Mobile slaughterhouse will help small farmers

BY ANDREA WEIGL - Staff Writer

http://www.newsobserver.com/

For Lee Menius to sell pasture-raised chicken at local farmers markets, he used to drive 150 miles round trip from his farm near Salisbury to Siler City, home of the state's only poultry slaughterhouse. To pick up the packaged meat, he had to repeat the trip. Now Menius just parks a mobile slaughterhouse in his driveway.

Last year, Menius was awarded an $8,000 private grant to build a mobile poultry slaughterhouse on a trailer that can be pulled behind his pickup. He rents the unit to other farmers for $45 to $100 a day depending on how far they live from his Wild Turkey Farms in China Grove, about 140 miles west of Raleigh.

The state's farmers are turning to endeavors like Menius' mobile slaughterhouse as they try to navigate the obstacles to getting their food into consumers' hands.

It's crucial now with high demand for locally raised meats fueled by E. coli scares and salmonella recalls, films and books about industrial agriculture's impact on the environment and just a basic desire to know where their food comes from.

As a result, crowded farmers markets have sprung up inside subdivisions and outside shopping malls. Restaurant menus list the farmer who grew the heirloom tomatoes, the cheese maker who made the mozzarella, the farm the pig roamed before it became a pork chop dinner.

Though local meat sales are not available, sales in natural and organic meat are expected to increase at an annual rate of 11.3 percent through 2012, according to N.C. Choices, a group that works with farmers who own pasture-raised animals. One local sign of the demand for local meat is the number of farmers who are registered meat handlers, which is required for them to sell directly to consumers. In 2002, there was one such North Carolina farmer. Now there are 366.

As demand has increased, small-scale independent farmers have struggled. North Carolina lacks the infrastructure they need to get their animals and birds slaughtered, processed and packaged for retail to compete with the Smithfields and Tysons of the world.

Mobile units may help farmers until more slaughterhouses are built and the ones already operating improve. With more access to slaughterhouses, more farmers could raise animals. That would give consumers more choice and might lower the price of local beef, pork and poultry, which at $4 a pound can cause sticker shock for a Food Lion shopper.

Not enough plants

There is only one slaughterhouse for poultry in the state. There are 45 slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants that will handle these farmers' "red meat," which includes cattle, hogs, goats, lambs, sheep, buffalo and ostriches. But only eight of them will both slaughter and butcher a wide range of those animals, will package the meat with the farmer's logo on the label and are approved to have their products sold in state as well as out of state.

Only two slaughterhouses - both about 120 miles east of Raleigh - will cure and smoke the meat. To turn their pork bellies into bacon, farmers have to go there.

Long trips needed

That forces farmers, particularly those outside the Piedmont, to travel hundreds of miles to get their animals slaughtered and processed to sell at farmers markets.

Once a week, Genell Pridgen, a seventh-generation farmer who owns Rainbow Meadow Farms in Snow Hill, or her 66-year-old mother gets up at 3 a.m. to drive the birds to Siler City for slaughter and processing. Two days later, a return trip is needed to pick up the meat.

"You are constantly on the road," she says. "You can't get any farming done."

Menius' mobile poultry slaughterhouse, the second one in the state, isn't a solution to the problem but maybe a bandage.

McDowell County plant

Since the state's other mobile poultry slaughterhouse, in McDowell County, opened in 2008, it has enabled farmers to slaughter birds as they built their flocks in preparation for a brick-and-mortar poultry and rabbit slaughterhouse to open there in 2011. Casey McKissick, a farmer who maintains that mobile unit at his Crooked Creek Farms in Flat Rock, says it generated $30,000 of new income for farmers in 2008, and that's likely tripled since that first year.

"It's not the silver bullet," McKissick says of the mobile unit. "But it's one thing that helps while the infrastructure is catching up with the market for local meats."

Menius and other local food supporters hope that transition from mobile stopgap to permanent infrastructure can happen all over the state. McKissick said there has been talk of passing the mobile slaughterhouse to another area of the state once the McDowell facility opens. In addition to the McDowell slaughterhouse, state officials say, about half a dozen new facilities could open in the next 18 months.

Learning how

Last month, about two dozen farmers traveled to Menius' farm to learn how to slaughter birds using the open-air trailer. They watched as Menius and several helpers slaughtered half a dozen chickens.

