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The next morning, we drove back to the farm with three of Bradford's children and one of his dogs. The kids hosed water into a small pigpen and played in the hay lining the loft of the barn. We drove to the top of a hill, where cows and steer quietly munched grass in the sun.We sat in his truck and looked down on his tidy operation. "I'm too small to be subsidized by the government," he said. But he's also too big to be sustained by farmers markets, so he keeps his business barely in the black by providing his beef to restaurants and stocking two Community Supported Agriculture programs, or CSAs.It's not easy economics. To sell beef in the US, the cattle must be processed (meaning slaughtered and cut up) at a USDA-inspected facility. Large, certified plants can do it for cheap but don't work with orders under 1,000 animals a month and are mostly located in the Midwest, Bradford said. Smaller, local shops are happy to have his business but charge around $1,200 per head. That right there, he told me, is the main economic driver of his business. It's tough to compete with industrially farmed $2.99 per pound ground chuck when the best you can do is $8.This article appeared in theApril issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.
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