Local beef on the menu at Cornell dining halls
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
The cafeterias and dining halls at Cornell University offer vegan cookies, Asian stir-frys, Kosher dishes, Indian entrées, and no-fat frozen yogurt. But, the origin of the most recent addition to the menu – all-natural, grass-raised beef – is close to home.
This spring, Cornell began serving burgers made from New York-raised beef cattle and purchased directly from farmers.
Cornell Dining has committed to buy three whole cows per week from local farmers. Ground beef goes into Trillium, an ala carte campus eatery that serves 3,000 meals daily – and some 500 burgers per week. Other beef cuts go to all-you-can eat student dining halls and a university-run catering service.
“I think opening up markets like this is important for the small farm,” said Jerry Stanton of Twin Maple Farm in Locke, who sold four of his cattle to Cornell dining and looks forward to selling more.
Selling beef to Cornell dining arose from an initiative by Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County to facilitate sales of local farm goods to institutional and wholesale buyers. That work was funded by a grant from the NY Farm Viability Institute, a farmer-run nonprofit group that supports projects that help farmers improve profitability and develop models for other farms.
The project also helped put produce from Muddy Fingers Farm, of Hector, into Elmira College.
An independently-run cafeteria with the flexibility to order non-standard food is more conducive to local food purchasing than the size of the buyer, LeRoux said. But, he added, the most important ingredient to a successful buy local program is the enthusiasm of the buyer.
“Customers have approached me. They have noticed the taste and quality difference in the local burgers,” said Paul Muscante, operations manager at Trillium cafeteria.
Gail Finan, director of dining services, said the buy local program “isn’t easy. There have been bumps in the road.” But, she said, the response to serving locally-grown beef has been positive: “It’s a lot like the ice cream. The staff, the students are so proud that Cornell University has its own ice cream. The local burgers are starting off like that, too.” (The university sells its own label ice cream made from the milk of cows on campus.)
Matt LeRoux, an agriculture economic development educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County, was the impetus behind getting local beef into Cornell dining. He has been working on a NY Farm Viability-funded project begun in 2007 to help Southern Tier farmers assess the labor and economic efficiency of their marketing channels – roadside stands, farmers markets, farm shares, wholesale, direct to grocery stores, etc.
Long-range LeRoux hopes to collect enough farm data to provide benchmarks for farmers to use in evaluating their market performance, LeRoux said. For now, farmers in the project found that the most profitable ventures tended to be the one that required the least handling from harvest to sale, whether roadside stands or wholesale. The trick, LeRoux said, was finding wholesale markets willing to pay premium prices for farm goods.
“We tried to figure out how to make it affordable for Cornell Dining to buy local food. Any chef wants the tenderloin, but there’s a whole lot of other stuff attached to the prime cuts,” he said. “Buying the whole carcass makes it more affordable for the buyer.”
Ten years ago, or so, chefs started getting interested in buying local – but, often, just for a special event or a particular dish on the menu, a system that wasn’t very reliable for the farmer who couldn’t predict when, or how much, product might be in demand.
“It’s the most sustainable model to have the buyer take the whole thing,” LeRoux continued. “It’s one thing to have local meat on the menu when you have the best cuts of meat. Buying the whole carcass supports the farm, and that’s more sustainable.”
Farmers receive 17 cents per pound over the USDA’s weekly average conventional market price.
Stanton started raising beef cows in 1988, the year his dad sold the cows on the dairy farm he was raised on.
“I wanted to have a few animals around,” he said.
Like most beef farmers in New York State, Stanton has a fulltime job off the farm. The average beef herd size in the state is 13 cows, according to Mike Baker, Cornell’s beef Extension specialist. Most of those farmers, like Stanton, sell their animals at auction and direct to customers through the freezer beef trade. Increasingly, farmers are looking for opportunities to attract premium prices by selling beef to restaurants and other wholesale buyers who are more and more interested in purchasing local food.
To meet the new demand, some farmers have had to revise the way they raise animals. The markets that favor locally-raised animals also tend to seek out animals raised on a grass-centric diet (if not wholly grass-fed), as well as free of antibiotic feed. One resource for farmers transitioning to direct sales is the Value Discovery Program at Cornell University’s Beef Teaching and Resource Center in Dryden.
Steer feed-out programs, common at land grant colleges throughout the country, help farmers realize the greatest value in selling their animals by teaching feeding protocols and providing data on rate of weight gain, animal health, marbling score, genetic and breed traits, and more. Then, the program helps farmers market the animal. Animals in the program can be raised on grain or grass diets, or a combination of both.
Working with the university’s existing beef education program accelerated getting the beef into Cornell’s dining halls, Le Roux said.
“Getting into institutions with local beef is going to have an impact on all of agriculture in a way that the freezer trade never will,” Baker said.
Such sales require coordination, as few individual farmers could satisfy the product volume or insurance requirements of a large buyer, Baker said. Pooling meat together to fill the order, and working through a program that can track source verification for the buyer, as Value Discovery does, lets small-scale farmers through the doors into premium markets.
The beef in the Cornell Dining program is processed at Leona Meats in Troy, PA, a USDA-certified slaughter facility. Like many smaller-scale slaughter plants, Leona books dates with farmers 6-12 months in advance, but when LeRoux first contacted them about the Cornell project, Leona’s owners made room in their schedule.
“We believe in what this project is trying to do for farmers,” said Lindsay DeBoc of Leona. “We have seen a lot of farmers go bust because they could use some help learning how to feed their animals and how to market them. There’s a lot of talk about Buy Local. This project is really doing it.”
One dozen farmers have sold beef to Cornell so far, and more are needed, LeRoux said.
Approximately 20 percent of food served through Cornell Dining is sourced locally, and the university is interested in increasing that number, according to Phillip Doane, a university marketing manager.
LeRoux is currently seeking funds for a project to develop a buy local beef program model for other universities.
For more information about NY Farm Viability Institute, visit www.nyfvi.org.
###
