Farmers Provide Grass-Fed Beef to Local Restaurants

Doing things differently was always the goal when Chris and Leigh Moul decided to move home to Pennsylvania and start their own beef farm.

“We never had interest in being a commodity beef supplier,” Chris said. “We always wanted to supply a special product.”

Their special product starts as a grass-fed and finished Black Angus and ends with direct marketing.

For the Mouls at Locust Point Cattle Co., direct marketing is a three-pronged approach.

“It’s restaurants. It’s whole-animal butcher shops. It’s direct-to-consumer,” Chris said. “Without all three of those, it’s very hard to do.”

Currently, the Mouls provide ground beef to three local restaurants — Brewvino in York, Millworks in Harrisburg and Watershed Pub in Camp Hill.

Across the three restaurants, the Mouls provide 250 to 300 pounds of ground beef weekly.

“There’s very few fillets and lots of ground beef,” Chris said. “So the goal is to find the right restaurants who want to serve a grass-fed and finished burger and pay a premium for it.”

The restaurants actually found the Mouls. Brewvino was their first customer and has been buying their beef since 2017.

Millworks and Watershed Pub started buying from the Mouls at the beginning of this year but first contacted them last fall.

Additionally, Paco’s, a taco stand at Central Market York, also gets beef from the Mouls.

It takes a bit of time between when a restaurant reaches out and when it can actually get beef. Sometimes up to a year, Chris said.

The Mouls’ grass-fed cattle take an average of 28 months to reach harvest. Because of the long lead time, the Mouls can’t add new restaurants right away when contacted.

“If you want to increase your sales, you have to think about it two years in advance,” Chris said.

The Mouls have 100 to 150 cattle, mostly Black Angus with a few Holstein-Angus crosses, that rotate through 225 acres of pasture.

The Mouls bought their first cattle in 2015, but Chris had some prior experience with the animals because he worked on his uncle’s beef farm growing up.

“The passion and interest in farming has stayed with me, even though we did some other things,” he said.

Source: lancasterfarming.com

Photo Credit: istock-simplycreativephotography