Omega Beef Direct - The Virtual Farmer’s Market

What is it you're eating?  Sebastian Hickey discusses a meaty alternative to the supermarket lucky dip.

Transparency.  That’s what it’s all about these days.  Give us the info on the pack, and none of that e-code cryptography.  We want to know where it comes from, how it was made, who got abused and who got rich.  Culinary consciousness.

That’s why people still buy from the butcher.  But even then, do you know how the cow was slaughtered or how it was fed for its last three days?  Do you know if it was kept on concrete instead of grass, or fed local or foreign grain?  Was it hung after it was slaughtered?  Which breed of cow are you eating?  Is that a good breed?  Was it a dairy cow before it got old?  The answers to these questions effect the price of the meat and the environmental impact, but most of all, they effect quality.  So how do you find out?

Solution

Forget research.  You don’t want more drudgery.  If you did, you’d already be buying the good stuff.  So what’s the alternative?  Easy peasy.  Buy direct.

Consumers have been trading with booksellers, retailers, pharmaceutical companies and opticians over the web for years.  It’s handier, more personal, and often much, much cheaper than dealing with a layman salesperson on the shop floor.  Why not take this model to the butcher?

Omega Beef Direct, among a few Irish cattle farmers, offer this kind of service, sort of like a virtual Farmer’s Market.  Visit the site, call the guy on the phone, ask your questions.  Once you’re happy, place an order online.

How does it work?

Omega Beef Direct use Organic Galloway cows, an old, old Celtic breed, and they feed them on grass.  Yep.  Grass.  No silage, no grain, no medicine.  They’ve got 20 acres per cow, forty times the usual terrain, so they’re pretty relaxed.  They’re slaughtered one at a time at a local abattoir run by an award winning artisan butcher, blast frozen at -60°C, and boxed up for delivery.

In a 5kg box, you’ve got these beautiful, thickly cut sirloins, wonderfully marbled strip loins, prime cut burgers and more.  Knowing the cows are free range, imagining their happy jaws chewing highland grasses, there is something soulful about cutting into an organic steak that the supermarket alternative doesn’t provide.  It’s a rich table top delight, and good for conversation.

Joe Condon (left), owner of Omega Beef Direct, told me that “the emergence of organic farming as a business could be seen as a type of retirement farming.”  He’s right.  Lots of farmers will find it hard to see the minimum input, sparse herding of grass fed cattle farming as anything more than a eco-political alternative.  It’s up to the visionaries and the consumers to set about a change in perspective.

With the internet and the e-grocery revolution, the infrastructure for direct farmer-to-consumer trade has opened up a gulf of opportunity for a new kind of meat trade.  UCD are sympathetically researching a new kind of meat verification to trace and test organic meats.  With the right backing that could lead to better producer certification, and in the end, a more reliable foundation for the future of producer-consumer relations.  I call it the informeation revolution, but that’s because I enjoy puns.  Whatever you call it, it’s a good idea.  Get on the meat wagon.