BETHALTO - Farm Meat LLC is a family-owned marketplace dedicated to connecting consumers with local farmers for high-quality, locally sourced meat. You can browse local farms, select meats that meet your dietary (grass fed/finished, grain fed/ finished etc.) and farming practice (organic, pasture-raised, regenerative etc.) preferences.
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Brian Werts is the owner of this family-owned business. “My family has always bought beef from local farmers, and as I got older, I got out of that,” said Werts explaining how he got into this business. “As I had kids, I started looking for how to buy beef from local farmers. I also wanted to know where I could sell my cows.” A big issue, Werts mentioned, is how marketing is a big barrier for these farms to be able to find people to buy their product, and for consumers to find these farms to buy from.
“There are three farms on the website right now,” Werts said. “There is one in Jerseyville, one in Carrollton, and one in Beecher City. Those farms have products ready to sell.”
When you go to purchase, you can see where it is being processed and when. You will go ahead and place your order there, then it will send a message to the farmer and once they accept (confirming they have the inventory,) you will get an invoice for a deposit. Once the farmer delivers the product to the processor, they will get the hanging weight, and that is when the final invoice will get sent to you.
Farm Meat LLC provides a sample cut sheet you can look through to make the process more straightforward for the customer before they go to purchase.
As for being a farmer wanting to use Farm Meat LLC to sell, the process is pretty simple. “You go sign up and give all of your information,” Werts said. The process is similar to eBay, and as you sell a product it will get taken off the website.
“This process is a huge time saver from the consumer perspective. The process to find a farm before was to simply know someone or really look for it through various internet searches. For farmers, I am doing all of their marketing which saves them a lot of time and money since everything is put on our website.”
From placing the order to getting the product, it usually takes around two weeks if it is a cow, for hogs/lambs/goats the time usually is within a week.
“The supply chain is farmer to processor to you,” Werts said, making this a very simple process to follow.
“Buying local means that you know the farm it is coming from, and you know how exactly they are raising the animals.” This is not only environmentally friendly, but sustainable as well.
This entire process is very easy to follow, but there is a Frequently Asked Questions page on the website to help further guide people on how things work.
You can click here to visit Farm Meats LLC where you can sign up as a consumer or a farmer.
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