A meaty proposition

Heather Curran has long wanted to buy locally produced meats just as she enjoys a regular supply of locally grown vegetables.

Thus, she wasted little time in joining a pilot project that allows consumers to get a monthly box of Sonoma County beef, pork and lamb.

"It's the whole idea of supporting somebody who's part of our community," said Curran, a Windsor resident who was waiting at a roadside stand with scores of other members of the new Sonoma County Meat Buying Club.

The UC Cooperative Extension recently started the club in order to expand opportunities for the sale of locally grown meat.

For $55 a month, members can pick up a box containing five pounds of frozen beef and two pounds of frozen pork, an average price of $7.86 a pound. The monthly order can increase to as much as 15 pounds of beef, seven pounds of pork and three pounds of lamb, for a price of $175.

The meat is inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the club tracks each order so that members don't get the same cuts each month, said Stephanie Larson, the livestock and range management adviser for the UC extension office in Santa Rosa. That way members gets both the higher-end and lower-end cuts.

The original goal was to obtain about 50 buying orders a month throughout the next year. But the program kicked off last month with 65 members, Larson said, and since has grown to nearly 115.

Each month an area chef offers recipes for preparing the meats. This month the recipes came from chef Peter Brown of Jimtown Store.

Sonoma Direct, a Petaluma wholesale processor for locally raised lamb and veal, helped start the meat buying club and serves as one of two sites where members pick up their orders.

On Thursday, more than 50 club members waited at the Airport Boulevard stand of Tierra Vegetables, a community supported agriculture program whose members purchase weekly boxes of locally grown, pesticide-free vegetables. Curran said she has been buying vegetables there for about 12 years.

While waiting, the members nibbled on lamb and duck dishes prepared by Roger Praplan, chef of Santa Rosa's La Gare restaurant.

Praplan and Windsor rancher Rick Olufs were on hand to help distribute the meat boxes once they arrived in a refrigerated van.

Olufs, this month's beef supplier, may be best known for his annual pumpkin patch and corn maze near Highway 101 off Shiloh Road. He also sells sides and quarters of beef, but each year he has visitors ask how they can buy his beef in smaller quantities. The meat buying club could satisfy that demand.

Olufs maintained that many consumers will pay extra in order to know where their meat is coming from and to know the rancher who is putting forth a healthy, tasty product.

"I owned it to the point that you took possession of it," he said.

Larson said members cite two key benefits: The meat is locally grown, and the ranchers and farmers treat their animals humanely.

"We're not the big agriculture production," Larson said, "and that's a selling point as well."

Curran said over the years she greatly reduced her family's meat consumption because of concern regarding the treatment of farm animals. Now with the new club meat will become a regular part of the menu.

"When my husband found out we were having chicken-fried steak," she said, "he did a dance."

You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com.