We're Not a Commodity Farm (And Why That Matters at Your Table)

By Ed Crowley · Life at the Meadows

Pull up a chair. I want to talk about the single biggest thing that separates Mesta Meadows and Atelait Creamery from most of the farms whose food ends up in your kitchen. It's in that one word from the title of this blog: commodity. We're not one.

First, a word in defense of commodity farms

I grew up on a commodity farm. A big one. We milked over 200 head of dairy cattle in southwest Missouri. Every week the tank truck came and picked up our thousand gallons, added it to the milk from five other dairies, hauled it to the processor, and blended it with milk from probably a hundred more farms before it was bottled and shipped out.

I have nothing against that system. It feeds the country, and it gives Americans some of the cheapest food in the world. If I'm a commodity dairyman, my job is to produce as much milk as I can, put it in the tank, and I'm done. If I'm a corn farmer, I grow as much corn as I can, haul it to the elevator, and they decide whether it becomes feed, ethanol, or corn syrup. You take the price they give you and the grade they give you, and that's your return. It's a good system. It's a hyper-efficient system.

It's just not what we do.

What we do instead

We are a farm-to-consumer producer. That sounds like marketing talk, so let me tell you what it actually means on a Tuesday.

We produce the food. The milk in the Atelait tank is our milk, from our ewes, period. We don't partner with anyone on that, and there's no other sheep's milk in the state going into an ice cream creamery the way ours does. On meat, we raise our own lamb and beef, and when demand outruns what we can raise, we partner with farms we know personally, Fahrmeier Farms for lamb, a local farm for hogs, who raise animals the way we do: on pasture, with regenerative practices, treated humanely start to finish. We take those animals to the same processors we use, and we know how they'll be handled there.

We do the middle part. Most farms that sell direct will sell you a half a beef hanging on a hook. Most people can't take that. So we have ours cut the way we'd want it in our own kitchen: steaks an inch and a quarter to an inch and a half thick, because a thin steak is a disappointing steak. We finish our cattle on grass with a little grain at the end, because we want that marbling and that flavor. Then everything is vacuum-sealed into individual cuts, labeled, and frozen, so you can buy four steaks and two pounds of ground instead of a chest freezer's worth.

We get it to you. At the Mason Jar store here on the ranch. At the farmers markets in St. Louis and Cape. Through independent stores, four of them in St. Louis now, plus Chicago, Cape, Farmington, and more every month. You won't find us in a national chain, and that's on purpose. The big chains want commodity volume at a commodity price, and they don't much care who the producer is. The independents know who we are. We know who they are and how they treat their customers. They're an extension of us, and we're loyal to them.

The whole basket

Here's the part people don't expect. We carry honey. We carry syrups. We carry potatoes. We didn't make any of those.

That's deliberate. If you want to eat food you can trace, the last thing you need is to drive to six farms to fill one grocery basket. So we partner. Engelan Farm makes hickory, pecan, walnut, and maple syrups that are flat-out amazing, and we carry them. Three Cats Farm produces the local honey on our shelf. Dowds Farm grows our potatoes and Waygu Beef. Every one of those carries the farm's name on it, because the whole point is knowing who grew it. (The eggs you buy from us are ours, from our own hens. The creamery goes through 30 to 40 dozen a week on top of that, and those we buy from a neighbor's flock.)

We're not all the way there. We don't do vegetables yet. One of these days. But the goal is simple: as much of your weekly basket as we can put in front of you, every item traceable to a farm you could drive to.

Why traceability isn't a buzzword

This summer's Cyclospora outbreak tied to Taylor Farms lettuce made more than 1,600 people sick across five states before investigators could pin down a single supplier. Part of the reason it took so long is that tracing anything back through a commodity chain is hard. Not impossible, but hard, because by design that lettuce was blended, shredded, and shipped under a dozen brands before anyone got sick.

The same thing is true in the meat case. A package can say "Processed in the U.S.A." and still contain beef that was raised, and sometimes slaughtered, overseas. The sticker isn't lying. It's just not telling you much.

Ask us where a package came from and you'll get a one-sentence answer. Which pasture, which processor, which week. That's not a feature we added. It's what's left when you refuse to blend.

On price

We won't be the cheapest. You can go to a warehouse club and buy lamb from New Zealand that was processed six weeks ago and spent three of them in a freezer container crossing the ocean. It'll cost less. It's a commodity product, and that's what a warehouse club sells. We don't think it's as good, it certainly isn't as fresh, and you'll never know how that animal was raised.

I don't intend for us to be the most expensive, either. We're trying to be a good value for people who care what they're eating. That's a different customer than the one shopping on price alone, and that's fine. Both can exist.

The creamery is the clearest example

There are only a handful of true farm-to-consumer creameries in the country. Plenty of places call themselves a creamery and buy their milk from a co-op, or buy their ice cream base in bulk from somebody else, and the folks scooping it couldn't tell you what farm it came from. Again, nothing wrong with that. It's just a commodity business with a nice sign.

Atelait is sheep's milk from sheep you can come meet, pasteurized and churned in a Grade A creamery a few hundred feet from where they were milked. That's rare, and it's the reason the ice cream tastes the way it does.

Come talk to us

This is what I love most about doing it this way: we know our customers, and they tell us things. If something's not right, tell us and we'll fix it. If something's great, tell us that too, because it helps us decide what to make more of. That feedback loop is something a commodity farm never gets, and it makes us better every year. Our goal is to provide you with fresh, local food - tell us how we are doing. 

If you are new to us, try our products. Try the other farms around you that are doing this too, because we're not the only ones. And come see the animals. That's the whole idea.

— Ed

Ed and Terri Crowley own Mesta Meadows Ranch and Atelait Creamery in Glenallen, Missouri. ed@mestameadows.com · www.mestameadows.com · www.atelait.com