Bay Area Ranchers Form Cooperative

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

The Bay Area Ranchers Co-op, or Bar-C as they call themselves, is a new cooperative designed to provide meat processing for its 17 ranch members. Adam Parks owns Victorian Farmstead Meat Company in Sebastopol, and is the Vice President of Bar-C.

Parks… “Processing in Northern California has been a problem the entire decade that I've been in business. It came to a head, just about a little over a year ago when the only local slaughter facility to Northern California, to the Bay area, anyway, shut its doors to anybody that wasn't under their own label. And one of the reasons the co-op model came about was because we wanted to ensure that local ranchers had a place to process their animals that would never be in competition with them, as happened with the previous processor.”

The cooperative plans to provide at least one location to base a mobile processing unit in the bay area, so that members can process livestock at cost.

Parks… “We are set up as a T Corp. I didn't even know what a T Corp was before we started this, but that is a corporation structure specific to ag co-ops. And, we've been fundraising since the middle of October. We've raised about $750,000 of our $1.2 million goal. And we have placed the order for our USDA inspected trailer, which will arrive here April 15th or thereabouts. And we hope to be in operations by May 1st.”

You can support the Bay Area Ranchers Cooperative by going to their WeFunder crowdfunding campaign. More details on that in tomorrow’s report.