We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the lack of safety and transparency in our food supply. We’ve learned about new parasites and a murky global supply chain. A wise person once told me that big businesses have bigger problems due to bigger scale, and this seems like a reminder of that truism. I hope it goes without saying that there’s nothing we take more seriously than the quality of our Ferndale turkey products, and the local foods we carefully select for our market. We’re built on shorter, local supply chains with lots of transparency.

Over the past decades of direct-marketing our turkey, we’ve learned a lot. I often marvel at how far we’ve come, and we’ve used the knowledge we’ve picked-up along the way to get better. One of our biggest successes was setting-up full traceability across all our turkey products, so we can link each package back to a flock from the farm, and track it forward to a retail partner’s cooler. Thankfully, we’ve never had reason to do more than our annual system test, but I’m proud that we can match every box in our inventory to its lot batch with the click of a button.

It’s probably no surprise that our traceability is made vastly easier since we raise 100% of the turkey in our Ferndale label, either on our own farm or a trusted local partner farm. It’s commonplace for the big meat brands to purchase outside commodity meats for their products, but we own all our turkeys from start-to-finish, and craft all our finished products at independent, local processors. Transparency is a lot easier when it doesn’t include anonymous middlemen, and we know all our partners personally.

I’ve spent years thinking about the many positive impacts of a local, sustainable food system. One that’s better for farmers and rural economies. Better for our environment. Crafting better food and healthier communities. But we should also celebrate that local food systems create shorter, more transparent supply chains. In today’s world, that’s a worthy attribute to add to the list.