The Difficulties Of Buying From Farmers

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to buy raw meat from farmers? We did too when we started in this business. Like where do you even find a farmer? Are they hiding under a rock? Are the at farmers markets? Much to our surprise we found that many vendors at farmers markets weren’t actually farmers but middle men (not that we’re hating on their hustle) because the actual farmers were busy, y’know farming. I came to this rough awakening when I tried asking about some of the odder cuts of meat and some unpasteurized milk. Of course, they didn’t know. They don’t farm.

This was an eye opener.

Farming being the tactile experience it is, you really need to step out of your comfort zone to get to the farmers. Sorry introverts. It’s not like they’re hiding or anything, it’s just they’re not where you are. So it’s time you start getting crafty if you actually want to get in touch with a farmer. Once you solidify your resolve, you got to think about what you actually want from this interaction, do you just want meat? Or do you want a lasting relationship with a small farm that’s likely to lead to an amazing depth in your knowledge of your supply chain.

If all you care about is getting meat from a local farm you’re in luck! There are plenty of services online that aggregate farmers online, list their inventory, and possibly even deliver to your home, usually they also have a pick up option which may or may not be more convenient. Some things that are very important to keep in mind are, How much are you getting? Do you have a Freezer available and ready for all the meat you’re about to purchase. You should also know, it’s going to be more expensive, without the effort in actually nurturing a relationship with a local farm and their family, the price is static (well often by weight) but if you can leverage a relationship with your supply chain often you can get much better deals for the meat.

Another downside to purchasing from the farm aggregator websites are that they’re optimized for human consumption of meat, so you find the important cuts for animals such as kidneys and livers or tripe as easily as you’ll find some sirloin or top round. You’ll really have to hunt for the farms that are really “raw” friendly, and most of the time being raw friendly is not an advertised feature of theirs. The most likely outcome of taking this method is you’ll have to majorly change your plan of how you’re going to feed your pet, changing entirely to fit the offerings to fit these online farm retail websites.

There’s nothing really wrong with taking this option, if the farms in your area have the pieces you need to, but if not you can’t really consider it too much because the diet will be very unbalanced and not ideal for keeping your pet healthy. Kibble is always better than an unbalanced diet. The caveat of this is if you want to share the meat supply with your pet and supplement the lack of the rarer parts with non local farm sourced items like Raw Feeding Miami, meaning it’s more of a win win, your pet gets some great tasty cuts of meat and so do you, of course under the assumption that you do your due diligence and get everything you need to balance your pets needs.

If you’ve managed to make a balanced dietary system out of local farmers using these services, congrats! You’ve stumbled upon a phenomenal local economy for feeding raw. However, for many of us this is not the case. Many of us will find that after searching and web crawling a lot of these places don’t have everything we need under one roof leading us to spend exorbitant shipping and processing fees, so the only option is going to meet the actual farmers in person or give in to the grocery store/super markets. But here we are again, how do we meet these farms?

How we ended up starting our first relationships with farmers was super simple and can be replicated by anybody. Please understand you have a ton of tabs open, like a dizzying amount of tabs open. And I hope you’re okay at using excel or sheets. What we did was we utilized the aforementioned farm aggregation websites, we filtered by the type of farm (like beef, lamb, chicken, veggies, mix) we wanted to work with and we started writing on sheets the type of farm, their name, number and email. Then we did a little more research, scrape thought the first couple pages of google because a lot of these farms don’t have a lot of resources to allocating toward ranking well on search engines. After having completed our list, we wanting to avoid actual human interaction for as long as possible, sent emails. And to much of our surprise, nobody answered. Absolute crickets.

That’s when we realized these farmers probably don’t have the same email habits as us, so that’s when we had to do the unforgivable, we had to call people. It wasn’t as unpleasant as we thought, they were actually very nice. We asked them a lot of questions and asked to go a farm tour. all things considered it was a very pleasant experience! But you should be prepared to ask plenty of questions about the things that matter to you. Are the animals given hormones? What happens when they get sick? What are their enclosures like? What are their feed? Do you sell by share or by cut? And we always highly recommend actually going to meet them on the farm for a tour, not that you don’t trust them, but you want to actually meet the people responsible for the production of all the meat your feeding your besfriends. Bonus points if you can make friends with them and get to know about them and their family!

We love when people participate in their local economy and share the love directly with the farmers instead of grocery stores, but we understand there can be barrier of entry in terms of both money and education, but the rewards from eating fresh and supporting local family farms are immeasurable and a different experience and feeling all together. Good Luck!

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