Hand in Hand

How a farm family, an agricultural entrepreneur, and a local butcher are collaborating to reclaim a model of true farm-to-table meat production.
photographs Julie Kramer

It’s a sunny July afternoon, not too hot, and I’m sipping cold water in a barn in Brown County, OH. I’ve driven about an hour and fifteen minutes east of Cincinnati to meet the brains behind a collective of businesses who are adopting a new strategy for high-quality, high-quantity, farm-to-table meat production. Together a cattle producer, a harvester, and a butcher shop are forging a self-sufficient path from the start to the finish, bypassing hurdles like limited processors and disjointed workflow. Gathered around a unique mobile meat processing unit, we talked about how—and why—these three entities are supporting one another’s mission to increase true farm-to-table beef in the Cincinnati region.

The Processor Predicament

Aubrey Bolender is one-half of Bolender Farms (one-fifth if you count their three children). She and husband Adam have been raising cattle from start to finish for 15 years. During their time in direct-to-consumer beef sales, they’ve worked with numerous processors, developing a customer base in Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and elsewhere. It’s been a positive, steady business—but one with little room for growth. Many processors have a limited capacity, which makes it impossible to increase output even if the farmer has the cattle to do so.

In 2017, with their third child on the way, Aubrey and Adam decided it was time to expand their business. They wanted to reach new customers—but they wanted to do so intentionally, with partners that shared their values. After the USDA in 2016 removed requirements for labeling beef products with country of origin (COO), Bolender Farms became even more invested in the quality of their beef and the idea of farm-to-table. Without the COO label, beef that is raised in places like Mexico or Brazil can be passed off as U.S. meat as long as it is processed in the U.S. The absence of the label makes it even harder for consumers to tell how fresh the meat is, not to mention where it came from and how it was treated.

“If we’re doing all the right things to raise our cattle, we don’t belong on the same shelf as that,” Aubrey says.

So Aubrey and Adam Bolender set out to find a new partnership for their next chapter. Keeping their previous processor relationships and product flow intact, they began looking into butchers in the Greater Cincinnati area. There were plenty of them, but not many had the know-how to cut down a whole carcass, which was important to the Bolenders.

“That’s a lost art throughout the whole city,” Aubrey says. But then they found Lehr’s Prime Market, a family-owned butcher shop and deli located in Milford, OH.

“I would pop into Lehr’s, get a sandwich, talk to somebody at the meat shop, and just kind of feel them out,” Aubrey says.1

The butchers at Lehr’s could break down a carcass, and their values felt aligned to the Bolenders’, prioritizing high-quality products from local producers. It was the perfect fit.

Lehr’s Prime Market began selling products from Aubrey and Adam, initially purchasing through a collective the Bolenders were a part of, and later directly from Bolender Farms. The quality of their beef was consistently high—firm cuts rich in marbling. JT Homan, son of owners DJ and Allison Homan and head butcher at Lehr’s Prime Market, estimates that 45%–50% of the beef they’ve received from Bolender Farms has been prime quality. (For reference, roughly 2% of the nation’s beef is graded prime.) Lehr’s couldn’t get enough of it. They wanted more product, and Bolender Farms was ready for their next growth phase, too.

But growth still wasn’t that simple. Together, the two businesses had the beginning and the end of the farm-to-table continuum covered, but they needed a middle man. Without more land, the Bolenders couldn’t raise more cattle. And they still needed a processor that could harvest, hang, and store the meat in the quantity and quality they were looking for.

They were at a standstill until they could find a solution—which came, one day, in the form of DJ’s cousin, Drew Homan.

A Mobile Solution

The Homans have owned land in Brown County, OH, since 1963. That’s when Drew Homan’s father began investing in properties in the rolling hills east of Cincinnati, including the farm that would later become home base for Drew’s mid-life business venture, Straight Creek Farms. Drew plans to harvest, hang, and store processed beef at his Brown County property, while also growing vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. Both the beef and the vegetables are intended for Lehr’s Prime Market.

“My dad passed away in 2001 suddenly,” Drew says. “We sold off some of the property. I never reinvested in myself or something like this. But I always wanted to.”

Drew wanted to create something sustainable, too, so when he heard that DJ and Allison were working with Bolender Farms and looking for a place to raise and process more cattle, Drew saw an opportunity.

“I thought, you know what, life is getting shorter,” he says. “So I decided to go all in.”

Shortly after the first meeting-of-the-minds between the cousins, DJ introduced Drew to Aubrey, and the group began scheming. This was before Covid, but when the pandemic hit, the public interest in buying meat from local farms and butcher shops only increased. There was a clear opportunity for growth, as long as they could find the pastures, the processor, and the freezer space to accommodate it.