At the back of the trailer, a chest-high railing is mounted with a row of upside down orange traffic cones. The narrow end of the cones are cut wider to hold the chicken's head. Birds are placed head first into a traffic cone, stunned and then have their throats cut. Blood drains into a trough and is collected in a bucket to be later composted along with the bird's feathers and entrails.

The dead bird is dunked in the "scalder," where hot water loosens its feathers, then placed in the "plucker," which removes all the feathers. The bird emerges naked, looking a lot like a chicken at the grocery store. The bird's head, feet and internal organs are removed. It is placed in a cooler filled with ice, awaiting vacuum-packaging and labeling.

Among the farmers looking on was Anna Mann of Chestnut of Ridge Farms in Mount Airy. As she watched the chicken slaughter assembly line, she tried to mentally calculate: How many chickens would she need to slaughter to make renting this mobile unit worthwhile? "This is a good start," she says.

For years, farmers have followed the federal law that allows them to slaughter up to 1,000 birds a year on their farm if they didn't have a building for slaughtering on their property. On Thursday, a state official attending a statewide food policy meeting said the number was dramatically more - 20,000 birds. That increase could make mobile units even more attractive for farmers.

Only plant for poultry

Until they get mobile units, farmers will continue to haul their birds to Chaudhry Halal Meats in Siler City, the state's only poultry slaughterhouse and processing plant with a federal inspector on site.

The owner, Abdul Chaudhry, says he spent $850,000 to build the 5,000-square-foot poultry facility three years ago and it has yet to break even. Finally, there is enough demand that the plant is slaughtering up to 1,000 birds a week. He charges farmers $3 to slaughter a bird and $1.50 to cut it into parts.

Not all farmers want to use a mobile unit to do on-farm slaughtering. Gary Murray, who owns Sunset Farms in Alamance County, was waiting to unload chickens on a recent Monday at Chaudhry's plant. He says there's too much risk a consumer will get sick from a home-slaughtered chicken.

"Even if we could do our own birds, it's a liability thing," he says.

Besides, the Carrboro and Durham farmers markets where he and his son, Chris, sell won't allow them to sell chickens slaughtered at their farm.

Red meat restrictions

Federal law does not allow farmers to sell any "red meat" - pork, beef, goat, lamb, and so forth - unless it has been slaughtered at a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse. But the plants that offer that are few and far between.

"The problem really is geographic locations," says Donald Delozier, the state director of the Meat and Poultry Inspection Division of the state agriculture department. In North Carolina, there is only one such plant west of Asheville. Of the eight plants that offer most of what farmers want, there are none in the Triangle; the closest three are in Caswell, Rockingham and Moore counties.

Delozier later added: "When I go out west, I hear a battle cry [for more facilities]. Those people are going to Georgia and Tennessee to do slaughter and processing."

There are a few mobile "red meat" slaughterhouses - 53-foot tractor-trailers, in fact, with a federal inspector on board - operating in the Pacific Northwest and Northeast.

A bumpy transition

In North Carolina, the handful of slaughterhouses and processing facilities that small-scale farmers frequent have adapted to these farmers' needs. Both sides acknowledge that the transition has not been easy.

It can take months to sort out and get government approval of the labels for each farmer's products from steaks to ground beef. Cuts and processing don't always turn out as requested. One farmer asked a processor to grind bottom round roast so he could sell it as lean ground round, which sells for several dollars more per pound than ground beef. The processor mistakenly labeled it ground beef, which cost the farmer a couple of hundred dollars. Another facility packaged a farmers' steaks all in one package as opposed to individually, making them more difficult to sell.

A costly lesson

Pridgen, the Snow Hill farmer, says when she first took lambs to be slaughtered and processed, the workers trimmed the racks of lamb too much, making them unsellable. At $16.99 a pound retail, it is the most expensive piece of meat on that animal, Pridgen says. She ended up giving those racks to a restaurant, losing several hundred dollars. "A small farmer can't afford to do that," Pridgen says.

After that, she took her lambs to Acre Station slaughterhouse in Pinetown, which had never slaughtered or butchered lambs before. They learned how to slaughter the animals, and Pridgen says she taught them how to break down the animal, especially how to cut racks of lamb.

"We're learning from the farmers and they are learning from us," says Richard Huettmann, who oversees the slaughterhouse and processing at Acre Station.