How to Scale Up Local Meat Processing

Success has been elusive for new meat processing infrastructure investments in most rural areas, but White Oak Pastures has made it work thanks to a business founded on values.

The western Canadian regenerative agriculture conference season kicked off last week with an inspiring and informative gathering hosted by the Manitoba Forage and Grasslands Association. As with every other regenerative agriculture event, the number of attendees is accelerating, and expanding well beyond the pasture-based farmer crowd.

There are 2 common threads that unite people passionate about regenerative agriculture: a reverence for the natural world, and devotion to community. ‘Defining regenerative’, or natural or soil health or sustainability for that matter, is a pointless conversation that distracts from the fact that industrial agriculture holds no space to address people’s concerns about losses in natural capital and rural farm communities.

One of the agenda’s highlights was White Oak Pasture’s sales and marketing manager Jenni Harris, daughter of founder and author Will Harris. Jenni offered up rare gems of strategy behind the business’s development of direct-to-consumer sales and livestock processing in the remote rural community of Bluffton, Georgia.

Hope, courage, connection and tactical wisdom characterize the White Oak Pastures business, where 154 full-time employees process 40 head/day in a federally-inspected meat processing plant located on the farm. Currently, sales are about 50/50 split between wholesale, i.e. into grocery outlets like Publix and Whole Foods, and direct-to-consumer households.

Keys to Success

It’s the kind of thing that’s been tried and failed repeatedly in North American farming communities in recent decades. Jenni outlined the steps her family took to make it a success, hoping to inspire more new farmers to start.