Announcing Our BIG News

Late December I mentioned that one of our objectives for 2021 was to improve our interaction with our farm customers.

Then, a few weeks ago we mentioned how our current freezer was a bottleneck (to small) and that we are in the process of building a new & larger one. Then we will be able to carry more inventory hopefully to prevent stock outs and allow us to add exciting new items like lamb and seafood.

Today, I want to announce that we are also building a carcass cooler and fabrication room to complement our new freezer!

This is a real game changer for our farm. To help you understand, your farmer will also be your butcher.

We have always had issues off and on with getting our animals processed by a third party processor. In 2020, poor processing of our pigs cost us customers as well as a lot of money.

And, there did not seem to be any hope for improvement!

The situation was very discouraging - we put a lot of effort into raising our animals on pasture for premium quality meat to support our customers. Only to have a processor fail to cure bacon correctly (4-times), constantly messed up simple cuts, and held our pigs in a pin two days after we dropped them off without food, water, and shelter from the sun (as I was later told).

What makes this work is a friend has purchased a mobile slaughter trailer that will come to our farm and slaughter the animal under USDA inspection. The trailer includes a cool room to hang the carcass for transport to my carcass cooler where the meat is aged. Once aged, we will fabricate and package into retail cuts and freeze.

This will be a private plant meaning we will only process animals sold through Nature's Gourmet Farm. Most of the animals will be raised on our farm with only a few exceptions like lamb.

Our plant will also have a very nice smoker so we can smoke bacon and sausages.... as well as many other meats like brisket, turkeys, pork shoulders! Really, the list is as long as the imagination.

Construction is about 2/3's complete and should wind up by the end of February.

And, I am sure you have a lot of thoughts and questions. So, during the month of February we will devote our Weekly Newsletter to help answer your questions.

I've separated the subject by the perspective of four stakeholders as follows:
Feb 6 Animal
Feb 13 Farmer
Feb 20 Customer
Feb 27 Community

To answer 1-question: Our project is 100% funded by our customers past and expected future sales. That makes you a valued contributor to our project.

Now you know our big big news! Hope you will stay tuned for the rest of the story.