A customer recently emailed me after picking up her order… she was curious as to why the “take-home” weight was different from the “hanging” weight. When it comes to beef weights, there are 3 different ones of which customers should be aware. The first is “live” weight. This is what the animal weighed on the hoof, or when it was
Category Archives: Food
Beef shares – availability update
We are currently sold out for our Premium Summer beef shares. We actually sold out in record time this year… which was great for us, but not as great for customers who missed the ordering window. The good news is that we are currently taking orders for Neighborly beef shares, available ~October to December. Please contact us for information about
Taking reservations for Premium Summer beef shares
Alright, orders have been rolling in, and it turns out that we have just a few quarter shares still available. The price is $3.75/lb (hanging weight), plus butcher charges (which will probably come out to ~$110-130/quarter). We’re estimating these quarters to be between 165-215 lbs (hanging weight). (You can request a smaller or larger quarter.) 4/29/12: edit/clarification: At $3.75/lb, a
Processing
The NY Times has an article on the lack of processing facilities that is impacting small farms. We’re lucky here to have a few options for mobile (“Custom”) harvest facilities, but we still fret about the threat of our primary one (Frontier Custom Cutting) deciding to quit. Still, at least we’re not obligated to drive our cattle for miles to
Food map
Via Resilience Science, who got it from Edible Geography(with excellent commentary) comes a new project of the USDA…the Food Environment Atlas. It’s a pretty fascinating tool…pounds of meat consumed per capita per year, access to grocery stores, WIC redemptions (pictured), and farmer’s markets are available down to the county level. We spent a good chunk of the evening playing around
the real cost of cheap food
I found an article from a couple weeks back in the Oregonian about efforts by farmers’ markets to encourage low-income shoppers. I thought it was an interesting article which highlighted the fact that while use of food stamps is up dramatically at several area markets, some markets are having a tough time getting low income shoppers to take advantage of
Mossback Farmer at InFARMation talk Tues. May 12th
I was invited to speak at the InFARMation (and Beer!) gathering next Tuesday evening. Friends of Family Farmers has been hosting these events since the start of the year. I’ll be talking about our nearly 10 years of experience raising animals, options for consumers who choose to opt out of purchasing factory-farmed meat, and challenges facing meat producers in our
Joel Salatin on a forgiving food system
Joel Salatin is gearing up for the media push for the movie Food, Inc, which I read somewhere is going to be a combination of Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation. That should be fun This is just a quick Chelsea Green clip of him speaking recently I’m a little skeptical of Joel’s energy analysis…tripling of energy prices would have
Know thy farmer… farmers’ markets, integrity, and consumer choice…
Mother Jones has an interesting article about farmers markets in its March/April edition. The article’s thesis is that farmers markets may not be all they are cracked up to be, and that the food that customers are buying at farmers markets may be overpriced versions of exactly the same produce (even grown by the same farmer) that could be bought
Want to know where your food comes from? Too bad…
The US Dept of Health and Human Services recently conducted a study on food source traceability (thanks to the Oregon Independent blog for the tip-off about this study), and found that they could only trace 12.5% of the items. Wow. To turn that figure around, they couldn’t identify the source of 87.5% of the foods they tried to trace. They
New farmers
In the vein of What is a small farmer, Yes magazine has a short profile of a series of new young farmers
Chicken Feed
Time to dredge up the past again. There’s been another surge of interest by several Oregon farmers to get into growing some of their own grain for feed. No wonder, as feed prices have more than doubled since we started doing chickens, and while the commodity insanity of the last year is taking a breather, there’s no reason to think
Blog for Food month
From Good Stuff NW: One of your elderly neighbors said, “It’s either buy food or take your medicine. It’s a real hard choice.” You can choose to listen, or you can ignore them. But these are real Oregonians facing real choices, and it’s time for those of us who can to take real steps to do something about it. “These
The fundamental rethink
In a fascinating convergence, Tim O’Reilly has a post up about Wendell Berry’s essay ‘In distrust of movements’. Fascinating because while Tim is a pretty visionary hi tech guy, you don’t often find that crowd crowing about the nitty gritty of our food system. That, plus the fact that he also mentions Dmitry Orlov’s recent work shows just how deep
Grains
News sure happens fast. No sooner did I read that analysts are getting nervous about this years corn crop that I read that US acreage planted will be down from last year and people are predicting corn rationing.{The numbers in this link turned out to be bogus; assuming 100 bushels per acre yield the nation will produce 4 times what