Pineland Farms Emerges as Largest ‘Natural Meats’ Producer in New England

Steve Taylor
New England Correspondent

NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine — Pineland Farms Natural Meats over the past four years has emerged as the largest integrated beef supplier in the New England region, and it’s aiming to keep growing to keep up with demand for its line of premium Wolfe’s Neck Farm branded products.

Pineland currently is finishing 250 to 300 head per week at its feedlot in Fort Fairfield in far northern Maine’s Aroostook County. It has close to a dozen farms, mostly former dairy operations in southern Maine, signed on a backgrounders taking feeder calves at 500 pounds and getting them up to 800 before they’re shipped north to be finished.

Getting sufficient feeders to keep the pipeline full is a challenge, says Erick Jensen, Pineland’s CEO, because the firm operates under a no antibiotics/no hormones protocol so it can market its beef as natural. Most of the feeders are sourced from Pennsylvania, but Jensen hopes that more will eventually come from farms closer to Maine.

Pineland is also looking at developing its own cow-calf dimension and has just acquired a small foundation herd of Angus as a first step toward becoming a more fully integrated beef enterprise.

Long-haul trucking is a major, and challenging, part of Pineland’s operations.

Finished animals are trucked over 700 miles from Fort Fairfield to the Taylor Packing slaughter plant in Wyalusing, Pa. Jensen does his best to get backhaul loads of feeders for his truckers to make the logistics more efficient.

The Taylor plant does all the processing for Pineland, taking carcasses through fabrication to boxed beef cuts ready to ship directly to wholesalers and distributors in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. Major customers for Wolfe’s Neck natural beef products are the upscale Whole Foods Market chain and Hannaford’s, a large New England food retailer. Weis Markets of Pennsylvania has recently joined the account list, too.

“We shoot for a finished animal in 20 to 24 months with a dressed carcass weighing between 750 and 800 pounds,” Jensen says. “Lately, with the way the economy has been going, we’ve seen tremendous demand for ground beef. To balance our supply we’ve launched a line frozen microwaveable meals to use cuts that may be in excess at a given time.”

The feedlot in Fairfield currently handles about 3,000 head at a time, with plans in the works to expand it to 5,000 capacity. The animals are finished on a ration built around haylage, barley and potato byproducts, all of which are purchased from growers and processors in what in Maine is simply called “The County.”

Aroostook County has vast land resources available for crop production. Its traditional mainstay, potatoes, has been slowly shifting away from tablestock to seedstock and processing markets while planted acreage has been shrinking. The far northern latitude means growing seasons are short, so barley and grass hay are well-suited for the conditions, and they can make good use of the huge quantity of manure the feedlot generates.

Pineland Farms Natural Meats has an unusual history for a commercial beef enterprise. Its roots trace to 1959 when Mr. and Mrs. L.M.C. Smith started raising Angus cattle on their 626-acre Wolfe’s Neck Farm in Freeport, on the coast a short distance east of Portland.

“They started marketing organic long before organic became a buzzword,” says Jensen. The Smiths continued the farm operation until 1985, when it was bequeathed to the University of Southern Maine, which ran it as an educational and demonstration farm for 12 years.

In 1997 the farm was turned over to the Wolfe’s Neck Farm Trust, a non-profit organization of which Jensen was then the executive director.

“We were looking for ways to fund it, so we came up with the concept of expanding the farm and involving other farms around the state,” Jensen recalls. “We started marketing our beef in Boston and New York by 2001 and things grew quickly.”

In 2005 the trust decided to spin off the farm enterprise into a for-profit company. The new owners were four individual investors and the Libra Foundation, the legacy of Elizabeth Noyce who in her lifetime spread millions of dollars of her personal wealth all over Maine in support of museums, educational initiatives and other charitable causes.

Noyce, the former wife of Intel founder Robert Noyce, upon her death in 1996 left the balance of her fortune for the benefit of the people of Maine through her creation, the Libra Foundation. Among its various philanthropic pursuits the Libra Foundation supports economic development initiatives, including in agriculture.

In addition to its partial ownership of Pineland Farms Natural Meats, Libra is involved in a dairy farm venture featuring elite Holstein genetics. Both are based in New Gloucester on the site of a former state mental hospital complex.