For a cow to magically transform into the ribeye steak sitting in your fridge, the animal travels through numerous middlemen: From the farmer to the feedlot, the feedlot to the slaughterhouse, the slaughterhouse to the butcher, perhaps from the commercial butcher to the market, and finally to carnivorous consumers. Over the course of the past half-century, the meat industry has lowered prices through massive, unchecked consolidation — larger and larger farms, fewer and fewer slaughterhouses.
Belcampo Meats is introducing a different model of bringing meat to the table. If we were talking about commodities and retail chain stores, we'd call it vertical integration: Within the course of the next year, the new company is aiming to bring pasture-raised meats from its farm to its own slaughterhouse in far northern California, then shipping them south to its own retail stores in the Bay Area. Only a few small enterprises in the United States are trying anything similar.
Belcampo CEO Anya Fernald — organizer of Slow Food Nation and founder of the Eat Real Fest — first developed the business plan working as a consultant to Todd Robinson, an investor who owned a 10,000-acre parcel of farmland in the Shasta Valley as well as plots of undeveloped land in Uruguay and Belize. Fernald recently closed down her consulting business to run the new venture. (The Uruguay and Belize ventures will be run separately, though there are some interesting cacao and rum projects afoot on the latter site that Americans will soon be hearing more about.)
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