By Emily Buehler, Weaver Street Market Website Coordinator
This month, we took a field trip to several of our produce and meat suppliers. We gathered at the ECO-HUB in Durham, where we toured the offices and storage areas of Eastern Carolina Organics (ECO) and Firsthand Foods. Then we drove two hours east to Rose Hill, to tour two organic produce farms that sell through ECO: Cottle Organics and Uncle Henry’s Organics, who supply us with berries, greens, muscadine grapes, and more. After lunch, we toured Wallace Farms, who sells pork via Firsthand Foods. This is the second in a series of posts about the trip. Read part one here.
Firsthand Foods’s website says it all: “Firsthand Foods connects North Carolina’s pasture-based livestock producers with local food lovers, restaurants, food service providers, and retailers. We source from a network of remarkable farmers who raise their animals humanely, on pasture, without using sub-therapeutic antibiotics, added hormones or animal by-products. We do the legwork necessary to get a consistent selection of quality local meats into local markets.” The Durham-based company connects sustainable meat producers with the markets, like Weaver Street, who want to sell their goods.
During our tour of the ECO-HUB last month, co-CEO Jennifer Curtis spoke about the company and showed us their space in the cooler and freezer. Firsthand has about fifty North Carolina farmers at the moment, from whom they buy pork, beef, and lamb. Everything is USDA certified and Animal Welfare Approved. Three processors package the meat for them, and most of it arrives fresh. Firsthand buys whole animals, which sometimes results in them having a lot of the cuts that are less popular at restaurants. Firsthand partners with ECO to deliver to their retailers.
Firsthand’s meat is more expensive than meat from animals raised in confinement, largely due to the small scale of the company. Sharing space at the ECO-HUB is a big help. And being so local, the meat is fresh: it arrives at the ECO-HUB just a few days after it’s slaughtered and heads out to customers a day or two later. It’s freshness together with the breeds grown by sustainable farmers mean it tastes great.
We carry pork sausages and lamb cuts from Firsthand Foods (look for their name on the package). Learn more at http://firsthandfoods.com/.
After learning about Firsthand, we set off for the farms! Read the next post in this series, here.