Cattle have grazed the fields of McCoy Cattle Farms for more than a century. The family has always sold beef to local markets, but over those 100 years they have seen their market change.
Myron McCoy’s grandfather started the farm in southeast North Carolina. Myron and his wife, Sharon, run the family farm with his son and daughter-in-law, Charlie and Kristen. Myron has witnessed many of the changes.
“People used to buy a quarter, a half, or a whole animal,” he said. When animals are harvested they are packaged in many cuts, including steak, hamburger, stew beef and short ribs.
Customers that come to the farm today want to buy specific cuts. McCoy sees several reasons for the shift in customer demand:
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Families are smaller than they used to be.
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Households don’t have as much freezer space, and it takes a lot to hold the meat from a cow.
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It costs a lot of money to buy a portion of an animal at one time.
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There are a lot of different cuts and not everyone knows how to cook them.
McCoy emphasized the last point. The hardest thing for people to understand is “you don’t get a whole cow of steak,” he said with a laugh.
So what their customers want is changing, and so are the customers themselves.
“When I grew up if there were 15 kids in your class, 13 were from farm families,” said McCoy. “Back then people in the community had hog killings, where they came together to process the meat. Then, everybody knew about it. Now you might have one (kid) from a farm.”
The local elementary school has at least two students from a farm. McCoy’s grandsons have the same passion to help people understand where their food comes from. Visitors to the farm can see the cattle and buy beef from the family’s recently expanded freezer beef business. Whether it’s their customers, on their Facebook page, or at school, the boys share their farm’s story.
This spring they joined their mom in a video about the farm that was shown at school during Farm to School week, an event Kristen, an elementary teacher, helped coordinate. Beef from the family’s farm was served one day during school lunch. It was another opportunity for the family to connect with local consumers and put a face from McCoy Cattle Farms on agriculture.
