Industry Club

~ This article first appeared in the Leader-Vindicator newspaper. ~

When organizations visit our farm for a tour the discussion forces me to step outside my first-person perspective and analyze daily activities from a new angle.  Last week we were visited by the Industry Club of a local high school.  The teacher in charge of the program asked me to explain how our business interacts with others. 

Our primary objective is to spend as much time as possible assisting customers and selling beef because this is the highest return effort for our business model.  The rest of our effort we want directed into animal care and attention, as this is the force that yields quality beef that attracts customers.  As a result, we hire out as much auxiliary work as possible so it does not interfere with beef sales and cattle care.  Such a model stands in opposition to a traditional farm mentality that attempts to do as much work in-house as possible.

One of the more dramatic decisions we made was to sell most of the equipment, stop growing crops, and purchase the corn we need from a different area farmer.  This seems like a dumb idea to almost everyone because our feed bill is horrendous and home-grown crops are perceived as a free resource.  Yet, we never have to worry about replacement parts, planting dates, wet harvest weather, drought, flood, storage, breakdowns, new equipment cost, fertilizer cost, and the host of other headaches that come with growing a successful crop.  It is a monumental effort to produce the quantities of grain we need every year, and that effort is much better accomplished off our farm than on it.  Instead of farming, we sell beef.

Mixing feed and mineral supplements is another important task that we choose not to do.  A local feed mill grinds, mixes, and bags the supplements we need, and then delivers them to the farm.  This isn’t a massive conglomerate we’re dealing with; it’s a guy and his family and a few employees, and we trust them to do a good job because it’s their name on the label.  As a result of this trust, we don’t need equipment to do the work, and we don’t need to spend hours each week standing next to a mixer waiting for the batch to be finished.  Instead of concocting feed mixes, we sell beef.

We also hire out all of the processing that is needed to make the switch from live animal to packaged beef.  Here is another monumental expense for our business.  Simply put, from a labor standpoint the amount of beef we process in a week is far too much for us to tackle ourselves, yet the volume is far too little to justify construction of a facility that meets the standards of our customer base.  Because we sell beef to families as well as through multiple restaurants in both Clarion and Pittsburgh, it is imperative that our beef passes through a USDA inspected facility that ensures humane handling standards and rigorous sanitation diligence.  I would like the opportunity to bring such a facility closer to home to enable more direct interaction with the process; as of yet the option has been quashed by too much interest and not enough cohesion.  Should the chance to construct a fully integrated USDA inspected facility nearby our farm arise, we’ll be thrilled, but we won’t work there because we sell beef and the effort is best left in the hands of artisans.

During their visit the Industry Club didn’t get to see a truck or trailer, either.  We hire out all of the cattle shuffling to people who have trucks and trailers.  They didn’t get to see a hay mower or a round baler because we buy all of our hay from a friend who has a hay mower and a round baler.  In fact, they didn’t get to see much of anything except cattle, and of the cattle they didn’t get to see the grassfed herd because those lunatics are always away in a meadow, most of which aren’t accessible in a school bus.

So the hilarious truth is when tour groups visit it doesn’t look like we do much of anything.  But the time we save by leveraging other businesses frees us up to focus on the vision of our business and to guide it in a direction our family of customers will be proud of.  We have time to open the doors and let people come in for conferences and music nights and meals and camaraderie.  We have time to be creative, and there are a few projects up our sleeve that are so exciting I can barely contain myself – but that’s for another day. 

The value of a family business is its ability to attract dollars from customers and push that funding back out into the local economy, thus enhancing it.  I am certain that our customers appreciate the fact that they’re not throwing their money into a pit when they shop at our store; instead, they’ll see those dollars again when they cycle through another business in the area.  And that, I told the Industry Club, is how our business interacts with this community.