In Colorado there are still many urban dwellers who buy their beef directly from beef producers in quarters, wholes or halves. That includes many friends that I know, and my own family members. Buying beef directly is still common, and the U.S. is blessed to have a bountiful supply of beef producers that sell directly to consumers.

When I ask folks who buy their beef this way, instead of buying their meat at retail, most often the answer I get is, “I like to know how the animal is raised and who’s doing the raising.”

With the consolidation in the meat industry over the decades, combined with urbanization, fewer consumers can know or do know the story behind the meat in the package. That saddens me greatly, because those stories are worth knowing.

Behind all those beautiful packages of delicious and nutritious meats, whether you buy from a producer or at the local neighborhood store, there are great, unknown, largely untold stories of families working hard to raise animals with care and passion.

Most farm families that I know who are still working the family farm or ranch are multi-generational. Many go back three or more generations. When you ask young farmers and ranchers why they want to continue the family’s operations, most will say that “I love the lifestyle,” or “I couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” or “I want to teach my children the same lessons I learned as a kid.”

Many of those lessons that multi-generational families want to keep passing on to future generations are things like learning the value of hard work, patience, persistence, and environmental stewardship; knowing where their food comes from; and how to produce it.

On the farm where I grew up, we used to say, “The pigs don’t know it’s Christmas,” meaning that even on Christmas day the animals all needed to be fed and watered and cared for. In the Colorado winters this most often meant hauling new water in 5-gallon buckets from our kitchen sink to the pig pens that were 60 yards from the house. Hauling 40-pound water buckets as a child each day in the winter wasn’t my favorite task, but it taught me to be responsible and how to value the needs of the animals over my personal comfort.

It's really too bad that urban dwellers who are critical of animals being used for meat can’t go work for a summer on a ranch or farm. They’d see that most animals are not raised by large commercial multi-national companies (we see this in meat processing, but not in animal production), but rather by families. In the beef industry there are an estimated 750,000 families raising beef cattle. The average herd size is about 45 head.

If you’ve ever had this ranch or farm visit experience, you’ve likely seen the occasional sick calf brought into the barn, or even the house in the cold winter, to nurse back to health. Or you might see piglets or baby chicks brought in. On my farm, the electricity went out in the middle of a cold spring night. The warming lamps in the hen house went out and the baby chicks were in danger of freezing. So we brought 250 chicks into the house and set them in the living room in dozens of cardboard boxes, near the wood fireplace to keep them safe and comfortable. The smell of the incident lingered for weeks, until we had the carpet cleaned.

My farm-raised childhood friends were in FFA or 4-H. In both of those groups, lessons about farm stewardship, animal care, business acumen, professionalism, respect and sustainability were valued and esteemed. Today’s erosion of respect for farming families is a real loss.

Lately, there’s a lot of hubbub, news, and anticipation about meats grown in labs and factories now. Missing from this production method are the stories and lessons of millions of families in the U.S. who raise animals and sustain their families doing so.

If the production of meat from cells takes hold in the future (I have serious doubts that it will ever be sustainable), I believe more folks than ever will be looking to buy their meats directly from families who raise animals. Or at least consumers will look for the meat labels that help them understand the production and sourcing of animals from family-owned operations.

Families feed this nation, not just factories. Let’s not forget them. Let’s tell their stories.

The stories behind the meat

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