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Do pigs swim?Salmon Creek Farms, based in Twin Falls, Idaho, gets it. I have just spent a couple of tremendous days in the banana belt with the third-generation owner of Independent Meat Company, Patrick Florence. Independent Meat Company, founded in 1904, has stood strong to the test of time as a small to mid-sized meat packer. Today, they harvest roughly 600 hogs per day and their product is marketed under the label of Salmon Creek Farms. I spend a lot of time talking about how we need to connect food producers and consumers and Beth Patton, who works for Patrick Florence, doesn't just talk about it, she actually does it. They recently hosted a three-day symposium in Twin Falls and brought together the producers who raise pigs for them and the consumers who buy their product. To see the interaction between a pork producer from a Hutterite Colony in Montana and a high-end foodservice meat marketer like Newport Meats from Los Angeles was quite rewarding for me. Oh sure, for the most part, the language barrier was a bit of an issue when discussing farrowing crates, PRRS, genome identification, purge, ph, shaving off the butt, pork collar and the consumer mentality of Los Angeles but it made for some tremendous bridge building. I must go back a bit and tell you how impressed I am with Patrick Florence and a vision he had in the early 90s to find a way to remain a viable player in an ever competitive business, one where most others have not survived-that of a small meat packer. This happened at about the same time that I was attempting to organize a system of what I called horizontal coordination from the farm level to the consumer. Of course, it should be obvious that I was not successful with that concept but Patrick has made it work. They were able to identify production techniques and particularly genetics that would enable them to have high quality products for the market place. No one can argue with the success of the campaign "Pork: The other white meat." It certainly is a recognizable slogan at any level in today's society but has it educated our customers and convinced them to buy the poorest quality pork products? Pork quality is driven by two factors: marbling and ph level. In fact, the best quality pork will have the higher ph level which, in laymen's terms, means it has a higher capacity to hold water and be juicy throughout the cooking process. The higher ph, however, the darker the pork will actually appear. So, as we have educated people to buy the white meat within the pork supply, they now are purchasing the lower quality products. I fully understand that the consumer has been demanding leaner products for quite some time but I also firmly believe that we must supply the proper level of education along with the products we sell. Economic professors continue to tell us that we must supply what the consumer wants. But at what point do we allow consumers to demand products that are not exactly something that they are really going to enjoy? For example, what is the demand for pork products only from pigs that have communicated with a spider named Charlotte? Will we attempt to supply that as well, or attempt to set the record straight and tell them pigs don't talk? Back to the symposium, there was no doubt that, at the end of this three day event, the item most needed for the future of marketing food is the connection between the consumer and the producer. The best qualified person to explain the "what?" "how?" and "why's?" of food production is those of us who actually implement the science and technology on our farms. Most farmers who are extremely good at implementing animal husbandry have a tendency not to communicate real well with the average high-end user of pork in Los Angeles, Calif. But honestly I find that once people actually get past the initial shock of language barriers, we find that we do have many things in common with people from urban areas. It just takes an icebreaker. Most people thought it would be impossible for people like Patrick Florence to continue as a small meat packer in today's ever consolidating business but I contend that anything is possible if you stay focused on what it is you truly want to accomplish. Look at the very name of their business: "Salmon" Creek Farms. Swimming upstream is nothing new for a salmon; they have to do it forever just to ensure that future generations of their offspring would have the same opportunities they had! Editor's note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.FacesOfAg.com, or e-mail Trent at trent@loostales.com. 11/3/08 Date: 10/30/08 Advertisement
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