It's all pre-sold before slaughter to buyers like Scott Schram of Port Huron. A professional butcher for 10 years, Schram says the beef from the Phillips farm is excellent, but mostly, he just feels better knowing how and where the animal was raised and processed. "I wanted to eliminate some of the hands that were on it," he says.

From birth to barbecue, the beef he bought traveled less than 30 miles -- a rarity in today's increasingly complex, globalized food chain. But in Michigan and across the country, a counter-trend is gaining momentum: More consumers are buying locally grown meat directly from the people who produce it.

As a result, increasing numbers of small farms are raising livestock animals -- from cows and pigs to lambs and French hens -- and selling them to neighbors, friends-of-friends and city folks who find them on the Internet.

No one knows exactly how many Michigan farmers are involved in direct-to-consumer meat sales, but experts agree the number is at least in the hundreds and growing. Even so, the supply often can't keep up with the demand from consumers looking for meat they believe is safer, more humanely grown and maybe even more nutritious than supermarket meats.

The natural way

The Phillips' cattle are different than most because they're grass-fed, a new approach that supporters say is healthier and less stressful for the animals, because grass -- not grain -- is a ruminant's natural food.

"I read a lot of publications about grass-fed beef, and the light went on," says Roger, 58, whose daughter Debra, 30, is his business partner. "I quit feeding grain and the cattle became healthier and life got easier . . . Nature is smarter than we are. They evolved eating grass, and that's what we should feed them."

Grass-fed advocates also say their beef contains higher concentrations of some vitamins and other healthful compounds -- especially conjugated linoleic acids (CLAs) and heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids -- than feedlot beef fattened on grain.

People debate which tastes better, but grass-fed beef is definitely leaner; frying hamburgers made of grass-fed ground beef leaves almost no fat in the pan.

Most of Phillips' customers find him while searching for grass-fed beef on the Internet; his Bluewater Beefmasters farm is listed at www.eatwild.com, a site that promotes the pasture-feeding agricultural movement. It's one of nine Michigan farms listed, selling everything from poultry and eggs to pork, lamb and beef.

Phillips, like several other farmers, says the discovery of BSE, or mad-cow disease, in Washington state last winter prompted a rash of calls from people looking for alternatives to feedlot-grown, mass-processed meats.

That's what led computer engineer Nick Blackman of Southfield to begin buying meat about three months ago from Andrea and Nathan Creswick, whose certified-organic, pasture-fed Creswick Farms is located in Ravenna, all the way across the state between Grand Rapids and Muskegon.

"The chances are slim that it's going to come your way," Blackman says of BSE, "but you have to play it safe. I just like to know who I'm buying from. I know where they are, I know the people doing the work, I know how the animals are treated. It all comes into play."

He's tried many of the Creswicks' products -- pork tenderloin, ribeye steaks, ground beef and even some bones for soup stock, and he's looking forward to pasture-raised chicken this summer.

Like many farmers who sell direct, the Creswicks offered only halves and quarters when they started six years ago, but now they sell individual cuts as well.

"We've had people want to try us out and buy a pound of ground beef or one single chicken to see what a pastured bird tastes like," Andrea Creswick says.

About half their customers live in metro Detroit, so they drive to Novi every four to six weeks, where customers meet them to pick up their orders.

Buying meat monthly might sound inconvenient. But Rob Holloway of Northville, who's splitting a 250-pound side of beef with his brother and sister, says it's the opposite.

"Of course, I had to buy a freezer, but it's very convenient. You have it at home; I can thaw it in 40 minutes in cool water and it's ready to go," says Holloway, who owns Security Corp. in Novi.

He became interested in locally grown grass-fed beef after reading an article about how cattle are fattened in commercial feedlots. The Creswicks sent him some meat samples and he was sold.

Varying costs

For consumers, buying direct from producers is no guarantee of savings; it can even cost more than supermarket shopping. It depends on everything from how much meat is purchased to the way it was grown and where it was processed.

Phillips' beef, sold as sides, is a flat $2.50 per pound of hanging weight.

In individual packs, the Creswicks' ground beef is $2.75 a pound, New York strips are $13 a pound, and "the filet mignon is cheaper than Meijer," Andrea says.

But Laura Kay Jones, who raises pastured, certified organic poultry at Earth Shine Farm in Durand, southwest of Flint, says she can't compete on price with supermarkets because her product is "totally different." Besides being raised organically, the birds are old, European-style breeds that taste better.

This spring, she and her husband, Frank, will open a new on-farm processing plant that features state-of-the-art air-chilled cooling and enough additional capacity to let her begin selling to restaurants. She hopes to get contracts from chefs to provide poussin, young chickens prized for their tender breast meat.

Jones says there's already enough demand for her farm-raised poultry to sell two or three times more birds than her processing limitations have allowed, and she thinks it will grow.

She's not always so optimistic, though. "Sometimes we get discouraged. We've had people who bought and won't eat them again, because the birds have been out exercising and the meat is more dense and different than what they're used to. They're used to mushier meat from the grocery store without any natural flavor."

More often, though, new customers call back and say, "Oh, it tastes like chicken used to. It was so good!"

An evolution underway

There's potential for much more farm-direct sales of locally grown meats, state officials believe, and they're trying to find ways to encourage it. It's happening in other states, too.

Michael Hamm, who holds the C.S. Mott endowed chair in sustainable agriculture at MSU, has just received a Kellogg Foundation grant to develop a Midwest conference this fall on animals in the food system, MSU extension specialist Susan Smalley says. Participants will look at production, processing, marketing and consumer demand, and then figure out what barriers exist and how policy-makers can remove them.

One major roadblock is a lack of meat processing facilities, says Patty Cantrell of the Michigan Land Use Institute, which encourages sustainable agriculture. To sell individual cuts in retail markets -- rather than trying to find buyers for sides or quarters -- farmers must have their meat processed at a USDA-inspected plant, she says. "That's fine, but the issue is that the plants that have the certification are few and far between. There aren't enough to help connect those farmers and those retail outlets."

Tom Guthrie, director of the Michigan Integrated Food and Farming System, which tries to help connect food producers with buyers, says there are hundreds of farmers around the state successfully raising cows, pigs, lambs and poultry for customers as well as themselves. "These things will continue to grow. There will be an evolution that's just getting under way," he says.

For consumers who try it, the rewards can be high.

Nick Blackman, the Creswicks' customer from Southfield, says he likes knowing the people he's buying from. But he's also a pragmatist: "I go where the good product is. If the meat wasn't good, I wouldn't be buying it."