So you have a cow. OK, a bunch of them. You raise them on the finest, healthiest pasture, never once showing them a feedlot or a grain of corn. As a farmer, you are an artisan, producing some of the best beef available – beef that tastes great and may even lower your cholesterol. The challenge is finding a market for it.

Meanwhile, a chef in a city nearby is wishing he could have beef like that. He, too, is an artisan, but the brilliant culinary creations he concocts are only as good as his ingredients. The local distributor is convenient, offering one-stop shopping and streamlined invoicing, but the ingredients they offer the chef are the same they offer every chef in the area, and it is difficult for the chef to learn from whom those ingredients came and how they were raised. The chef feels disconnected from his ingredients in a profession where the best chefs must be inextricably linked to them. This chef needs to reconnect with the farmer.

This need grew into the Farmer-Chef Connection, a concept that first germinated in Portland, Oregon in late 2000, and is now spreading to the rest of the United States. To learn more, read the The Farmer-Chef Connection article in the May/June issue of Touch the Soil magazine.