Canada-Branding local beef for home market.

CANADA-BRANDING LOCAL BEEF PAYS.

It doesn’t involve any red-hot pieces of metal applied to cow hides, but some local farmers are branding their beef.

To be launched officially this summer – and hopefully to be popping up in grocery stores by the fall – Superior Beef is a marketing project of the Thunder Bay Cattlemen’s Association and the Food Security Research Network at Lakehead University.

Four area farms will start using the Superior Beef logo and brand this summer.

A study conducted by Connie Nelson, who heads the FSRN, found that only 15 per cent of the beef raised here makes it onto Lakehead plates.

The rest, says participating beef farmer Jason Reid, is shipped live – at farmers’ cost – to Winnipeg or Toronto to be fattened up on grain before slaughter and processing.

He argues that selling more local beef here will keep more money in the community, going to producers, abattoirs and farm suppliers.

Though several generations of farmers have raised beef here, recent market trends and high transportation costs may be restricting the potential for beef revenue, Nelson’s report says.

"At the present, the choice of being a beef producer has more to do with lifestyle choices than stable profitability," she writes.

The "overwhelming" increase in the popularity of area farmers’ markets in recent years is evidence of more interest from consumers in local food, the report says, and a preliminary report in June 2007 at the Thunder Bay Country Market showed strong market potential for local beef.

Currently, local beef producers have a combined breeding stock of 1,500 head of cattle and 40 producers each own less than 10 head of breeding animals. Some dairy producers market cull cattle, veal and Holstein steers.

The area’s major producers say if the beef industry becomes profitable, they can expand to at least 3,000 head of cattle, the report says, arguing that a more stable industry would attract new producers.

The four participating producers in the new Superior Beef brand now have a combined 230 head of cattle, with the potential to increase to 1,000 given their current land and resources.

The brand will have two lines: grass-fed calves available in the fall and the more traditional grass-raised, grain-finished beef, said Reid, the area’s representative to the Ontario Cattlemen’s Association, which funded three quarters of Nelson’s study.

The 15 per cent sold locally goes to customers who buy at the farm gate or the country market.

The goal is to have the local beef in the city’s grocery stores, though there are some hurdles, said Reid.

Local beef, processed at Thunder Bay Meat Processing, already meets provincial regulations.

The difficulty is that grocery stores are used to buying boxed meat in moveable sizes and cuts they want, rather than every piece of a cow.

"On our animals, we have more than just T-bones and tenderloins," Reid said.

And because most grocery stores have gone to boxed pieces of meat, they often don’t have the equipment to handle full sides of beef, he said.

Solving that quandary will likely mean changing how things are done a bit on both sides, he said.

As part of the project, beef producers and study organizers hosted a meal featuring local beef for a handful of local grocers, restaurant owners and butchers, and there was a lot of interest in the local product, Reid said.

"We need somebody that’s going to step out for us and take that chance," he said of commercial buyers.

Part of the Superior Beef branding project will include public education about the health benefits of local grass-fed, growth hormone-free beef, as well as marketing all cuts of beef and the best ways to prepare the less expensive bits of a cow.