Pinning pork farm’s hopes on omega 3 product

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

“It’s got to work,” Somerset farmer Jim Lamb says of his farm’s latest life as a pork producing and meat retailing operation.

Meadowbrook Farm and its on-site meat market is now the only source for Atlantic-grown and processed omega 3 enriched pork.

“We converted, we made the ‘big’ transition - that’s the name of the game.”

Lamb points to just seven Nova Scotian pork farmers still in business; last year, there were about 25, the year before, over 50. The collapse of the pork industry has been fast and desperate.

“It’s all challenge, but we’re producing a very high quality, fresh, local product; and, it’s a healthy choice by adding the omega 3. That sets us apart, and people want it.”

Lamb has 300 acres of corn and grain: he can farm much of his own feed. The farm has its own piglets and sows, orders in a pre-mix for the small pigs and then starts market hogs at 50 pounds on an omega 3 enriched feed.

“It costs much more money to feed them this, but we can get it in the market. We won’t be cheaper than the retail stores - we can’t be - but there’s a difference.”

The omega 3 enhancement provides a health boost - preventing children’s type 1 diabetes, and protecting adults from heart disease, stroke and LDL cholesterol. Your body can’t produce omega 3, but it’s an essential fatty acid - “the good ones,” Lamb says.

Lamb has operated an on-farm meat market for close to 20 years, expanding to a roast pork and beef catering business. In 2007, the farm opened an, expanded meat cutting and retail shop. The farm sends 30 pigs a week through Bowlby’s slaughterhouse in Greenwood, and then markets the cuts and smoked products in the Somerset shop - a quarter million pounds a year.

“The market is doing great, we’ve seen a big increase.”

Lamb says people come from as far as Halifax and Yarmouth, and the shop hopes to use 50 pigs a week in the near future.

“We have to have that: there’s been a big increase in overhead we didn’t have before:” 15 store workers, three farmhands, up to 20 more on weekends for catering work, and the shop and farm itself.

Lamb is looking at the official launch of his omega 3 pork this month as the end of a multi-year transition for the farm. He gives some credit to Select Nova Scotia for promoting the buy local philosophy and to people willing to live by it but, in the end “it’s still us.

“Making money on 30 pigs a week is better than losing money on 100 - every pig we were sending in the last couple years to the commodity market was costing us up to $80.”