Demand for Local Meat Brings the Butcher Shop to the Farm

Reader Contribution by Staff
Published on January 14, 2011
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It’s a common saga for many small-scale local meat producers: Slaughtering time arrives, but without a butcher or slaughterhouse in a several hundred mile radius. The demand for local foods, including sustainable meat raised nearby, continues to skyrocket. Without a simultaneous rise in the infrastructure necessary to process all these animals fresh off the farm, locally raised meat might end up traveling just as far — if not further — than your standard, packaged supermarket meat product. This whole process equates to a bigger price tag at the meat counter: The costs of transportation and

slaughtering can add to the price of local, grass-fed meat in a big way.

If the meat can’t make it to the butcher, then why not bring the butcher shop to the meat? Thus was born the mobile abattoir.  

Where Have All the Local Butchers Gone?

By 2005, a Food & Water Watch Report found that 84 percent of cattle and over 60 percent of hogs in the U.S. were slaughtered by only three — that’s right, three — companies. After the series of beef scares in 2010, this centralization of our meat supply has gone beyond a question of fair business into the territory of food safety and human health. Unfortunately, the regulations enforced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have encouraged this centralization. The expensive inspection systems make it hard for smaller, local slaughterhouses to remain financially solvent, favoring the big-industry plants that already have these implements in place and can afford the high overhead costs.

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