Next Slaughterhouse Extinction Wave

This should be the slowest time of the year for butchering, but T&E Meats is booked months in advance, like the other small meat processing plants in my area. We’re all working at almost full capacity to bring locally grown, pasture-raised, and humanely slaughtered quality meats to market. The local food movement and the bad economy have motivated people to return to their roots, but the infrastructure to support such a movement is threatened with extinction, and there’s a chance that the USDA will seal the deal if we don’t act now.

Picture an hourglass and you’ll understand the local, sustainable meat crisis: there are plenty of willing consumers out there looking for humanely raised, quality local meats, and there are more and more farmers looking to “meat” that consumer demand (sorry – couldn’t help myself!), but the real bottle neck is processing capacity.  Small, community-based meat processing plants have become an endangered species in America, done in by an ocean of super-cheap industrial meat and the challenge of meeting the Byzantine demands of USDA regulation requirements without a Ph.D. in microbiology.

Although species go extinct on earth on a regular basis, every so often there is a major event that comes along and wipes out 40 or 50 percent of all species.   The same happens in the small business world.  A few businesses fold every year due to retirement, poor management, and changes in the market, and that is quite normal.  But then every so often a catastrophic event comes along that causes a wholesale wipeout, such as the recent global credit crunch. 

In the small meat businesses in America, catastrophic events result from changes high up in the regulatory food chain that make it very difficult for small plants to adapt. The most recent extinction event occurred at the turn of the millennium when Small and Very Small USDA-inspected slaughter and processing plants were required to adopt the HACCP Plan system.  It has been estimated that over 20%, perhaps more, of existing small plants went out of business at that time. Now, proposed changes to HACCP for Small and Very Small USDA-inspected plants threaten to take down many of the remaining local plants, making the availability of healthy, local meats a rare commodity.

HACCP is a food safety plan approach that stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Plan, and the intent of HACCP is to prevent contamination of meat by harmful pathogens. Plant HACCP plans are approved and overseen by the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the inspection arm of the US Department of Agriculture.  On March 19, 2010, the FSIS published a Draft Guidance on HACCP System Validation, outlining new rules which would institute regular, year-round validation testing of all meats, whether or not a problem has been identified.  The problem is that these rules do not identify the hazard that they are attempting to address.  It is testing for testing’s sake, and it will cost small plants tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, every year. The financial burden appears great enough that this will destroy much of the remaining community-based meat processing industry, which is enjoying a renaissance and creating jobs. 

Small, local meat processors have always supported food safety. At our plant, we have had a functioning HACCP Plan since 1999, and it works.  We undergo extensive E.Coli testing every year, with zero (0) positive results, ever.  The purpose of HACCP is to employ well-recognized, established processes and process control parameters to produce safe meat products – processes and parameters recognized and published by the USDA itself.  Now, for some reason, the USDA is attempting to test safety into the system and requiring excessive end-product microbiological testing, rather than allowing us to depend on these well-recognized process controls.  Perhaps a large plant slaughtering 5,000 animals per day can afford its own lab and microbiology staff, and can pass the cost along to the consumer, but most small plants can’t.  And perhaps they should – those are the plants where a massive beef recall can involve millions of pounds.

In my opinion, the USDA needs to recognize that "One Size Fits All" inspection no longer fits current industry practice and consumer demand. These new HACCP Validation requirements are going to cause a train wreck in a portion of the industry that is growing due to consumer demand for the first time in years, and then the USDA is going to have a serious embarrassment on its hands. Someone needs to take a clear-eyed look at this situation and find a way to split the agri-business mega-plants from the community-based localized plants within the regulatory structure. This does NOT mean that small plants are not serious about food safety. It is because consumers are serious about food safety (and food security) that they are coming to us, and we need to keep local infrastructure alive in this country.  We need an inspection system which recognizes that the small plants do not put either the economic food system or millions of people at risk in case of a food safety event.

If any individuals are interested in providing comments to the USDA on this matter, I urge you to do it by the new deadline of June 19th, 2010. The original deadline was April 19, but it has been extended due to the great interest and concern that has been generated around this issue.  You can learn more at the Association of American Meat Processors web site, at www.aamp.com/Validation.php. or the Niche Meat Processors Assistance Network at http://www.extension.org/pages/NMPAN_Comments_on_FSIS_Draft_Validation_Guidelines  Please submit a comment if you care about community-based meat processing and humanely produced meats.  Your comments really do matter. Submit your comments to the email address DraftValidationGuideComments@fsis.usda.gov or to the Docket Clerk, USDA, FSIS, Room 2-2127, 5601 Sunnyside Avenue, Beltsville, MD 20705.

