4 Things to consider before buying pasture-raised meat.

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February 22, 2024

So you’ve decided you’re ready to try pasture-raised meats. A quick Google search leaves you with more questions than answers about where to start. Here are 4 quick things to consider before purchasing pasture-raised meats.

Practices-

You first must figure out what farming practices and principles you care about. (Organic, grass-fed, humanely raised, pasture-based, environmental impact, etc) The amount of information now readily available on the internet is truly immense. Make sure to thoroughly search each farming aspect you care about and rank them in order of importance to you. This is a vital first step that will help you begin making your decision.

Transparency -

It is more important than ever to make sure you have healthy and safe food on your table. It is easy to get caught up in the convenience of running to the supermarket and grabbing the cheapest option from the meat case. You can look at the packaging and see buzz words like humanly raised, grass-fed, and pasture-based. Words like these have turned from meaningful labels guiding consumers on what to purchase to marketing tactics used by big companies that persuade you to buy their products.

Federal and state agencies watered down these guidelines to ensure large companies can use these labels to promote their product. If you take the time to read up on the requirements for some of these labels you will realize that they are bogus. (Remember that these are also the bare minimum requirements farmers must follow to use the label!)

How can you find transparency in today’s food market?

By knowing your farmer!

We live in an age where everything we do can be pictured, recorded, or documented in a matter of seconds. As customers, you deserve to see how your food is being raised. You should always feel free to ask questions and learn more. Find a farmer who is willing to share his/her practices with you either on social media, a website, a newsletter, or better yet willing to take you on a farm tour!

Local-

As the Row 7 Seed Company co-founder Dan Barber said, “Buying local isn't always the easiest or cheapest option, but it's an investment in the health of our communities and the vitality of our food system. And that's a price worth paying."

Buying locally has changed a lot in the past 100 years. When my great-great-grandfather began to deliver his local produce to the neighboring coal towns, he loaded his horse and wagon by hand, made the 10-mile trip over the mountains that took 4 hours, went door to door selling his produce, and then made the 4-hour trip back home.

Now with the same or less amount of effort, we can ship farm fresh products through UPS over 200 miles directly to your door. You can take virtual farm tours, watch us on social media, and have direct conversations with your farmer in real-time from anywhere in the world.

To us, buying local means supporting your community. Communities are no longer limited to a geographical location but by individuals with a common goal in mind. By supporting smaller farms, you’re not only helping the farmer’s family, but you also help the family butcher shop, a hatchery trying to pass down its business to the next generation, the local feed supplier, and the struggling small-scale packaging supplier who is trying to get his business started.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this, buying locally no longer has to mean buying from someone close to you on the map. It means to support a business whose goals and aspirations for the growth of your community are closest to yours.

Value to your family -

Now that you’ve decided you're ready to try pasture-raised meats, you load your cart up with some of your favorite cuts of beef, chicken, and pork, then you see the price tag. Due to the smaller scale, time, and effort, small-scale family farms often have to charge more than the supermarket to overcome the cost of production.

We get it, it can be a struggle to justify the price compared to the supermarket. Remember you’ve done the research, you're positive it is a superior product, and you want what is best for you and your family. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to help ease your mind,

Are you comfortable with the food your family is eating?

What value do you put on your family’s health?

How does the food you eat correspond to your health?

What am I willing to do to make my family healthier? Happier?

I hope this helped you to make new, informed decisions on what you feed your family. Feel free to contact us with questions or concerns about how your food is being raised.

Nathan Masser

info@redhillharvest.com

From field to barn! How we harvest potatoes at Red Hill Harvest!

