UM’s Farm to College program links Montana producers with campus consumers.

Gene Shock sits on his green four-wheeler, gazing over his pasture toward the Mission Mountains. I’m a few feet away, surrounded by a ring of Shock’s cows, who are intently gazing at me. One cow gets in my face and sniffs. “That’s Mary,” says Shock, who says he’ll hang on to her and breed her next year. “Her half sisters and brothers are what go to Montana Natural Beef.”

Last year, Montana Natural Beef, a Ronan-based company that markets beef raised in the Mission Valley, sold roughly $37,000 of that beef to UM.

It may seem a no-brainer that Montana beef, among the world’s finest, is fed to Montana’s students. But today’s cattle industry, like many other food industries, operates on a scale bigger than Big Sky Country. The beef could come from anywhere. The distributor might say it is from Idaho. But that only means the cows were slaughtered there, perhaps fattened on an Idaho feedlot. Or they could have been raised in Florida, Texas, Washington, or Montana and fattened in Colorado or Kansas, “It’s a mixed bag,” says David Opitz, purchasing manager for University Dining Services (UDS). “Unless I can source my meat exactly, I don’t try to guess. You just never know.”

UM’s Farm to College (FTC) program has eliminated a bit of that guessing by taking the mystery out of the meat. “It started with a conversation after a campus recycling oversight committee meeting,” explains UDS Director Mark LoParco. “Professor Hassanein [assistant professor in UM’s Environmental Studies Program] asked me what I thought about serving local foods. That’s something I’ve wanted to get going for some time, but didn’t have the resources [for]. After that meeting, she lined up four graduate students and off we went.”

Story and Photos by Ari LeVaux

Full Story: http://themontanan.us/