N.S. farm meat shop providing exotic fare for home and professional kitchens
MARTOCK, N.S. — Given the intense physical demands of the job and the financial and environmental uncertainty that marks every step, there aren’t too many farmers who can say they are actually having fun with their chosen lifestyle.
Wayne Oulton may be an exception, and he’s taking some of his farming neighbours along for the ride.
He and his family have carved a niche for themselves by raising and processing traditional, as well as a wide variety of exotic meat animals and free-range poultry, on their 607 hectares of land near Windsor, N.S.
"Dad told me if I was going to do this for a living I better find a way to have some fun with it," he says, sitting in the office of the small slaughterhouse and meat shop that his parents started in the 1970s.
Not only is his free-range, free-roaming approach to raising animals paying off for the family’s Martock Glen Farm brand, it’s also providing a market for other area farmers.
"If you want to live in an agricultural community you’ve got to treat your neighbours fair and you’ve got to support your community," he says.
"We make a living and so do others. We’ll pay a farmer $175 for a pig that current commodity prices would only give him $60 for."
A graduate of the Nova Scotia Agriculture College, Oulton kicked around in Alberta and New Zealand before joining his dad Mike and brother Victor in running the family business.
"We do about 500 head of cattle, about 1,500 lambs and about 500 hogs," he says of the traditional meat animals they process annually, raising about a quarter of the animals themselves.
In addition, they offer chicken, duck, partridge, pheasant, quail and wild turkey.
But it’s the exotics, the wild boar, the elk, the Sika deer from Japan, the yaks and the emu, that customers like chef Michael Howell, owner of Tempest in nearby Wolfville, N.S., find intriguing.
"I bought some wild boar and venison sausage from him last week," said Howell as he prepared to incorporate his purchase into a cassoulet for a French buffet he was planning for his 70-seat world cuisine establishment.
"On my menu right now is braised Oulton’s osso bucco of elk."
Howell says he’s well positioned to offer unique food items because he gets adventurous diners from all over the world, drawn to the university town he now calls home.
And Oulton’s couldn’t ask for a better marketing arm, with a chef often invited to participate in major culinary competitions.
Howell was invited to Gold Medal Plates a couple of years ago where he finished second with a braised Oulton’s pork belly with dried cherry sauce.
"Wayne is thinking outside the box, unlike so many people, and he’s listening to customers’ demands," he says.
Howell, who heads up the Slow Food movement in Nova Scotia, says it is important to have a personal relationship with suppliers, a cause he’s trying to champion in the region.
"Chefs really, really need to know who’s supplying their food these days given the current crisis of food-borne illness through corporate industrial food delivery systems."
For Wayne Oulton it’s that kind of working relationship that drives him to try raising different animals, like the few antelope he just acquired.
"A lot of it is the support of chefs wanting to try different things."
He laughs when he talks about his penchant for finding the unusual, but he has to admit there was a lot of wisdom in his father’s advice.
"Right now all these exotics are somewhere between a pilot project and actual full-scale production, but they do allow me to have fun and vary my job during the day."
