Securing Local Food

The definition of farming is: using land to grow food to feed people. Stabilizing the businesses that process farm-raised foods is needed immediately to restore regional food sovereignty.

Interest has never been greater in supporting local farms to strengthen society’s access to food. But try finding it in a modern grocery chain!

Most consumers have no idea where to start to find farm-raised foods, outside of market season. Inevitably, both farmers and conscious food consumers run into processing bottlenecks in the middle of the supply chain.

Local Meat Inspection Regulations, and Those Who Get Around Them

In Manitoba and most North American jurisdictions, meat has to move through a government-inspected slaughter, cut and wrap process in order to be sold to the public legally. The deep shortage of plants that provide this service leads some farmer sellers and food buyers to find workarounds that amount to a black market in local meat.

Hutterite colonies that raise livestock often have commercial processing on-site to butcher their own animals for communal meals. However, in order to sell that meat legally to people from outside the community:

• An inspector from the department of agriculture would have had to witness and approve the slaughter process, and place an official stamp on the carcass before it’s cut up; and

• An annual audit and inspection from the health department, resulting in a food handling permit, would need to be obtained and on display at the point of sale.

There are real regulatory costs to the businesses that offer local meat for sale legally, making it possible for uninspected Hutterite meat to be sold to the public at a discount. Furthermore, Hutterite labor is free: in about grade 8, young people are assigned to the various roles in colony life, including in the barns and gardens – where the rest of agriculture struggles to find and pay workers.

Local Food Market Economics Moving Forward

Food is the most sought-after and talked-about product that consumers and the media are looking into right now in Canada, as demand surges for local alternatives to imports from the U.S. Grocery retails are scrambling, and flipping the script to make it much easier than it used to be to offer farm-branded foods in Canadian stores.

In market economics, this is what’s called a ‘demand-pull’ scenario, and it’s ideal for stabilizing a fragile segment of the food supply chain. The bottleneck in legal processing capacity, and a crackdown on black market sellers, must now be addressed because consumers are insisting on finding better new local food options.

Furthermore, one only has to visit a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO), such as an industrial hog barn on a Hutterite colony, to discover the opposite meat buying experience than they were after. Consumers want to feel great about meat, from the start of the animal’s life, all the way to the end of their meal.

People want pastured meat. Grass-fed, grass-finished, organic, natural, humanely-raised, etc. all come with confusing and complex standardizations, that fail to convey to consumers that the superior quality of the food they buy means that the farmer’s knowledge and management decisions have a positive impact on the land.

This is why Prairie Routes built a direct-to-consumer pastured meat merchandising program. It starts with mapping out opportunities to stand up regional supply sheds for food, then moves through all the math and supply chain linkages to enable farmers, butchers and meat aggregators to fully understand purchasing, costs, sales, regulations, logistics and margin analysis.

Meat processing and distribution businesses in this space are facing strong headwinds and growth in response to new trade barriers, mounting media coverage, and escalating scientific evidence. Plus, pastured meats offer economic ‘co-benefits’ representing new revenue streams for the best farms:

• Livestock living their best lives, outdoors and moving regularly across fresh pasture;

• Functioning nutrient and water cycles;

• Farms, supply chains and communities with improved connection and resiliency;

• Restored soil health, biodiversity and wildlife habitats;

• Nutrient-dense, textured and flavorful products sold to an enthusiastic consumer, supporting farms that protect the environment.