As some of you know, my mother-in-law, Debi, and I have a retail meat business, The Pork Shoppe, where we sell pork products direct from the farm to consumers. We mostly market our meat via farmer’s markets, farm pick-up, and delivery. We also have meat available at a retail location and a few restaurants feature our pork products. The Pork Shoppe was the brain child of my MBA program’s final project. I studied the demand for locally raised livestock and products directly marketed from the farm. The Pork Shoppe was my way to contribute back to the farm since there isn’t room for me to be solely employed by the farm at this point. The Pork Shoppe allows us to do some niche marketing with only a few of the hogs our family farm markets each year and more importantly it allows us the opportunity to educate our urban neighbors.
Debi and I have never hid the fact that our hogs are raised in confinement. When consumers ask questions about our pork, we are proud to tell them the truth which includes the facts that we take better care of our pigs than we probably do ourselves, that we only use antibiotics when neeeded, and that our pigs are raised in climate control buildings, which is a necessity in Indiana where it does get very cold during the winters and very hot and humid during the summers. Once we get the chance to explain our story and that we take care of the pigs ourselves, most people are completely ok with our hogs being raised in confinement. We are one of the unique vendors at the market as most of the other vendors are organic vendors or “all natural”. This has never been a problem or an issue with the other vendors until this past weekend.
One of the beef vendors, who I would have referred to as a friend at the market, asked me if I had ever seen The Meatrix. Of course I had, but I just let him talk to see his angle. He was very excited about the Meatrix and had contacted them and told them about our farmers market and how it was full of family farms. Those behind The Meatrix, the GRACE factory farm project, sent him magnets of all of the Meatrix characters along with several different brochures about the “dangers” of factory farming and sustainable agriculture. My fellow vendor thought that I would be excited to share this information with my customers. He also thought that we should show the 3 different Meatrix spoofs at the market’s visitor booth. Having seen the 3 spoofs, I knew for multiple reasons that I did not want these spoofs shown at the market. For no other reason, they are very graphic for the children that visit our market and do not depict the truth.
I took this as an opportunity to point out to my fellow vendor that those behind the Meatrix were opposed to how we raised our hogs on our family farm since our hogs were raised in confinement. He tried to say that they were only against factory farms, but I asked him what was a factory farm. He really couldn’t answer. He was very nice and had never thought about the fact that the Meatrix would depict how we raise hogs in an untruthful way, but I was appalled. I never thought that I would have to defend my family farm to a fellow vendor or consumer. I understand if consumers don’t want to buy my pork because it isn’t what they want, but to have a fellow vendor promoting the Meatrix and how it defends sustainable agriculture was something I never thought I would do. I also never thought that I would have to defend agriculture at an agricultural event. Sustainable agriculture… interesting concept to me. Do people really think that we can feed this country let alone the world if we don’t feed animals in confinement? I think what we do on our family farm is sustainable agriculture.
I realize like with everything that there are a few bad actors in the confined feeding world; however, there are many family farms just like ours that take the best possible care of their animals and the environment. Getting this message out to the masses is only going to get harder and harder which means we can’t give up. Telling our story is the best thing we can do to promote agriculture and more specifically our family farms.