Drew had the means and the desire to invest, so it was decided: He would become their processor and would provide the land they needed to expand. Initially Drew considered building a processing facility in a barn on his property. But then he learned about Friesla, a Washington State-based company that builds mobile meat processing systems. Their units are made to do exactly what Drew needed, with the added benefits of mobility and resellability.

Initially, people were skeptical about the unit. “I showed them blueprints,” he says. “Nobody believed it.”

He pulled the trigger anyway, ordering a trailer with the expectation that he’d travel to producers and harvest cattle on-site. But conversations with producers made it clear that they wanted to keep their distance from that part of the cattle’s story.

“By and large, the producers did not want to see their cattle die on the property,” Drew says. Instead, they’re used to taking animals to market or to the butcher and parting ways with them there for good. “When you’re raising an animal like that, you’re making a personal investment in it,” he says. “Yeah, I could understand why they try to stay at arm’s reach from it.”

So, Drew formulated a Plan B and moved the processing trailer to a building on his property. It sits inside a large barn, taking up about as much space as a semi-trailer. Inside, pristine surfaces and equipment for harvest glisten in wait at the front end, and a heavy door opens up to a large freezer in the rear. There’s an on-board generator, a water supply, and water heater—all the necessary elements for the harvest are there.

“This unit is literally set up to go into the field,” Drew says.

Beside the trailer, Drew has set up his custom-built cattle chute, made for him by a company called HerdPro out of Toledo. And outside, a narrow space between two barns makes a natural drop-off point where producers can leave their cattle in the care of Straight Creek Farms. Drew anticipates being able to receive two to four cattle per day once he’s up and running.

Eventually, Straight Creek Farms intends to serve other cattle farmers across Southwest Ohio. For now, their primary focus is their collaboration with Bolender Farms and Lehr’s. While Bolender Farms maintains relationships with other processors for bulk, direct-to-consumer sales, Straight Creek Farms will harvest, dress, and store the cattle intended for Lehr’s, which they will distribute to in-store customers and local restaurants.

Ultimately, Lehr’s hopes to fill at least 30% of store shelves with high-quality beef from Bolender Farms. That level of growth wouldn’t be possible without Straight Creek Farms. With Drew’s operation as their primary processor for the Lehr’s market, Aubrey says they should be able to avoid any of the processing bottlenecks they’ve faced in the past.

Traceable Farm-to-Table

Quality control starts the moment a calf is born. And if you want true, pure farm-to-table meat, you need to be able to retrace every detail of an animal’s journey before it arrives on your plate, from the bull that bred it to the land it grazed on. By sharing resources and mutual support, this trio is making it possible to know exactly what goes on with their cattle.

It starts with the land. Land is hard to come by in Brown County, and many of the pastures that Bolender Farms rents for their cattle are owned by people who may soon age out of their land ownership.

“That’s not guaranteed land we have for our cattle,” Aubrey says. So when Drew proposed a solution to the land problem, it was “a godsend,” Aubrey says.

“I am offering an expansion of pasture so we can grow without it being painful for [Bolender Farms],” Drew says. As part of their collaboration, Drew received a grant from the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service that incentivized him to repurpose 282 acres of land. By providing land, he’s helping Aubrey and Adam invest in growing the feed for their cattle, one of the many details that ensures top-quality product from Bolender Farms.

“We don’t outsource our feed, we raise it,” Aubrey says. “Then Adam actually grinds the feed and feeds the cattle. Everything is in-house, and that makes us unique as well.”

With pastures and feed secured, Bolender Farms can vouch for every part of an animal’s life—from when it’s born to when it’s harvested. “That cow was under our watchful eye for the entire time that it existed,” Drew says.

To ensure a consistent quality of product on their shelves, DJ and Allison Homan have invested in their own addition to the Bolender Farms livestock—a bull that will be used to breed cattle for their beef company, Homangrown. By providing the land and handling processing for the additional cattle produced for the Homangrown brand, Straight Creek Farms has a hand in the beginning and end of the cattle’s lifecycle.

“[There are] definitely three parts to this puzzle,” Aubrey says. “All are independent, but we are also definitely hand in hand with one another.”

It is a puzzle—a complicated puzzle—but more than that, it’s a story about three parts working together to overcome a major hurdle in food production: the disconnect among farmer, producer, and retailer. The ‘to’ in farm-to-table takes all three parts working together. This group is hopeful that their method can become the model for beef that is traceable and local, in higher quantity and consistent quality, so that fewer people will have to resort to commodity meats with unclear origins.

“The bottom line is still as much farm to table as possible,” DJ says.

As a coherent unit of three individual businesses committed to their collective success, Bolender Farms, Lehr’s, and Straight Creek Farms could be on their way to changing the way farmers handle the meat processing bottleneck. If their plan works, mobile processing units could be an answer to the limited availability of local, traceable beef.

“It’s a flow and work relationship,” Aubrey says. “Our individual successes depend heavily on each of us giving our best effort to do what we’ve promised to do.”