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When Bill Niman, founder and chairman of Niman Ranch, started selling sustainably raised meat 30 years ago, the slaughterhouse he worked with was about 10 miles from his ranch in northern California. Now he has to truck his animals across state lines to be killed—250 miles away, to be exact.
Though consumer demand for specialty meats like Niman’s is growing, smaller ranchers are having a hard time meeting it. They simply can’t find places to get their animals killed.
The problem is the slaughterhouses. As ranching has changed from small family operations to giant corporations, the killing floors have expanded to meet their needs. An outfit like Niman Ranch, which has hundreds of animals a day that it needs slaughtered, is too small for many large slaughterhouses to bother with. And his is one of the largest specialty meat producers in the country. One farmer with a single herd often doesn’t stand a chance.
Smaller Plants Disappearing
According to the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the number of federally inspected meat-processing plants fell by about 200 between 2001 and 2005. About half that disappeared were very small plants, or businesses with ten or fewer employees and no more than $2.5 million in annual sales. The smaller guys simply couldn’t compete due to labor costs and stringent new food safety regulations. At the same time, big slaughterhouses consolidated into just 366 giant centers across the country.
Small ranchers often are far from these centers. Besides having too few animals for large slaughterhouses to care about, sometimes the animals themselves present a nuisance. The heritage turkeys raised by Frank Reese, a farmer in Lindsborg, Kansas, are shaped differently than conventional turkeys. In particular, they have less breast meat. Although Reese has a small slaughterhouse nearby that he can rely on for most of his needs, around Thanksgiving he has to kill thousands of birds at a time. This means he has to pay a large slaughterhouse to custom-kill them—at twice the rate a big turkey farm pays.
Heritage turkeys are shaped differently than conventional turkeys.
“They have to slow the line down because they’re not set up to handle our birds,” says Reese. Workers paid minimum wage to cut up turkeys the same way every time must change their process and interrupt their flow just for Reese’s birds. “They’re only willing to do that if we’re willing to pay.”
An Idea with Wheels
A group of farmers in Washington state has developed a novel solution: a mobile slaughterhouse. Pulled by a diesel truck, the refrigerated car is equipped to kill and process everything from birds to cows. It’s USDA approved and can meet small farmers at their doorsteps. It can handle only five to nine steers a day, but its small size is seen as a virtue by its farmer customers.
The farmers built their mobile slaughterhouse after trying to build a permanent one in the area and getting shut down by their neighbors.
On the outside, it looks like a large horse trailer. Inside, it has three sections for processing, refrigeration, and storage. One person can run the whole operation, and farmers pay $75 per animal. The carcasses are then taken to a facility where they’re cut into portions. Farmer Bruce Dunlop, who helped spearhead the cooperative of Washington farmers that built the slaughterhouse, says it cost about $150,000, versus the $400,000 he says a small permanent facility would have cost to build.
After three and a half years of operation, the cooperative now works with about 45 farms in a four-county, hundred-mile area. The mobile slaughterhouse is available all year, but June to December is the busiest time. “It’s a tiny percentage of what the big slaughterhouses do, but for small and medium-sized farms, it’s significant,” says Dunlop. “It’s not a get-rich-quick operation for anybody, but there is enough demand for locally grown meat to keep it going.”
Slow Growth, with Potential
At least one other slaughterhouse-on-wheels is being tested in California, but such operations have obvious limitations in the volume they can process. Farmers in western Washington have been able to sell a quarter-million pounds of meat that they wouldn’t have been able to produce otherwise. However, says Dunlop, “this is obviously not going to take over the industry just based on the number of animals we’re talking about,” says Dunlop. “We can only handle about 1,000 head each year, while something like 60 million animals are slaughtered in the country. But there are a fairly large number of communities around the country that could do the same thing.”
The other hope is that as more consumers are willing to pay higher costs for specialty meats, some of that money will flow into the coffers of small slaughterhouses, allowing them to compete against the bigger houses.
“Twenty to 25 years ago, this was a booming market; everybody was killing beef and poultry until boxed beef drove the prices down,” says Mike Smucker, of Smucker’s Meats in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. Smucker recently expanded his business from a small butcher shop to a full-service, federally inspected slaughterhouse, after noticing consumers’ growing demand for specialty meats. “We just can’t do it as cheaply as the big packaging places. Still, there’s a large segment of the population that doesn’t want to buy from Wal-Mart.”
If that segment grows, slaughterhouses may shrink.
The real issue at hand is natural farming versus industrial farming on any level, at any stage, with any plant or animal. The industrial farming model is based on economy of scale and not by mere accident. The minimum level of entry expressed as volume per hour sets the bar far beyond the reach of small operations. It’s called discrimination. The fact is, the small, local operation is more likely...+READ
The real issue at hand is natural farming versus industrial farming on any level, at any stage, with any plant or animal. The industrial farming model is based on economy of scale and not by mere accident. The minimum level of entry expressed as volume per hour sets the bar far beyond the reach of small operations. It’s called discrimination. The fact is, the small, local operation is more likely to produce a higher quality and safer product with less impact on water, soil, and air than its big brother counterpart in spite of the myth that food safety agents can be trusted to properly examine the product. They, the food safety agents, also measure their productivity by economy of scales, or, by how many carcasses inspected per hour. That’s called a conundrum.
