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Farmers Need to be Promoted to Society as Food
Producers
Cambrian
Meats owner, Ewan Campbell says farmers need to
promote themselves as providers of food, health,
nutrition and wealth.
How many dollar bills do you need to eat
before you are full?
Money won’t feed people but farmers do, making
farmers the most important people on earth.
This was the point farmer and owner of
Cambrian Meats, Ewan Campbell made in his
address to farmers at a recent Holistic
Management conference in Christchurch.
He says farmers need to promote themselves as
providers of food, health, nutrition and
wealth, where at the moment they are seen as
the dregs of society, responsible for
environmental damage such as the degradation
of waterways.
“Society doesn’t see us as food producers and
we need to change that.”
Campbell believes farmers need to be focusing
on producing “awesomely” good produce to get
increasingly health conscious consumers on
side with farmers.
“And then we’re made.”
Campbell has developed a niche market for his
beef and lamb grown on his Waihi property and
processed in their cutting plant in Tauranga,
to the point he now has a waiting list of
Auckland restaurants hoping to be able to
include Cambrian Meats on their menu.
So what’s so special about Cambrian beef and
lamb?
The answer, according to Campbell, is in the
soil.
Campbell has shunned conventional fertiliser
treatments in favour of a fertiliser regime he
has developed himself after years of running
trial plots on his property and doing years of
research in New Zealand and overseas.
“People said to me put Super on your farm and
it will look wonderful.”
But Campbell found the trial plots treated
with Super to have no worms and plenty of
grass grub, a finding that encouraged him to
look outside the square as to what his soil
needed to optimise the nutritional value of
the grass.
“What we found was that when we changed our
nutrition in the soil and we started mucking
around with minerals in our animals, the
actual change that came then was far more
remarkable than you could ever imagine.”
He says they changed the mineral status of the
soil, looked at what the animals were eating
and their health, and found when they killed
the animals the quality of the meat had
changed remarkably.
“We are what we eat, so the soil is nutrition
for the pasture, the pasture is the nutrition
for the animal and what we found is the animal
is the nutrition for us.”
But Campbell says they weren’t aware of the
nutritional value of their meat in the early
days, all they knew was that it tasted
exceptionally good and it is this taste
experience that urged Campbell to look at
marketing his beef outside out of the
commodity market.
Although Campbell initially approached Meat
Boards to seek fund-ing for more research they
were not interested, but this lack of support
only made Campbell more determined to find out
why and how things work and to build a
successful business from his research.
But as Campbell says, it wasn’t always easy.
He says he came to the realisation he had to
stand in front of people and say this is what
I do and this is what I produce, so he went on
the road promoting his produce to restaurants,
caterers and bakeries in the Waikato, Bay of
Plenty and Auckland.
“It was physically and mentally draining and
one hell of a learning curve.”
Although they now have a waiting list of
restaurants wanting their prime cuts, Campbell
says they will only grow at the speed they can
market the rest of the carcase.
“This is even changing rapidly with high
quality bakeries taking serious notice and
using the facts to help their own businesses.”
Currently Cambrian Meats sells around ten to a
dozen beef carcases and 25 lambs every week.
Campbell sells his product for a premium, a
price he has found chefs more than happy to
pay.
“The focus on quality and consistency has paid
off.”
It is the attention to the soil that Campbell
attributes to the high quality of his meat.
“It goes back to the soil again and again and
again.”
William Albrecht, one of the great scientists
of our time stated confusion will prevail
until the soil becomes the basis of
agricultural policy.”
In testing the nutrient value of their meat in
the laboratory Cambrian Meats made an
interesting discovery.
They found their meat to be particularly rich
in Omega 3 fat, in fact over 100% richer in
Omega 3 than standard New Zealand beef.
Omega 3 is a polyunsaturated fatty acid and,
according to the plethora of information
available on the internet, is woefully
deficient in the Western diet.
Omega 3 is found in the body in conjunction
with Omega 6, and while the ratio of these
polyunsaturated fatty acids in past times were
found in the body at a ratio of 1:1 or 2:1 in
favour of Omega 6, the modern diet of
processed foods has put this ratio way out of
kilter.
Published in Country-Wide, southern edition,
September 2004. Reprinted here with the kind
permission of Country-Wide. For more on
Country-Wide, check out www.country-wide.co.nz
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