This week on the farm, potato harvest was all we had on our minds! The weather has been a challenge during this year's harvest, from being too dry early in the season to 10 days of rain in late September, but hey, that’s farming. This week's goal is to get as many of the remaining potatoes out of the ground and back into the storage. Here’s how we do it! Step 1: Prep fields for harvest - Before a field of potatoes is harvested, the tops of the potato plants must be killed. This tells the potatoes to put all their energy into growing thicker skin instead of growing in size. We terminate the potatoes 2-5 weeks before harvest, depending on the variety. (Some varieties take longer for the skins to set.) In a non-organic system, potatoes are terminated using a chemical desiccant. This is a very effective way to get the potato vines to die and leave the field ready for harvest. However, we must take a different approach to the 50% of our potato crop that is certified organic. Once our organic potatoes have matured, we will run a flail shredder through the fields to mulch the vines into tiny pieces, killing the plants and sending them into full skin development mode. While we wait the 2-5 weeks before harvest, weeds tend to pop up now that the crop canopy is gone and sunlight reaches the soil. We often run the flail shredder or our weed burner ahead of the harvester again to help separate potatoes from other materials during harvest. Step 2: Dig - Once the fields are prepped and the conditions are right, we head out to the fields to bring in the spuds. We have a harvester that can dig two rows at a time. We chose this smaller machine because it matched well with the destoning system we use in the spring. To briefly explain the long process of planting, we make a bed of soil, use a destoning machine to pull the rocks from the bed and lay the stones into the tire tracks, and finally, we plant two rows of potatoes in the rock-free bed. Using this system, we can limit the damage caused by handling potatoes and rocks together. Here’s how the harvester works… First, the potatoes are dug out of the ground and transferred onto a slatted conveyor belt. This conveyor is the first separation method, removing all the loose dirt and small rocks. The remaining material continues up the belt and onto the main separation table. This table has a series of counter-rotating shafts that grab onto vines, mud clumps, rocks, and other foreign materials and pull them down below and back into the field. From there, the potatoes go to another conveyor, where we have two people standing to remove all of the foreign material that the harvester missed. At this point, it is crucial to get all of the rocks that the destoner missed out of the potatoes because the next stop is the truck! The potatoes ride up the conveyor and into the truck, which drives alongside the harvester. Once the truck is full, it returns to the shed, where it gets unloaded! Step 3: Unload - When the truck returns to the shed, we back it up to our ELIMINATOR… Dun, Dun, Dunn! Ok, maybe it's not that scary! The potatoes unload from the truck and ride up yet another conveyor, which dumps onto a star separation table. The table allows any soil that may have passed the harvester to be removed from the potatoes. Then, the spuds get one final hand grade. Removing all of the material before the potatoes head into storage is important. After the final grade, the small potatoes are removed. These potatoes are not desirable for making french fries and do not look nice in a package with bigger potatoes, so we remove them and pack them separately. Once sizing is complete, there are only two more conveyors before they reach the bins! We use an automatic bin filler, which uses sensors to fill each bin to its optimal level. After the bins are filled, they’re off to the cooler! Step 4: Storage - Most potatoes in the United States are stored in bulk, which means they are stored in one big pile. We choose to use the bin method for variety separation and quality. The first reason is simple: we grow over ten varieties of potatoes on our farm. It is much easier to keep them separate in bins rather than piles. Most importantly, though, we use bins to keep the quality of our potatoes high. With varying field conditions, potatoes in one area of the field may be more prone to rot. Rot will spread like a disease in storage if not properly addressed. Separating the potatoes into boxes can better control an outbreak of rot; we only lose 1,000 lbs of potatoes rather than the whole pile. This method takes a lot more time and money, but it is necessary for our operation, especially storing potatoes for nine months like we often do! Each bin is labeled with the variety, field name, and date harvested. The organic potatoes are then put into a cooler at 38-40 degrees Fahrenheit, and the non-organic potatoes are put into a cooler kept at 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit. Why do we store them at different temps? Almost all of our non-organic potatoes are sold to vendors who make fresh-cut French fries! If the potato's temperature gets colder than 45 degrees Fahrenheit, it will turn dark brown when fried. YUCK!! On the other hand, we keep our organic potatoes at a colder temperature because they keep much longer. Also, we do not use a sprout nipper, so the cold temperature helps to keep the potatoes from sprouting while in storage. As a small farm, we choose the smaller, simpler equipment and storage techniques to give us the ability to produce many different types of specialty potatoes. The spuds we raise would not fare well with the large equipment used in other parts of the world. Many farmers use various techniques to bring in the crop for their unique situations. We plan to continue to adapt our harvest methods as new engineering technologies are discovered. I hope you learned something about how we harvest potatoes today! If you have any questions, please email us at info@redhillharvest.com or call (570) 900-1566. If you’d like to try some of these potatoes for yourself, here are some of my favorites! Organic Purple Potatoes Organic Red Potatoes French Fry Potatoes Baby Yellow Potatoes

4 Things to consider before buying pasture-raised meat.

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From field to barn! How we harvest potatoes at Red Hill Harvest!

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