If you keep with my blog regularly you will know that I recently subscribed to "The Stockman Grass Farmer magazine. While I haven't received my first current issue, one of the bonuses of signing up when I did was that I could get two back issues. So, I'm working my way through those right now. The great thing about the articles in these things is that they are pretty much timeless.On the cover of the February 2005 addition is an article about a farm in Maine (yep, that's right I said MAINE) that provides grassfed beef year around. This is the type of article that really catches the eye of a kid from Iowa that grew up thinking you needed to feed corn during the winter months if you had a chance of sending an animal to slaughter while snow was on the ground. But, Roger and Linda Fortin of Little Alaska Farm are sending four finished beeves to a processor each week from their snowy southeastern Maine farm. According to the article, they used to raise grainfed natural beef but decided to go all grassfed so they could continue to get the premium for their beef that was slowly slipping away in the "natural" market.
Mr. and Mrs. Fortin pasture their animals from May until mid-October and then feed grass silage over the winter months. Their pastures are a mix of Orchardgrass, Timothy, and white clover that comes up on its own. I thought it was funny that the article mentions that chicken manure is their main fertilizer ... hmmm, why not just raise pastured poultry and not buy in the fertilizer! Anyways, most of their 100 cow herd is Red Devon, but they do buy in yearlings from neighbors that use their Red Devon bulls. They selected this breed because of its easy marbling on grass (still gotta conform to the standards of the beef grading industry).
They sell their wholesale beeves to Hardwick Beef (a grassfed beef distributer) when they are between 20 and 28 months old and have a carcass weight between 600 and 650 pounds. They get $1.75 per pound from Hardwick Beef, and all their carcasses need to grade at high Select to low Choice. In order to get the needed daily weight gain to produce the marbled beef, they have to supplement their wilted grass silage with 6 pounds of citrus pulp (available in their area because of the dairy operations) per head per day.
The cool thing about the Fortins is that they also have an on farm store that sells their beef by the cut along with their pastured chicken eggs and pastured pork (I really need to get some pigs!). They are doing all of this on 220 acres that they own and 120 acres that they rent, so it is not like it is a huge operation. Another interesting fact about their article is that their town is only 900 people strong so they really rely on the tourists coming from Portland, ME 60 miles away to bring them business. This is something I have often thought about if we ended up near my dad's farm because there is a growing tourist opportunity there.
I gleaned a couple key things from this article. Number one, I love the fact that they are trying to get away from their wholesaling by creating their on farm store and expanding the product available there ... gotta love the pastured pork and chickens (although I think they could easily add meat birds and then buy less poultry manure for fertilizer). Number two, I was surprised at how long they take to finish their beef. I assume that is because they are grassfed year around and because they finish all year long, but it made me wonder if I'm off on wanting to finish my Dexters between 16 and 22 months. I'll just have to investigate a little more. Finally, I just love the way they have transitioned from commodity based system to a farm that goes full circle with calves being born on the farm and sold in the store. That is a place that I would really like to end up. I wonder if I could start out that way?
