Civil Eats

The growing demand for locally raised, pasture-fed meat is confronted by a lack of high-quality, humane, and regional processing plants. Even the USDA has gotten involved in identifying where outreach is most needed, by helping to build or maintain local slaughtering facilities. The agency just released an updated version of slaughterhouse maps that target local processing establishments. (The re-release can be found here [PDF].) But well before this week’s map release, organizations like Glynwood set out to understand and assess the need for mobile slaughterhouse units in the Hudson Valley region of New York. Working since 2008 to address the obstacles that have prevented the construction of adequate facilities to serve small to mid-size farmers, the organization created a modular mobile slaughterhouse—their Modular Harvest System (MHS). Civil Eats spoke with Judy LaBelle, President of Glynwood, to find out more about the first and only modular mobile slaughterhouse in the U.S. Read More

Massachusetts poultry farmer Jennifer Hashley has a problem. From the moment she started raising pastured chickens outside Concord, Mass. in 2002, there was, as she put it “nowhere to go to get them processed.” While she had the option of slaughtering her chickens in her own backyard, Hashley knew that selling her chickens would be easier if she used a licensed slaughterhouse. Nor is she alone in her troubles. Despite growing demand for local, pasture-raised chickens, small poultry producers throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even New York can’t or won’t expand for lack of processing capacity.

It isn’t only small producers who are feeling the pinch—a widespread lack of processing infrastructure appropriate for small farmers has caused supply chain problems for the big retailers as well. Whole Foods—the world’s largest natural-foods supermarket—wants to aggressively expand its local meat sourcing, according to its head meat buyer, Theo Weening. But it faces the same limitation as Hashley. Most regions of the country have “lots of agriculture but nowhere to process,” Weening told me, adding that the phenomenon is most acute in the northeast.

Whole Foods wants to change all that. In a move that has national implications, the retail giant has confirmed to Grist that it is working with the USDA as well as state authorities to establish a fleet of top-of-the-line “mobile slaughterhouses” for chicken. Starting with a single unit serving Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Hudson Valley, N.Y. area, Whole Foods hopes to offer small farmers an affordable way to process chickens as well as to vastly increase the amount of locally-sourced chicken it sells. If successful, this program could be expanded to any region of the country with similar infrastructure shortages.

Read the rest of this exclusive story at Grist