Every month, COTA celebrates inspirational stories from our members who are radically transforming our food system and making waves in the organic world. This month we are excited to feature an interview with Whispering Meadows, a COTA member since 2019.
Tell us about your organization and the people who work there.
Whispering Meadows was founded in 2003 with only a small herd of Black Angus cattle, and one product: a box of mixed beef cuts called the BBQ Select. Over time, we built a chicken barn, got it organically certified, and gradually kept adding more meats and prepared foods to our lineup. And we started offering delivery, expanding our delivery areas over time to the point where we now have regular customers all through Southern Ontario and the GTA.
As we grew, we started working with other organic family farmers. Not every farmer is good at finding new customers to buy their products at a fair price — so as our customer base has kept expanding, it has been mutually beneficial for us to work with other farmers, to support their sales while bringing more choices to our customers.
What are you trying to achieve through your vision, mission, and purpose?
Our vision is to continue to support more and more family organic farmers to bring premium meats to market, at sustainable prices that earn them a good living. We believe that small family farms are able to produce the highest possible quality of foods, and by bringing them direct to our customers, we can avoid a lot of levels of distribution and retail, which eat away at what ends up in the farmer’s pocket.
How was the organization founded? What are the origins of the organization?
The first time we tasted an organic steak, the flavour was so incredible, we knew we could never go back. That’s why we always tell people never to try one, you’ll be ruined forever! That was the beginning of our commitment to raising all of our animals organically.
We now use organic growing and processing methods with all of our land, animals, and products. We are gradually working towards having everything that we sell be certified organic. However, it’s not always cost-effective to get everything certified.
Do you feel that organic certification is a challenge in your market segment?
For us to sell a certified organic steak, it means that every single step in conceiving, raising, and processing our cattle has to be certified, which can mean a total of six or seven separate certifications. We often graze our animals on our neighbours’ fields – which we know and trust are organically grown – and that means that each of those fields needs to be certified as well. When you add up the costs of all the different certifications that are required, it raises the price of the meat beyond what most consumers are willing to pay.
We’re hoping that over time, we’ll have enough volume that it becomes cost-effective to certify every one of our products. In the meantime, we depend on the trust of our customers. We’ve been fortunate to have been able to develop a wonderful customer base, who understand and appreciate our products whether they are certified or not.
Luckily, it has gotten a lot easier to find organic feeds and ingredients, compared to when we first started. The organic community has really blossomed over the last 20 years, and just about anything you could ever want is now available organically. It has been exciting to see the whole ecosystem grow, and consumer demand has grown along with it.
What advice do you have for newbies in the industry?
If it’s at all possible, create one or more products that you can start selling online right away. It’s easier and cheaper than ever before to start an online shop, and to promote it through social media. Also, sign up for a newsletter subscription service from the beginning, and promote that to your social media and your website visitors. The earlier you can start collecting contacts, the larger your customer base will become.
It’s important for organic producers to also become good marketers, and there are plenty of free resources online, and at your local library, to learn about marketing. It’s a skill that anyone can develop.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to get into sales and marketing at all, look for a local food hub that you can work with. Our particular niche is selling local organic meats in Southern Ontario, but there are likely other delivery services and shops in your area who may be delighted to carry your products.
What gets you most excited about the organic community and your involvement in it?
We’re passionate about supporting small family farms who care as deeply as we do about the holistic health of their land, environment, and animals. It’s been our experience that those are the growers who are able to produce some of the highest quality meats.
Family farmers often don’t have the resources to be able to market their products for the prices they deserve. We’re in the fortunate position to be able to bridge the gap — between the farmers, and the kind of customers who really appreciate their quality. So we’re excited to keep building the numbers of farms we work with, and especially to help them to earn a good living as organic farmers.
What are your hopes and dreams for transforming the food system to be more ecological?
The Canadian Organic Standards, and the new Canada Food Guide, are wonderful for promoting human and environmental health. We’d love to see their scope expanded to cover more steps between healthy and unhealthy foods, and between conventional and organic production. There are plenty of conventional farmers who are very close to organic. And there are a lot of mass-produced organic foods that we wouldn’t consider very healthy.
Our dream is for there to be a big scale on the front panel of every retail product that gives a clear indication of how much it supports long-term health, and how ecologically it was produced.
We’re aware that meats aren’t always considered the most ecological food choice. But we’d rather have people eat smaller amounts of really high quality meats, than huge servings of factory-farm meats that taste like mushy cardboard. Not that we’re biased!
About:
Randy and Ang Martin both come from farming families — in fact, Randy’s family goes back through 10 generations of livestock farmers. We both believe in using the very best, most up-to-date tools and equipment, both for our animals’ welfare, and for running our business. We are working to build a vertically integrated food hub that uses state-of-the-art technologies, while honouring sustainable principles of local organic agriculture.
To learn more about Whispering Meadows Family Farms, visit https://www.whisperingmeadows.ca/