Chase Brook Natural Meats - farm direct natural chicken, beef, lamb, and pork

We wanted to send out a note to let everyone know that we will not be farming or selling our meat any longer. We have had a lot of fun and we have met a lot of great people so this is not something to be sad about. No doubt about it we have a lot of very loyal customers.

In the end though, this was a business. Too much has changed for us to be able to continue our operation and we have decided to stop farming. Folks interested in what happened are encouraged to keep reading. I will try to suggest what went wrong.

We were unable to control our costs. Over the five years or so that we operated, our per animal feed costs increased by 388%! Since we were in the business of feeding animals high quality natural rations, this hit us right in the shorts! We couldn't go cheap! Another big part of our business was meat processing. Meat processing costs doubled during the same time period. All of these cost increases forced us to really increase our meat prices...

The recession hurt our customers. Everyone has been pinched by the economy and we were no different. Our sales in 2009 were less than half of what we saw in 2008. A regular business might have been able to take this, but we were already reeling from our growth and cost increases. Since we raised our meat ourselves, our planning cycle was far too long for these changes. To have meat to sell in 2009, we had to plan our work in 2007 and raise our animals in 2008. Too much changed!! We got crushed!!

The food market has become highly fragmented and some consumers are confused. Over the last few years folks have really gone in a thousand directions in what they are looking for. Some demand organic, some don't care, few understand what it really means. Some folks want grass fed, some tried it and hated it. Some wanted fresh ( never frozen ) grass fed pork tenderloin in January... Argh. We were trying to be simple, do what made the most sense and provide a great quality local product.

Our farm has become worthless, really really worthless!! The outer ring around the cities has been devastated by the real estate crisis. We would have tried to go for one more year, but in the end our farm had become a massive liability. In a period of four years we went from a 60% LTV ratio ( pretty good for the times! ) all the way down to 54% negative equity. Any further investment would have been a waste.

We really did have a good time though. We really did have great products that we could be proud of. Best of all we met some of the very greatest and most awesome people in the Metro!!!

THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH!!

Jeff, Jill, Jeremy and Justin

P.S. Comments and questions are welcome, email "info at chasebrooknatural dot com".