How do we preserve the opportunity for a small local operator’s to come up with creative solutions to prototype meat processing tailored to a local community that shares the same land, watershed, and culture?
To answer this question we first have to consider whether the government should be involved since they determine how big a slaughterhouse has to be before they will employ inspectors. The second question is whether or not they actually produce food safety? Based on my research, the answer to both questions is no.
Locality’s or regions need to have a free trade food commerce zone. One where anybody can buy food from anyone that they want to without the government involved. And if two people want to do business together it is their right of contract. And if at the end of year the hospitals fill up with people suffering from food poising maybe that was a bad idea. But what if those local people started enjoying local foods produced by small local producers and actually became healthier?-COLLAPSE
does anyone know of a mobile slaughterhouse in the SF bay area?
Im a high school student interested in opening a small scale slaughter house when im done with high school. Any hints or suggestions???
I guess I didn't realize that there was a shortage of slaughterhouses...I'm from SC-KS, and we have small slaughterhouses all over the place. I'm not sure that my dad and grandpa have ever taken our cattle more than 20 miles to get butchered. We only do about 7 a year, so we would be considered "small scale" for sure.
It is sad that people simply don't realize what goes into the "mystery meat"...+READ
I guess I didn't realize that there was a shortage of slaughterhouses...I'm from SC-KS, and we have small slaughterhouses all over the place. I'm not sure that my dad and grandpa have ever taken our cattle more than 20 miles to get butchered. We only do about 7 a year, so we would be considered "small scale" for sure.
It is sad that people simply don't realize what goes into the "mystery meat" that comes from Wal-Mart--my friend works at a USDA plant, and some of the stuff that is allowed would make you turn vegetarian...*gag*-COLLAPSE
I am glad to hear this concept has come to the US. The UK has used mobile centers for years to address these issues. Many farmers I've know have confessed that USDA-slaughtering is the major hurdle to local meat.
A truck and a hoist doesn't meet USDA standards and can't be sold..
Great story. Portable abattoirs are common in Europe. They are the best way for small, sustainable ranchers to bring fresh meat to market. I hope they take off in the states.
"Producing 1kg of beef results in more CO2 emissions than going for a three-hour drive while leaving all the lights on at home"...time to give up beef!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jul/19/climatechange.climatechange
Love the concept, confused by the numbers: If they charge $75 / animal, and they can only process around 1000 / year, that's $75,000 in revenue. After taxes, labor, and equipment, I'm not sure how Dunlop makes a living!
We as a culture have come to use some pretty extreme solutions to appease our appetite for meat. The beef industry in North America has become a scary thing. The factory-style processing of beef has become soundly Orwellian in nature and scale & it is appalling to learn of the environmental, social & ethical costs associated with the feedlot environments from which most of our beef comes. Any...+READ
We as a culture have come to use some pretty extreme solutions to appease our appetite for meat. The beef industry in North America has become a scary thing. The factory-style processing of beef has become soundly Orwellian in nature and scale & it is appalling to learn of the environmental, social & ethical costs associated with the feedlot environments from which most of our beef comes. Any method we can use to localize and scale-down beef production will be a benifit for us & our kids.-COLLAPSE
I know of small mobile slaughter-men in California, that mostly do one-offs or a few animals at a time. It's nowhere near as fancy as that nice truck; usually it's a pickup with a hoist on it and a trailer with equipment for scalding the hair off of the pigs. They do small cattle, pigs, and lambs, mostly.
The Big Island of Hawaii seems to be dominated by large upland cattle ranches, but has no slaughter houses. It is possible to buy the local, grass fed beef at the market near the Parker Ranch, but most of the herd is shipped off the the mainland for corn feeding and the big processing plants. And then the product from those plants are shipped back to the supermarkets on the Islands...
amazing...+READ
The Big Island of Hawaii seems to be dominated by large upland cattle ranches, but has no slaughter houses. It is possible to buy the local, grass fed beef at the market near the Parker Ranch, but most of the herd is shipped off the the mainland for corn feeding and the big processing plants. And then the product from those plants are shipped back to the supermarkets on the Islands...
amazing waste-COLLAPSE
Wish we had a mobile slaughter house down here - would be terrific. Unfortunately the slaught houses here dress the slaughter animals all the same - one is unable to get different cuts - slows the flow - as many of the local chefs are trying different ways of cooking/smoking/hanging organically grown meat. Bwave is correct the meat is much more flavorful, partly due to the animals not being under...+READ
Wish we had a mobile slaughter house down here - would be terrific. Unfortunately the slaught houses here dress the slaughter animals all the same - one is unable to get different cuts - slows the flow - as many of the local chefs are trying different ways of cooking/smoking/hanging organically grown meat. Bwave is correct the meat is much more flavorful, partly due to the animals not being under such stress.-COLLAPSE
I like the mobile operation. Maybe that will help the "locally raised" movement grow. The fact is that quality costs money. We've gotten used to the affordability of wal-mart/costco/safeway without thinking about what we're giving up for that low price. My solution: buy less, pay more, support the local operations, and enjoy more nutritious, flavorful food.