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Meat Snacks Made from Grass-fed Beef Born in Virginia

By Lorrie Baumann

1D8A3583_colorLandcrafted Food is a brand that’s about an idea as much as about its products. That idea is that there’s a place in the American market for responsibly raised grass-fed beef and the family farmers and ranchers that produce it.

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The company was started a decade ago by Gary Mitchell, Charlotte Hanes and Brantley Ivey, neighbors in Grayson County, Virginia. The county sits in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Highlands, firmly at the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, and it’s mostly famous for the quality of its bluegrass and old time music. It’s unpretentiously rural, and the people who raise cattle there call themselves farmers rather than ranchers.
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Both Mitchell and Ivey grew up on family farms and wanted to be able to pass that legacy on to their own families. Mitchell’s family has farmed in Grayson County for four generations. Ivey moved to the area about 10 years ago to manage the Hanes farm, and it didn’t take long after he and his wife showed up in the county for them to get together with Mitchell for a conversation about how they were going to wean their cattle operations from the marketplace for commodity beef and generate the revenue that would allow them to give their cattle a qualify life. “The first goal was to raise cattle the way we wanted to and to earn a premium price,” says Mitchell. “Selling into the commodity market, there’s not much motivation for doing it better.”
They went to the nearest folks they could find who might be interested in paying premium prices for quality beef – the white tablecloth chefs in Washington, D.C. Once they’d explained to those chefs how they were raising their cattle – out on pasture year-round, with no hormones or antibiotics — chefs started buying even before the company had its first meat ready for the market. “Restaurants began to tell us they wanted us to be grass-fed, and since we were in the mountains of Virginia, where there’s plenty of grass and no corn, it was a natural fit,” Mitchell says.

1D8A3257_bw“There is no market for grass-fed beef unless you develop it for your product,” adds Ivey. “We developed the market.”

Among the three of them, they own and rent about 3,000 acres, and they began partnering with other local farmers – their friends and neighbors – who saw what they were doing and wanted the premium price that Mitchell, Hanes and Ivey were paying for beef raised to their requirements. Now, they have enough beef available to branch out with a new value-added product that’s shelf-stable so they can sell it on the national market, and the team have just built a processing facility in Independence, Virginia, to make smoked meat sticks. Their Landcrafted Food Smoked Meat Sticks are now available in two flavors, Sweet Smoked and Original Smoked. Each 0.9-ounce stick is packed in a countertop caddy of 20 that’s ready to be merchandised either for individual sale or in the whole box of 20. Each stick has 100 calories, with 3 grams of saturated fat. Because the meat sticks are made from grass-fed beef, they’re lower in saturated fat and cholesterol than most other beef sticks on the market, and they’re also made with less sugar than most processed meat snacks, so they’re particularly Paleo-friendly as well.

Marketing support for the product will include shopper marketing, and a social media campaign is in the planning. The brand will be available on Amazon, and additional retail distribution is in process. For further information, call 276.773.3712, email gary@landcraftedfood.com or visit www.landcraftedfood.com.

Summer Markets Offer a Panoply of Beauty and Function

By Lorrie Baumann

The makers of high-end kitchenware and giftware are bringing a gorgeous array of new products that will surprise and delight your customers this holiday season to the summer markets in Atlanta, Las Vegas and New York. No matter which you’re able to attend, you’re sure to find items to entice the passionate foodies and the people who love them to browse and buy at your store this fall. Here’s just a small sample of the products that are making their debut in July.
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Read much more at KitchenwareNews.com.

Vineyard Robot Prototype to Debut at FutureFarm Expo in Oregon

Seeking to solve the chronic labor shortage problem facing the US premium wine industry, the project ‘ROVR’ (Remote Operated Vineyard Robot) team has developed a fully mobile concept demonstrator at their Pendleton, Oregon research and development lab. The first public demonstration of the virtual reality operated robot will take place at the 2017 FutureFarm Expo on August 15-17.

The one-of-a-kind technology was developed over the last 18 months by Digital Harvest, a Virginia-based agricultural solutions company that recently established a research outpost at the Pendleton UAS Test Range.

To date, the promise of industrial robots taking over “dumb, dirty or dangerous” tasks for workers has yet to be realized outside of the factory floor. Despite tens of thousands of man hours and huge sums invested, robotics researchers and innovators (with few exceptions) have yet to realize the goal of developing cost-effective robots capable of replicating the productivity of skilled farm workers.

As the labor force that tree and vine fruit growers depend on continues to decline, the complexities and costs associated with finding new workers have left the industry in crisis. Multiple surveys of fruit and vegetable growers have confirmed that labor is the number one challenge facing agricultural growth.

The ROVR robotic worker system to be displayed at the FutureFarm Expo is unique in that it bypasses many of the persistent technical challenges of machine learning and intelligence by keeping a human operator in the loop via a virtual reality interface.

“We tried many types of tools to operate the robotic arms, such as joysticks and game controllers, but none were capable of allowing the system to operate at the similar level of accuracy or speed as traditional skilled workers,” says company CEO Young Kim. “By using virtual reality as an operator interface, we not only improved manual dexterity but also opened up the possibility of human workers being able to teleport to work from anywhere.”

The FutureFarm Expo is the annual technology summit of the Oregon FutureFarm Project, a new farm-tech accelerator effort that has brought advanced digital agriculture developers such as Digital Harvest and Yamaha Unmanned Systems to eastern Oregon.

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This year’s Expo program will offer attendees a comprehensive look at what some are calling Digital Agriculture 2.0. Optimizing farming practices, streamlining production, and reducing the impact on resources are the collective goals in agriculture today. Learning about advanced technologies and how to implement them, today and tomorrow is a key outcome of this event.

Previously undiscussed topics such as beyond line-of-sight crop imaging and managing cattle from the sky will be presented as well. Updates on ongoing developments in farm automation, field robotics, soil sciences, precision irrigation and what-do-to-with-all-that-data will round out the expert presentations.

Among the many key presenters is George Kellerman of Yamaha Motor Ventures & Lab. Kellerman will share his global insights during his presentation titled: “Reinventing Agriculture: How Robotics and Automation Will Save Farming in the 21st Century.”

Because the FFE is focused on “Bringing Clarity to Growers,” this event offers attendees and presenters an opportunity to learn from each other, forge ties, and jointly develop new tools and methods to make each new harvest bigger and better than the last.

A trade show, all group lunches and outdoor field demonstrations of the latest farm drones and automated machinery are all part of the experience.

Space is limited and the Expo sells out each year – order your tickets now. To learn more or attend, visit FutureFarmExpo.tech or contact: Jeff Lorton, FutureFarm Expo Director 503.989.6933 Jeff@dukejoseph.com.