4 Years in the Making
We’ve officially entered into our 2024 calving window this week at Alden Hills.
This is always a very exciting time on the farm for us. Our Livestock Manager, Ethan, checks on the pregnant momma cows more frequently because we never know when we’ll have a new surprise waiting for us. It’s calving season a little earlier than we normally like but there’s a story about that… We’ll talk more about that once the calves start dropping though!
I was thinking about the length (in time, not miles. Importan distinction!) of our local food chain again this week as we have a brand-new product hitting the website. Shameless plug but we have Pastured Organic Ground Turkey available for sale! Our USDA inspector said it was the richest colored ground turkey he’d ever seen, so I’ll take that compliment! Meat that has more coloring (deeper pinks or deeper reds) correlates to eating forages and grasses so that is a compliment to our meat quality. Shameless marketing aside, being able to offer ground turkey seems like a very small thing.
But it’s actually a big moment for us personally.
Emily and I had the chance to buy our local poultry processing facility back in 2020 and we jumped at it. In hindsight I realize how naïve I was because one of our driving motivations for the purchase was to be able to start doing more value-added products with our chicken and turkey. At the time, the facility was not able to do any deboning work, no ground chicken or sausages. We knew that our customers wanted boneless chicken breast and ground chicken, so this seemed like the perfect solution. I say that I was naïve though, because it took us fully two years to even be able to start deboning chickens. So why did it take so long? And What does that have to do with local supply chains? Well, it can be really hard to “create” a new product in the local food chain. Usually if it’s not being done locally then there’s probably a very good reason for it. The reason for this constraint we discovered was due to labor. On the local scale all deboning must be done by hand with a skilled crew, and with how much demand there has been since 2020 we didn’t have the time to spend on deboning chickens. Finally, last year we got to a point where we said that we just needed to make it happen, so we started doing it. It was a good decision!
We’ve been limited many times with wanting to explore a new product and idea but not having the option for it. Bone broth is a good example of this too. We’d love to do a lot more with broth but finding someone who can make it for us how we need it has been a years long search. We’re actually pretty close to getting that done too so we’re excited for that too.
Needless to say, we’re excited about the new ideas we have coming….
Even if they take a lot longer than we expected!