KENTON, Man. – They wanted to help keep their small town alive and add some extra income to their farms.
But when seven farm families bought a meat processing business here in 1992, they also bought into more work.
Ron Sangster, a hog farmer and shareholder, said the group spent a lot of time talking about how it would run the new venture, which was named Down Home Country Meats.
“One of the names that came up was Late Night Meats,” he laughed, recalling the long meetings.
Read Also
Federal government supports soil health strategy
Sophie Beecher, director general at Agriculture Canada, said at a soil conference in Winnipeg that the feds support the idea of a national soil health strategy.
Karen Wright, a shareholder and also general manager, said the monthly shareholder meetings can be quite spirited.
“There’s some interesting debates,” she said. “Everybody’s really open-minded though. They listen well to the other members of the group.”
The couples are all from the Kenton area, northwest of Brandon. Six of them raise Limousin cattle and one raises hogs.
Sangster said the farmers don’t get huge premiums for their animals at this point, but enjoy some other advantages.
“You don’t have to haul these things to Brandon, and shrinkage is pretty insignificant compared to going on the big truck and ending up at a slaughter plant in Alberta,” he said.
Butcher Ted Wright, no relation to Karen, slaughters on average six cattle and two hog carcasses each Wednesday. Some of them are custom-killed for other local producers.
“We cut and wrap the meat exactly the way the customer wants it,” said Phyllis Miller, another of the plant’s five employees.
Sell locally
Most of the plant’s business is custom butchering and selling sides of beef or pork for the freezer. But it also has a fresh meat and deli counter and sells meat at the local co-op.
Karen Wright said local customers appreciate the quality .
“It’s all home-grown, so you know how it has been handled right from the day it was born and raised and fed,” she said. “They’re not out of big commercial feedlots.”
Ted Wright said he notices a big difference in quality compared to the meat he handled at large meat processors in years past.
“Most … chain stores, their beef isn’t hung very long,” he said. They’re slaughtered, cooled for two days, then shipped out to these places.”
Wright hangs marbled meat for 10 to 14 days, depending on customer specifications.
The couples would like to expand the business. Right now, customers are mainly within an 80-kilometre radius of the town.
But they say they’d have to put more time into co-ordinating production and marketing their products to get into the restaurant market in Winnipeg and Brandon.
One large upscale restaurant they approached was interested in their product, Karen Wright said, but would need a guaranteed supply of 10 steers’ worth of tenderloins in one week alone.
“Steers aren’t all strip loins,” Sangster said. “That’s where the organizing comes into place. You have to be in a position where you’ve got a home for the rest of it.”
Karen Wright said the group would have to look at building a new plant that meets federal standards to get into markets outside of Manitoba, or process other animals like elk and ostrich.
