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Meet Your Beef

Group of 21 chefs and foodservice professionals tour cattle operations to learn more about beef.

The “Meat Your Beef” farm tour offered chefs and foodservice professionals the opportunity to do just that, to meet their beef. A group of 21 chefs from the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pa., attended a full-day beef tour in the south-central part of Pennsylvania June 26. The chef attendees source their beef from Indian Ridge Provisions, a further processor and distributor of proteins based in Telford, Pa.


The first tour stop of the day was the Masonic Village Farm located in Elizabethtown, Pa. Scotty Miller, beef herdsman at Masonic, led attendees through a firsthand look at the entire beef life cycle, from birth to market. Masonic Village Farm was selected as the 2016 National Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) Cow-Calf Award recipient, as well as the Region 1 Environmental Stewardship Award winner in 2011.


Chef Tour

Chef attendees were able to learn more about the day-to-day commitment cattlemen have for the health and well-being of cattle and the passion beef farmers have for preserving land, water and natural resources.


Following Masonic, the attendees toured Hershey’s Lancaster Beef in Mount Joy, Pa., led by owner Seth Hershey. Hershey’s is a grain-fed finisher of beef, and they’ve worked to secure a direct market for their cattle through relationships built with local restaurants.


Sara Place, the senior director of beef sustainability research with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), a contractor to the beef checkoff program, shared a beef sustainability presentation with the group over the lunch hour and served as panelist on a beef industry panel discussion later in the afternoon. Additional panelists included Dave Wolfgang, veterinarian and the PA Department of Agriculture’s director for the Bureau of Animal Health and Diagnostic Services; Adam Zurin, a cattle nutritionist with Agri-Basics Inc.; and Seth Hershey, owner of Hershey’s Lancaster Beef.


Attendees had the opportunity to have candid discussions with panel members on topics ranging from cattle traceability to plant-based proteins. No topic was off the table, and the discussion allowed for a deeper dive into the transparency of the industry.


Prior to the beef tour experience, 27% of attendees stated the positives of beef strongly outweighed the negatives. Following the tour, that number had risen to 88%. With more than 60% of the attendees claiming they were at least three generations removed from production agriculture, it’s worth noting the posttour survey results showed a 32% increase in the attendees’ favorability towards farmers and ranchers involved in the beef industry.


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Editor’s Note: This article is from the Beef Checkoff Program.



 

 

 

 

 

 





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