Meat Cooperative

Meat Cooperative Moves Product from Farm to Restaurant

Vermont Quality Meats farmers are boosting farm income by capturing more of the consumer food dollar. Says VQM founder Lydia Ratcliff: 'Food doesn't get from the farm to the table without a lot of steps . . . Instead of throwing our product away at the auction and supporting a bunch of middlemen, we're doing all those steps ourselves.' Photo by Jerry DeWitt

With start-up help from a SARE grant, a farmer-owned meat marketing cooperative is netting top dollar for its products and providing its 52 member farms with crucial income. Vermont Quality Meats now sells more than $1,000 a day worth of New England lamb, goat meat, pork, veal, venison and game birds - most of it to upscale New York and Boston restaurants at double regular auction sale prices. The cooperative has put between $100,000 and $150,000 extra profit 'into the pockets of producers,' estimates diversified livestock farmer Lydia Ratcliff. That kind of income is beyond the reach of most small-scale livestock farmers. Few have independent access to top-dollar markets, she says, and instead often receive auction prices insufficient even to cover production costs. The result: Many small sheep, goat and pig farms are often short-lived or deep in debt. Cooperative members, on the other hand, are benefiting from both lower production costs and higher sales prices by meeting market demand for significantly younger animals. About 10 part-time jobs have been created through the project, all of which are filled by co-op members, further supplementing farm income. 'Our farmers are also getting the reward of knowing they're producing such fine products that their efforts are being recognized by some of the most distinguished chefs in the country,' Ratcliff says. For more information, go to www.sare.org/projects/ and search for FNE99-270

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