Surprise

Ever hear the phrase "Sometimes life is what happens when you are making other plans?"  I purchase pigs regularly for our sausage making enterprise, and almost always have some in the barn.  Imagine my surprise yesterday to come in and find my little herd had grown by 6!  Someone had shipped a pregnant sow to me and no one had caught it.  An abbatoir is not typically known for warm and fuzzy feel-good stories, but here was a little moment of grace.  We got out the heat lamp and moved Mom and kids to a private suite.  Everyone is doing well and going back to the farm next week.  No doubt they will come back up one day but we won't dwell on that.

The Beauty of Local Hogs

Why eat local? Why know your food source? Why care about humane husbandry practices? As owner/operator of a small local slaughterhouse, I see a lot of pigs over the course of a month. Some of them are mine – mostly raised in industrial conditions in Pennsylvania farms, and purchased to be converted to sausage in my plant. The rest are brought in by small farmers from all over Virginia, to be slaughtered and processed for sale in farmer’s markets, to restaurants, and directly to consumers. All of them spend from a day to several weeks in my humble little barn behind the plant. The moments when I go out to feed and water them are among the best parts of my day. Alone in the cobwebby old structure, I talk to them, bring them their corn ration, and take a moment to just watch them being pigs. This morning it was cold, and I had to smile looking at a pile of Joel Salatin’s Polyface pigs peacefully sleeping in a big puppy pile keeping warm.

Feeding pigsIt is fun to step into a pen full of hogs – and informative. Joel’s little pig dudes run up eagerly like curious dogs, and you immediately have your legs covered with inquisitive round snouts checking out the smells. Is it dinner yet? No fear or shyness here. They run and jump around, snurfeling excitedly. Black, tawny, red, spotted, their coats literally shine with health. Glossy bristles give their bodies a bright sheen. Step into a pen of industrial hogs, and the atmosphere is completely different. Sunk in a sleepy torpor, they lack the alert awareness that would tell them you are coming, and they startle with alarm. Startled pigs bark like dogs, and scurry mindlessly around in an attack of high anxiety. Perhaps I should say hobble – many of them limp about in a strange sore-footed way. Raised on hard concrete, their feet and joints have developed wrong, and they live their lives in constant pain. The deep sawdust in my barn is the best they have ever had it. Their white flanks and shoulders are covered with bloody scrapes – they have been fighting, working to establish their dominance hierarchies in middle age. Not having grown up together like the Polyface pigs, they have no sense of a pecking order. The contrast between the two types of pigs could hardly be greater.

I like to touch the pigs in the barn while feeding them. Lay my hand on their round hip, feel the warmth and the coarse bristle against my skin. Perhaps this is strange, knowing we will take their life in a day or two, but I appreciate the sense of connection. Pigs don’t like the touch. But Joel’s hogs, raised in the woods in their little band, perhaps feeling secure with their brothers, don’t react at first, then mildly move away. My Pennsylvania hogs, twice my size, bark in alarm and hobble away. They clearly show fear. I have no doubt that they have been frequently physically abused, given their fear. Or perhaps they live in a state of psychological distress.

The local farmers bring in pigs of all size, shape, and color. Berkshires, Durocs, Old Spots, mutts. My Pennsylvania hogs are typically uniform – boring white hogs with washed out blue eyes. No doubt they have superior genetics for certain traits, courtesy of a breeding program out of Iowa State or elsewhere. Perhaps they mature on corn 17.3 days ahead of the control groups, and are 8.6% leaner. Certainly they are dependably available and cheaper – that’s why I have them. But I can’t help but feel that something is lost. Hard to put your finger on it. Beauty, variety, individuality, ability to fatten on acorns, apple gleanings, or table scraps – these are not the goals of USDA sponsored breeding programs. But surely these are traits worth supporting with our consumer dollar, too. If the consumer doesn’t do it, perhaps these unique races of animals will disappear. Or maybe not. I remember the lady who unloaded her pig, and smiled as it went to its pen and immediately plunged belly first into its water trough. “She loves water so much”, the owner confided to me, as if she were delivering her pig to a day care center, not the abbatoir. This sense of loving their animals, yet holding the boundaries of utility in place, marks many of my clients attitudes. I think they would continue to raise their pigs under almost any market conditions.

Originally published January 22, 2009

2009 Mid-Atlantic Grass Finished Livestock Conference

2009 Mid-Atlantic Grass Finished Livestock Conference

Topics included: forage systems for grass finishing, alternative marketing outlets, small scale processing facilities, meat cutting and cooking demonstration, building healthy grazing systems, supplementation in pasture finishing, factors affecting meat quality, genetics for grass finishing, and marketing.

