Mobile Slaughterhouses -- Food From the Edge

by Rebecca Rothbaum, Posted Aug 18th 2010 @ 4:00PM

Although Americans' appetite for local, grass-fed beef is growing, regional livestock farmers face a nagging problem: a shortage of slaughterhouses. Now some of them are turning to mobile operations to butcher their animals on their own farms.

Kim Snyder is one of them. A former operations manager for American Express who turned to farming in 2003, Snyder, 42, raises livestock in a way the she believes is as humane as possible; her cattle and hogs are pasture- and grain-fed, and free of antibiotics and hormones. Yet when it comes time to slaughter them, she must load them into a trailer for a two- or three-hour trip to a butcher for what she said is a cruelly jarring end.

"It's like the last piece of my puzzle I can't control," she said on the phone from her Faith's Farm near Kankakee, Ill., about an hour-and-a-half south of Chicago. She has begun talking with others in the area about developing a mobile slaughterhouse that would travel the state. She said the idea has been met with interest by other farmers, some of whom share her philosophy as well as others who are simply looking to save valuable time lost by traveling long distances to bring their animals to slaughter.

If she is successful, the Illinois unit would join a small but growing band of federally inspected mobile slaughterhouses across the country. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are nine federally inspected mobile slaughter units in the U.S., all of which process red meat. The movement reflects a consolidation of the industry over the past several decades that has resulted in massive slaughter facilities designed to accommodate livestock raised on corporate farms.

The U.S.D.A. has acknowledged the issue and its Rural Development Agency has extended grants to mobile slaughterhouses. Additionally, last May, the department's Food Safety and Inspection Service issued a compliance guide for mobile slaughter units geared to helping small processors and establishments who own or manage mobile slaughter units meet food safety regulatory requirements.

For Snyder, a mobile slaughterhouse would be mean a way for her animals "to start and end their lives" on her farm.

Filed Under: Food from the Edge
Tags: department of agriculture, DepartmentOfAgriculture, kim snyder, KimSnyder, mobile slaughterhouses, MobileSlaughterhouses, slaughterhouse, usda

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

8-18-2010 @6:24PM Walter Jeffries said... I am glad to see you addressing this important issue. We raise pastured pigs on our family farm. Yes, really pastured, not a pen with grain. We feed pasture/hay plus dairy plus veggies and fruit - this makes up almost all of our pig's diet. I want to raise them humanely and naturally. Taking them to a less than humane butcher would be defeatism so I have to drive a long ways to get good slaughter. Each week we must go seven hours to get our pigs to the butcher so we can get our pork to our customer's fork. With butchers closing left and right as well as such long distances to drive our solution is we're building our own on-farm nano-scale slaughterhouse and butcher shop. To fund our project we're selling CSA Pre-Buys where we give customers a 30% discount (free processing) for helping us.

We're two years into the process of building and I've been writing about it on my blog so that other farmers can do the same thing either individually or as groups. Small is an alternative solution that works.

-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
in Vermont
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/
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8-19-2010 @11:51AM judy said... how can a person take care of an animal everyday and then kill it? I don't understand this at all, to me i find it disgusting & heartless.

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8-19-2010 @6:34PM Nanc said... @Judy: Animals are food. It is all part of the natural cycle. Sadly you don't get it. When you eat commercially raised vegetables you are participating in the deaths of billions of animals that were killed in the tilling, planting, -ciding and harvesting of the fields of grains and vegetables you eat. You are a murderer and hypocrite. At least omnivores are honest.