Club Member Casey McKissick, with wife Meredith

BLACK MOUNTAIN — Do you know your farmer, your butcher and your meat-truck driver?

Casey McKissick is about to become all three. McKissick, owner and farmer of Foothills Pasture Raised Meats and program director of NC Choices, which provides education and technical assistance to local and niche meat supply chain partners, is diversifying his family business.

McKissick, with wife Meredith, will later this September open a butcher shop in Black Mountain associated with Foothills Pasture Raised Meats, where he will process much of the meat he raises on his own farm, supplemented by other local farms. McKissick won’t technically be the butcher; he’ll leave most of that work to Karen Fowler, former butcher of The Chop Shop.

Out of that storefront, which is located close to Dynamite Roasting Co., McKissick will supply his own food truck, which will act as sort of a roving butcher’s shop. “That will enable us to take the products out to where people want them,” McKissick said. “Festivals, fairs and farmers markets.”

Though the store will be branded to Foothills — which has provided whole hogs to Blind Pig events and Asheville restaurants Seven Sows, Ben’s Tune Up and Table — other producers of meats like beef, goat, poultry and lamb will round out the inventory.

One such producer is Wendy Brugh, whose Dry Ridge Farms raises meat chickens, rabbits, hogs and lamb.

Brugh said it’s important to know how her products are being processed and marketed. She thinks a farmer-run butchery means meat free of green-washing. “As ‘local’ becomes more popular, there are plenty of places that aren’t necessarily true to that label,” she said.

The meat at McKissick’s still-unnamed shop will be so local that some of the meat sources — like Dry Ridge Farms, for example— can be visited by appointment.

“The most enticing element of it is that it’s a butcher shop being opened by a fellow farmer who is also the head of NC Choices,” Brugh said. “(McKissick) knows how important it is to advocate for other farmers and for how we raise our animals and why we raise them that way.”

Read all the story, 

http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20130723/LIVING/307230011/Make-way-meat-truck