Speakers included: Anibal Pordomingo, Denise Mainville, Joe Cloud, Ed Rayburn, John Andrae, Susan Duckett, Jeremy Engh, V. Mac Baldwin

Courtesy of "Meet the Farmer". More here.

Notes from a Slaughterhouse: Using the Whole Animal

In her 2008 book, “The Compassionate Carnivore,” Catherine Friend makes a rough estimate that America throws away 7,500 cattle, 18,000 hogs, and 1 million chickens a day.  Every day. Even if the accurate number were half that amount, it would still represent a sinful amount of waste. When the Local Food movement really succeeds, we’ll be mirroring the days when our grandparents used every “everything but the squeal”. There are some major hurtles to leap before we get there, and there are some encouraging signs that we just might be able to succeed.

Small abbatoirs are under tremendous economic pressure.  In recent memory rendering plants paid us for fat and bones and blood and entrails, all of which are used to create an enormous variety of products including cosmetics, minerals, and animal feed. Now we pay the rendering plants every time they pick up the parts of the animals that we can’t sell directly, as if they were just like any other waste disposal service, even though we are supplying them with usable materials.  The most painful change is the cowhides.  Where the rendering plants paid as much as $65 a hide a few short years ago, we now get just $3 a hide!  Part of it is the economic downturn, but the bigger factor is that consolidation and vertical integration in the meat processing industry have motivated the big plants to construct their own rendering plants.  Consequently, the few companies that dominate the industry can control the market in hides and waste products, and there is little room for the raw materials that small abbatoirs produce.  We used to be able to offset a significant part of our labor costs with the income from rendering plants, but those days are over.  This is part of the sad story that is destroying community-based slaughterhouses all across America.

So we need to get creative.  I recently got a phone call made me laugh.  A man’s voice on the other end asked “Is this Joe?” After I replied in the affirmative, he quickly said “I have a question for you, but PLEASE, PLEASE don’t hang up.  This isn’t a joke, I am very serious.” I assured him I would not hang up.  He took a deep breath and asked, “Do you have any bull penises?”

I laughed out loud, but immediately told him I understood what he was looking for, and yes, I could help him out.  A bit more conversation let me know I was talking to Chris Haney in Richmond, VA (www.puredogtreats.com), and we have now begun doing a little business together in not only bull penises but also beef hearts for his pet treat business.  All male beeves, bull or steer, have a long thick cord that goes from their kidneys to the scrotum then down to their belly that performs both sexual and urinary functions.  This can be dried and prepared into a dog chew toy called a “bully stick.”  Before I started to do business with Chris, this tasty tidbit typically went into the barrel with the rest of the offal for pickup by the rendering plant, but from now on, they’ll be going into the freezer.  Chris told me that he had wanted to make bully sticks for a while, but the only source of raw material he could find was from Argentina, and he didn’t feel good about using it.

I love that Chris will pay me a fair price for the animal parts that I used to have to pay to dispose, and that he’s turning these raw materials into something useful and desirable.  It’s a perfect example of a basic sustainable manufacturing principle in action:  One industry’s waste becomes another’s raw material, and everyone makes out in the deal.

Locally-produced, sustainable pet food products are direct-to-consumer items, and supplying producers with raw materials can create a dollar return to local slaughterhouses, which small

plants like T&E need.  We not only work with Chris, but also with another start-up run by Adam Beslove, who creates Wolfie’s Dog Food (www.wilddogfood.com) in a small facility in neighboring Augusta County.  One of his principal ingredients is green tripe, which is basically the washed out fresh stomach of a cow or steer.  He picks up barrels of bellies from our kill floor every other Wednesday when we harvest Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm beef.  The stomachs immediately get hauled back to his manufacturing facility where they’re washed, mixed with other ingredients, and ground into a raw frozen dog food that Fido cannot get enough of.

In addition to supplying raw materials for Pure Dog Treats and Wolfie’s Dog Food, we also run special lamb slaughter days for Chow Now (www.chownowpetfood.com), which produces raw frozen pet foods. We slaughter the lamb for a product that combines ground lamb bone, offal, and meat as well as organic vegetables into a high quality product designed as complete meal containing all of the necessary vitamins, minerals, and calories, without allergens like wheat and corn.  Like Adam, Chow Now’s founder Carole King is passionate about providing the highest quality pure pet food, and they’re committed to sourcing lamb, chicken, turkey, and other meats, as well as organic vegetables, directly from Virginia’s family farmers.

Clearly, the local sustainable meat industry is not just about satisfying human cravings for high quality, humanely raised meats. There is also a local pet food revolution going on in these parts, and we enjoy being a true and essential player in that arena. And needless to say, we also enjoy the mutual economic benefits that flow out of the process to everyone involved.