Health

• Happy animals (raised with respect to their nature, with high-quality diets) are healthier animals. Healthier animals are more nutrient-dense than their less-healthy counterparts. Your tongue is made to tell you when something’s nutritious for you, so the meat is more delicious as well.

• Avoid the use of nitrates, nitrites, glues, fillers, and other artificial ingredients in your meat. We only use salt for preservation, unrefined sugar for flavoring some cures, and dried or fresh spices that you could grow in your garden for sausage.

• Meat loses its nutritional content with prolonged cold storage. Instead of moving through a national or regional supply chain, your meat goes directly from farm to butcher to you.

• The small scale model mitigates risk compared to centralized industry. Remember when lettuce from one foreign farm caused a cyclospora outbreak in 20 states, affecting 11.5k people and hospitalizing almost 500? Or when 12,000 lbs. of bacon was recalled from a Canadian packer? Such widespread misfortune is impossible when we source from small farms. First of all small scale production is more disposed to careful and individual management than industrial assembly-line-style production is. Second, at Village Herd we handle one animal at a time, so your meat is from one single animal. Compare that to ground meat at the grocery store which may originate from well over 100 animals. If meat from one was contaminated anywhere along the processing chain, the entire batch would also be contaminated.

Environmental

• American industrially farmed beef is driven an average of 3 hours (or 150 miles) just to get to the slaughterhouse, then it travels to the packer, then gets distributed nationwide. Beef from Argentina, or lamb from New Zealand obviously travels much farther than that. In contrast, our meat doesn’t travel at all to the slaughter, and it’s in your freezer in under two hours’-worth of drive time (or 100 miles start to finish). That’s a lot less fuel used to get your freezer stocked.

• While there are good ways - like composting - to dispose of unwanted trim without wasting it, we believe that the highest use of an animal’s harvest is to nourish people. That’s why we provide 100% of the hanging weight to you by default: because all of it is good for you, whether as roasts, sausage, organs, fats, or broth.

Quality

• The greatest factor in maximizing meat quality is freshness, and you can’t get any fresher than our meat unless you processed it yourself!

• We offer traditional cures and well-loved flavors for your processed meat products (bacon, sausage, etc.) as well as some exciting new recipes, soon to become tradition themselves!

• Swine at modern factory farms are bred for pure mass and rapid growth, with little consideration given to meat or fat quality. Heritage breeds, often favored by homesteaders and small scale farmers, were bred for generations to be as delicious as possible, and you cannot get their meat from a grocery store. Discover your favorite flavor of pork, lamb, or goat through Village Herd!

Economic

• Buying meat shares is buying in bulk, so you save a ton of money over buying individual cuts. For example, while $12/lb for ground lamb is more expensive than what you can find elsewhere, it represents significant savings on lamb chops, leg, etc. (~$20/lb from Costco)

• Local farms are not affected nearly as much by supply chain issues or macroeconomics as the centralized industrial farms. Our prices are more stable because our supply is more stable.

• Once you start stewarding the land, you realize how important it is to not let resources leave the system. Sheep eat grass, sheep poop on grass, more grass grows. When soil runoff and “waste streams” carry resources off of the farm, we need to buy to bring more in. The same thing happens with money. When you buy through Village Herd, your money is going to two local families instead of to the shareholders of a multibillion dollar corporation. When we invest in our businesses, it makes more goods available for you at better prices.

• The biggest four meat packing corporations control 70% of the pork market, and 80-85% of the beef market. Their near-complete control over the market allows them to control supply and therefore prices to a high degree. When you get your meat from the Village Herd, you completely exclude them from our economy and begin to transfer control back to local small operations.