In farming, raising the food is only part of the problem. Getting the food on the customer’s plate requires a lot more than raising a crop or an animal.
All foods that come from a farm need some sort of processing. In my case, I raise animals so the animals need to be butchered. Customers aren’t going to want an entire animal (unless they want to stock their chest freezers for the year.) They want particular cuts of meat.
Once the meat is butchered, getting the meat to their home or restaurant so it can be cooked is also part of the problem.
Right now, our US economy is overregulated. Most of the reasons why we do things the way we do is because of regulations. It doesn’t matter what the original intentions of the regulations were, they exist and they direct people’s behavior, often using fear of punishment or of losing profits rather than raising the quality of food for the customer or lowering the prices.
A long time ago, most Americans live in small towns. If you wanted some meat, you could go to the butcher. The butcher would buy the animals direct from local farmers or maybe the local sale barn. He would slaughter the animal and cut it into the primal cuts, then cut those primal cuts into cuts that the customers wanted. Customers would visit his shop and buy what they needed, and cook it in the evening for supper. Refrigeration wasn’t really needed since the time between slaughter and cooking was less than a day. If the meat needed to be preserved, it could be salted or canned or bottled.
Nowadays, we’re used to getting our meats from supermarkets like Costco or Wal-Mart. Thanks to refrigeration, we can store the meats we buy in our fridge, but often we can’t expect the meat to last more than a week. While the supermarkets do some butchering, most of the work is done in processing facilities, owned by the supermarket. They get shipments of animals from farms they contract with, hopefully grown according to their specifications.
If you want to buy meat that isn’t grown and processed that way, you do have options but they are not very palatable. One common practice is to use a local processing facility, buy an animal from a local farmer, and pick up the frozen meant when they are done butchering it. You’ll need a chest freezer to store the meat. A whole cow can easily fill a large chest freezer. Maybe you can split the animal with someone so you only need to take a half or a quarter home. The good news is you’ll probably pay a lot less for the meat than you would if you bought it at the supermarket.
If you just want to buy a cut of meat grown by a local farmer, there really aren’t many good options. You might be able to join a co-op or farmer membership program and bypass regulations that require the meat to be inspected. You might be able to buy meat that is labelled as fish food. Or you can negotiate with your neighbor who has a chest freezer full of beef. All of these methods should get you reasonable prices for the meat, but be prepared to pay a premium.
While you can find butcher shops, they are rare and they often buy commercial meat that isn’t much different from what Wal-Mart and Costco is doing. (Sometimes they even buy from Wal-Mart or Costco!) Talking with the butcher, they might be buying their animals from a local farm. Don’t expect to pay Costco prices for meat you buy this way.
You may be able to find a farm store that goes through all the regulations to sell cuts of meat. It’s expensive to do this, and you’ll never find prices comparable to Costco and Wal-Mart. They won’t be operating “at scale” and can’t take advantage of the economies of scale.
You might think that farmers butchering their own meat and selling it to customers might be unsanitary. The fact of the matter is that there are NO cases of e coli or other contaminants in meat sold in this way. It’s always commercial scale processing plants and farms that run into problems.
I propose one simple change to our regulatory system that could bring customers better products and cheaper prices. Simply allow farmers to butcher their own animals and sell them. Allow butchers and grocery stores to sell meat that isn’t inspected by the USDA as well. Obviously, it should be clearly labelled if it isn’t inspected. But I think consumers would appreciate the choice.
Make the USDA label as any commercial label. If someone wants to slap that label on their food, then they have to follow the rules. If not, then they can do what they like.
Obviously, people selling food products that they know is not safe for consumption should be held accountable. But this is no different than the rules we’ve always had about butchers selling tainted meat or farmers selling sick animals for meat.