The Basket

When It All Starts Coming Together

There’s a moment in every farm business, if you’re lucky and stubborn enough to reach it, when you look up from the work and realize the thing you’ve been building actually works. Not perfectly, and not every day, but it works. This fall I’ve had a few of those moments, and I want to tell you about them.

I grew up on a commodity dairy farm in southwest Missouri, milking over 200 head. I learned early how hard that life is, and how little of the value of what you produce stays on the farm. You do the work, the milk truck pulls away, and somebody else turns it into something special and sells it to somebody you’ll never meet. When Terri and I started Mesta Meadows, we wanted to do it differently. We wanted to raise the animals, make the food and hand it to the people who eat it ourselves.

That’s easy to say. It’s a lot harder to do.

It starts with the people

No farm-to-table business runs on one person’s back, and ours certainly doesn’t. It takes a crew that shows up before daylight to milk and do chores, and folks who load the van and run a market stand in St. Louis all afternoon in the heat. It takes partners who care about the same things we do.

We have that now. Our team knows the animals and the product, and they talk to customers like neighbors, because they are. Our partner farms fill out the basket: Fahrmeier Farms with lamb, Engelan Farm with their syrups, Three Cats Farm with honey, and Dowds Farm with potatoes. Our wool goes out to Wyoming to be spun at Mountain Meadows Wool Mill and comes back as socks from Northland Woolens. Each of those relationships took time to build, and each one makes the whole stronger.

Then the customers start coming back

The first time someone buys your ice cream, it’s curiosity. The second time, it’s a good sign. When they come back every week, ask about the new flavor, bring a friend to the stand and tell you about the time their grandkids found the petting zoo, that’s when you know you have something.

We’re seeing that more and more. It happens at the farmers markets, at the Mason Jar here on the ranch, and at the independent shops that carry Atelait. People’s faces change when they taste sheep’s milk ice cream for the first time. They expect something unusual and find out it’s just plain good. Then they start asking what else we raise.

That’s the whole point. A loyal customer isn’t buying a pint of ice cream or a pound of Wagyu. They’re buying into a farm they trust.

And then the logistics click

This is the part nobody puts on a postcard, but it’s where farm-to-table businesses live or die. You can raise the best lamb in Missouri, but if it isn’t frozen, packed, labeled and in the right place on the right day, it doesn’t matter.

For a long time it felt like we were inventing every step as we went. Now the pieces fit together:

• Online orders at mestameadows.com.
• Weekly pickups in St. Louis and Cape Girardeau.
• Home delivery.
• Freezers that hold their temperature, and a van on a route that makes sense.
• Batch records in the creamery that our Grade A inspector likes.

When a customer can order on Sunday and pick up a cooler of lamb chops, eggs, sheep’s milk and ice cream later that week, all of it traceable back to our farm, the farm-to-table model stops being an idea and becomes a system.

What we’re building toward

Our goal is simple to say and a lifetime’s work to do. We want Mesta Meadows to be a complete farm-to-table provider, a place where you can get most of what your family eats from people who know exactly how it was raised. That rests on three commitments.

Holistic farming. We farm with the whole system in mind: the pasture, the flock and the land we hope to pass on in better shape than we found it. Our Great Pyrenees guard the sheep, so the flock can graze the way sheep should, out on the grass.

Humane animal practices. Our animals are raised with care, without antibiotics or artificial hormones, and processed humanely at a local USDA-inspected facility. If we wouldn’t be proud to show you how an animal lived, we have no business selling it to you.

Great food. In the end this has to taste good, and it does. Our ice cream is made from our own sheep’s milk with no commercial base, and our Wagyu steaks are cut thick. Good farming and good food aren’t separate goals. One leads to the other.

The thrill of it

I’ve started a few things in my life, and I teach young entrepreneurs at SEMO about starting theirs. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of watching a plan you sketched on paper turn into a working business with real people, real customers and real food moving from our pastures to your table.

We’re not done. There’s a new barn to build, more ewes to milk and more doors to open. But for the first time, I can see the whole thing working together. That’s a pretty good feeling for an old dairy kid.

Thanks for being part of it. We’ll see you at the market.

— Ed, Mesta Meadows