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Wende Elliott realizes a
profit from raising organic turkeys, partly thanks to her a
membership in a grower’s cooperative. Courtesy of Wende
Elliott. |
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ELLIOTT/RUDE FAMILY
Since 1999, Wende Elliott has raised poultry and lamb in a pasture-based
system on her 120-acre central Iowa farm. With her husband, Joe
Rude, she gained organic certification for her meat products, as
well as alfalfa, oats and corn.
As they fine-tuned their production, Wende and Joe pondered how
to get the most from their meat. In 2001, Wende wrote a business
plan and successfully launched a cooperative called Wholesome Harvest.
With two grants from the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education
(SARE) program, she began to promote meat sales in five Midwestern
states.
Wholesome Harvest is now a thriving, farmer-owned organic business
with more than 40 members. The e-commerce site, wholesomeharvest.com,
is a successful direct sales mechanism that augments more traditional
markets such as grocery stores and restaurants.
The website provides a wealth of information about the Wholesome
Harvest cooperative and the group’s efforts to promote organic
meat grown on pasture with humane handling practices.
Wholesome Harvest’s virtual market enables buyers to order
meat online for delivery. It evolved from Wende’s vision that
people who wanted to eat certified organic, independently raised
meat from family farms didn’t have to go farther than their
computer to shop for it.
In an innovative twist on community agriculture projects, people
can join Wholesome Harvest’s meat-of-the-month club and receive
monthly shipments of organic beef, chicken, lamb, duck, goose and
turkey, much like a CSA. Frozen meat on dry ice is shipped via two-day
express delivery. In its advertising, the co-op emphasizes that
its products are locally grown, farmer-owned, pasture-raised and
rendered at custom processors to give them a human edge over the
more anonymous industrial model.
“We can’t compete on cheap food,” Wende said,
“but we can compete on quality and freshness and the fact
that our product is local.”
Growth, the co-op’s communications officer says, is steady.
For that and other reasons, Wende hopes to form a national coalition
of regional organic meat cooperatives.
“Only by working together can farmers protect the added value
of organic meat, and capture premium and remote as well as mainstream
markets for their products,” Wende said. “Otherwise,
they will end up being paid what the plant wants to pay them.”
To learn more about the national coalition, contact Wende at welliott@wholesomeharvest.com.
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