Where Does Your Conscious Food Dollar Go?

What benefit is there in buying your produce direct from the farmer?

Buying direct from the farmer means choosing who (and what production system or farming methods) you would like to support. When enough people do this, it eventually shapes and influences the farmer’s means of production through supply and demand. Knowing your farmer can be really important to know exactly how that food has been produced. More important even than a certification from an outside organisation.

Buying direct can mean the difference between receiving fresh produce or not. This is especially so with fruit or vegetables that come straight from the farm instead of straight from the year-long storage facility! Buying from the farmer at least allows you to ask these sorts of questions.

Another reason you may choose to buy your produce direct from the farmer, is because it cuts out the middle man. People like to know that their food dollar is actually going to the people that produce it for them. We’ve seen the example of $1 per litre milk and we know how that works out for the farmer!

We love that our customers choose to support us and we understand the sentiment behind directing more dollars to the producer, but we actually support quite a few ‘middle men’ in our business. We would like to make you aware of just how far your food dollars go and what that means for our communities. You might be surprised.

When you purchase our Conscious Farmer grass fed beef or lamb, you are directly supporting our family with your food dollars at purchasing time. So, it’s true that you have cut out the transactionary middle man, but you might be surprised to know that you haven’t actually cut out many people at all, and we are completely comfortable with and even happy about that!

Let me explain, beginning at our farm, the start of the food journey.

When it’s time for our cows to leave the farm, Phil, a local farmer picks our cows and lambs up with his truck to deliver them for processing. We like using Phil because he is always calm with the cows and lambs and treats them as do we. Phil has a family and is an integral part of the local community and is also an active RFS volunteer. Part of what you have paid to us, goes to Phil for his part in the journey.

The family owned abattoir that processes our cows employs and supports families in Coonabarabran and Binnaway in the Warrumbungle Shire, and then the chilled beef is transported to our butcher by Tom in his refrigerated truck. Tom has a family and also employs people in his community, so part of what you have paid to us, supports Tom and his family.

Now, I know that you can see where I’m going with this, but let’s see how far it goes.

Dave and Tanya, who own the butchery in Richmond, and their head butcher, Colin, who prepares our variety of beef and lamb cuts for you, also have families with growing children. Dave and Tanya have employees that make our sausages, and weigh and label each package of your beef and lamb ready for us to pack your hampers before delivery. Then for Sydneysiders and surrounds, they are also making your deliveries. So Dave and Tanya and their team are supported financially too, and I know they’re grateful for that.

Those green boxes that your grass fed beef is delivered in have been designed and created for us by Barry. And the labels that tell you the weight, the cut and the used by date of each package are designed and printed by a family owned printing business in Sydney, whom make a phone call to see when we require more labels – not some online automated system.

And finally there are a number of people that help out with our deliveries further afield either interstate or into regional areas.

There are people living in different communities across NSW, southern QLD as well as Melbourne that are the beneficiaries of your decision to purchase grass fed beef and lamb from The Conscious Farmer. The only people that are not on this list are the wholesale distributors and the supermarkets.

What does this mean? Well firstly, we have received a fair return for the food that we have consciously and carefully produced, but equally importantly, each individual business that we have actively chosen to work with has also received a fair return for the services that they provide.

So while you purchase our beef directly from us, there are plenty of people along the process being supported too, that perhaps you hadn’t considered. Naturally, we would love to keep as much of this activity as local as we can, but that’s not possible just yet. The more that people choose to buy direct, the more services will be available to support these industries regionally. In the mean time, we’re content knowing the positive flow on impact that our business is making.

And all of this is only possible because of the choices that you, the conscious eater have made. Now have a think about some of the other things that you choose to spend your food dollars on. What farming methods are you encouraging and how might that affect the people and communities along the way?

We can’t ever possibly know the true extent of how our food choices make a difference, but one thing we can know, choose consciously and you can shape the world you live in.

Derek

You can see our grass fed beef and lamb hampers here