Join NC Choices’ for a producer-oriented program, Ensuring Quality from Pasture to Plate: A Meat Quality & Marketing Training, taking you from pasture to package – covering live animal evaluation, nutrition, carcass assessment, and bulk sales strategy. We’ll examine every stage of the process to understand how farm management and nutrition decisions directly impact product quality. Leave with the practical knowledge to understand your product at every step, and the confidence to market it successfully to bulk buyers and build a thriving local meat business.

This intensive features a full day of classroom instruction led by Dr. Jennifer Martin (Colorado State University) and some of the field’s top experts in nutrition, meat quality, and marketing. We’ll examine every stage of the process to understand how farm management and nutrition decisions directly impact product quality. Leave with the practical knowledge to understand your product at every step, and the confidence to market it successfully to bulk buyers and build a thriving local meat business.

Attendees also have the option to add a pre-tour on Tuesday, August 25. This all-day tour will include on-farm live animal evaluation followed by meat cutting demos at a USDA-inspected processor to evaluate meat quality from pasture to package. Pre-workshop tour space is very limited and first come, first served.

Dates: Tuesday, August 25 (optional pre-workshop tour), 8:00am-5:00pm

Wednesday, August 26, 2026 (workshop), 8:00am-5:00pm

Location:

N.C. Cooperative Extension, Randolph County Center,
1880 US Hwy 64E, Asheboro, NC

Tickets: Space is limited. Register here.

This NC Choices’ training is part of the Meat Summit’s national effort to strengthen local meat systems through focused supply chain conferences and summits. Read more about Meat Summits at www.MeatSummits.com

Support for this program is provided by USDA NIFA sponsorship award #20227042038269 to Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) & this material is based upon work supported by USDA/NIFA under Award # 2021-70027-34722.

Funding for this work was also made possible by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service through grant I 25LFPPNC1283. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the USDA.