the fifth-generation family farm with his dad. 

Thanks to platforms like Instagram, they can show followers how corn is ground; the sound it makes when soybeans settle into grain bins; the sight of cattle prancing through a pasture; and more — things that people who are not born on a farm might never get the chance to experience firsthand, Beach said. 

Their own website and Craigslist have also helped with promoting and marketing their products, which they often deliver to customers, he added. 

Through selling more directly to consumers, they have been able to introduce people to items they may never have realized were options to purchase — such as beef tongue, liver and oxtail, said Beach.

Alissa Ahrens, 26, and Caleb Ahrens, 29, also raise beef animals locally and have been able to sell freezer beef to interested buyers through people finding out about them just by word-of-mouth, they noted. The Ahrens were in the process of adding USDA-certified freezers to their operation recently, with the hopes of soon being able to start selling individual meat cuts — rather than just wholes, halves or quarters.

The couple met in college while studying agriculture-oriented subjects at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and both come from farming backgrounds.

They now advocate for the use of technology in farming, as it helps them ensure that they get the best genetics possible in their animals. For instance, because of the option to freeze bovine embryos in liquid nitrogen, they still have calves being born from a cow who has passed away, but lived to be 15 years old, Caleb said. And because they can artificially inseminate cattle, they can breed members of their herd with animals that have desirable genetics from across the country.

Despite the innovations that have helped advance the field of farming, a challenge that some farmers have nevertheless faced involves being able to find available appointment slots in processing facilities when they need them, according to Beach and the Ahrens.

Those working to help get a new, local meat processing site, Meatsmith Co-op, off the ground “are just kind of kickstarting everything right now,” said Heather Oppor, who is preparing to act as the co-op’s head butcher/operations manager. Their operation plans to do on-farm slaughter, Oppor said. Their team then intends to process the meat into the requested cuts at the facility they are setting up in Argyle. 

The individuals involved in the effort are scheduled to close on a former grocery store building that will be their processing facility site in June, with the hopes of being up and running by September. 

“If you go into the grocery store, I don’t know that anybody could tell you (exactly) where that meat came from,” she said. At Meatsmith Co-op, they will aim to “connect that … chain between the farmer, the processor, and the customer” and help provide smaller farms with greater selling power, added Oppor, who is currently a student in the University of Wisconsin-Madison two-year Master Meat Crafter Training Program. 

They hope to work alongside local farmers to help keep their operations running smoothly and plan to eventually operate an online interface that will allow customers to buy the area farmers’ products and make selections on things like how thick and lean they want their cuts to be, said Oppor.

The facility may help some farmers with their processing scheduling challenges. 

“(The) pandemic has made processing plants absolutely crazy, where they have two-year waiting lists to try to get an animal in,” said Beach. That means that farmers are often “trying to book an animal that has not even been conceived yet.”

The Ahrens have “appointments for 2023 already on some processors’ books” — spanning out to as far out as November 2023, since wait times they’ve experienced have increased from more around 4-6 months in the pre-COVID-19 pandemic days, to more around 12-18 months now, Caleb noted.

Planning that far out is difficult and involves some educated guessing about when the animals might hit their target market weights, he added. But, if they don’t book a slot that far in advance and have nowhere to go with their beef later, they can end up having to sell at a discounted price at the sale barn. 

On the bright side, Beach noted that during the pandemic it seemed like more people became interested in where their food was coming from. He commented that his family’s farm saw a boost in sales to consumers and hopes that even more people will opt to buy local in the future — throughout the rest of May Beef Month and beyond.