By Jim Munsch, Coon Valley, Wisconsin — Take a stroll through the meat market, do some math, and your first inclination is to say that direct marketing of beef will pay a producer.

We farmers have been basically saying that for years. Ever since I can remember, I’ve heard uncles, cousins and neighbors complain about store prices for food, and the fact that the “middleman” is making all the money. Behind this emotional observation is an acknowledgement of a real economic truth: Middlemen tend to be a small number of for-profit organizations with considerable economic power compared to individual producers of much smaller scale and with feeble economic power. In some cases their performance can be inconsistent, resulting in equally inconsistent demand and prices for your products. Continue reading “Methods for calculating marketing costs”

By Tom and Susan Wrchota, Omro, Wisconsin — If you want to sell a few head of grain-fed beef in sides and quarters, you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a processor who can do the job for you. But if you want to target a high-end niche market for grass-finished beef in an effort to produce the margins required to make a living from a small-scale enterprise, you need a processor who is up to the task.

In the nearly 15 years that we’ve been marketing grass-finished meat, our business has evolved to meet both customers’ needs, and ours. Staying small and simple wasn’t going to cut it if we wanted to make a full-time living selling grass-finished beef and other farm products, so we had to grow and become more complex. Continue reading “To really market, you need the right processor”