{"id":14172,"date":"2013-07-26T17:21:37","date_gmt":"2013-07-26T21:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/?p=14172"},"modified":"2013-07-30T15:22:49","modified_gmt":"2013-07-30T19:22:49","slug":"growing-pains-can-demand-for-local-meat-sustain-n-h-s-three-new-slaughterhouses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/2013\/07\/26\/growing-pains-can-demand-for-local-meat-sustain-n-h-s-three-new-slaughterhouses\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing Pains: Can Demand For Local Meat Sustain N.H.’s Three New Slaughterhouses?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ray<\/a>

Emily Corwin \/ NHPR<\/p>

Ray Conner at Evandale Farm, with goats. Conner is hopeful the state's new slaughterhouses will help her expand her business.<\/p><\/div>\n

According to the USDA, Americans are producing and eating more locally-raised food every year.\u00a0 But the market for local meat has trailed behind the market for local produce.\u00a0 Until recently, reasoning has been that there\u2019s a shortage of local slaughterhouses. But as three slaughterhouses open their doors in NH this year, industry-wide studies<\/a> show that more slaughterhouses may not be the answer, after all.\u00a0\nhttps:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/files\/2013\/07\/nht072313ec1.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/p>\n

\u00a0 Hear the first installment of this series.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Pete and Tara Roy ran a small slaughterhouse in Vermont before they decided to expand. They turned away good customers for five years straight. So about a year ago, the couple built this, bigger meat cutting plant across the river in N. Haverhill, New Hampshire. Pete Roy has a bandana tied tight around his head.\u00a0 As he leads me onto the kill floor, one of his five kids trail behind us.<\/p>\n

Roy points to a pneumatic lift and giant stainless steel saw. He says considering the capital it takes to build a new facility at all, it was go big, or go home.<\/p>\n

We got 10,000 feet here we had two in our other plant, this is way bigger. Our capacity, the infrastructure is here to kill 40 or 50 beef a day, we don’t have the equipment or the manpower, nor do we have the demand, but we built the shell, the infrastructure is all here to grow significantly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like all USDA slaughterhouses, the Roys\u2019 facility had to include an office and a separate bathroom for a full time USDA inspector. <\/p>\n

To run such a big plant, they also need more employees.\u00a0 At the old place, they had eight. Here, the family employs 24. But, Roy says, so far they only have enough business to slaughter three days a week. \u00a0They\u2019d like to be doing it 5 days a week. Pete\u2019s wife Tara says \u201cwe have so much invested, there’s a lot more to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n

The typical pig costs a farmer $200 \u2013 that includes a fixed slaughter fee, and variable processing fees, by the pound.<\/p>\n

Tara says when they opened a year ago, there was just one other game in town. \u201cIt would have just been us and LaMays,\u201d she says a little wistfully.<\/p>\n

See as long as anyone can remember, there has been only one USDA slaughterhouse in New Hampshire: LaMay and Sons, in Goffstown. \u00a0But after the Roys opened their plant, a third USDA slaughterhouse opened in East Conway. And a fourth is scheduled to open in Barnstead, this fall.<\/p>\n

LaMays says they turn away customers all year long.<\/p>\n

And the way farmers see it, these new slaughterhouses are a long time coming. Many say there\u2019s been a slaughterhouse shortage.<\/p>\n

Ray Conner says LaMay\u2019s \u201cis crazy-booked, in season.\u201d She has a farm in Pittsfield with 15 pigs and a few hundred chickens. Like a lot of farmers in New Hampshire, she wants to raise her pigs on pasture in the spring and summer, then take them to slaughter in fall. She does not want to keep them alive in the winter:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more feed, they don\u2019t gain weight when they\u2019re cold, and they don\u2019t move around, and there\u2019s lots of poop. For me, that\u2019s like, antithetical to my farming.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But during the autumn busy season, slaughterhouses across New England turn away small farms like hers. They just aren\u2019t as lucrative as the bigger farms.\u00a0 Last winter, Conner couldn\u2019t get an appointment until January. Her pigs were in snow.<\/p>\n

A bigger farm, with say, 20 beef cows and 50 pigs might not have such a hard time. But most livestock farms in New Hampshire are really small, like Conner\u2019s.\u00a0 Until the new facilities started opening up, farmers drove one, two, even three hours to a slaughterhouse in VT, Maine, or Massachusetts. Conner says she can only fit four pigs in her trailer.<\/p>\n

Each drive to slaughterhouses is between $60 and$ 90, and then I have to go back to drop off the cuts, you’re looking at 4 trips, that\u2019s\u2026 $250 and almost a week’s worth of my hours.<\/p>\n

Small farmers like Conner say getting booked, getting to and from, and getting what they want from slaughterhouses is a big headache.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why she says more competition is really good news.\u00a0 She can\u2019t wait for Russ Atherton to open his new facility in nearby Barnstead. Atherton is a former dairy farmer who hopes to help the little guys like Conner break into local retail markets.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so excited about Russ,\u201d Conner says, \u201cbecause then I can literally go over there, and have a relationship with him, and if I\u2019m upset, I feel like I can say so, and if I\u2019m not and I\u2019m happy I can say so, we can have a relationship. Whereas if they\u2019re in Maine or NH or Massachusetts or they\u2019re in VT, I\u2019m not going back to chat, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s complicated.\u00a0 While farmers rejoice about all the new options, some researchers are concluding that more slaughterhouses may not be the answer. The USDA recently commissioned Lauren Gwin, a professor at Oregon State, to look into the so-called \u201cslaughterhouse shortage.\u201d Since slaughterhouses cost a couple million to build, and are expensive to operate, Gwin says having a lot of them is often inefficient:<\/p>\n

For the processor to start that equipment, he’s got to have enough of a volume to go through it.<\/p>\n

In VT, a meat processing task force has decided that building slaughterhouses is not the answer to inefficiencies in the meat processing system.<\/p>\n

At Pete and Tara Roy\u2019s plant in N. Haverhill, a meat cutter saws chunks off cattle carcass, and passes them to a line of butchers who cut and package it. Pete Roy says getting the new, larger slaughterhouse off the ground has been \u201ctougher than I expected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roy says he\u2019s not sure there is enough livestock in NH to support four USDA slaughterhouses. “I think there will be some failures,” he says.<\/p>\n

Lauren Gwin says Roy may be right.\u00a0 But if more processors aren\u2019t the answer, she says, something still has to change.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure it serves local food ultimately, to have all these local farmers in all their small trucks, shipping all these animals in small batches up and down the road all the time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She says the market will be happiest when small farmers join together to share transportation costs. And, she says, farmers need to work with slaughterhouses to coordinate their livestock schedules well in advance.<\/p>\n

For his sake \u2013 Pete Roy says that kind of consistency is good for everyone.<\/p>\n

As for the future of those three new N.H. slaughterhouses? We\u2019ll just have to wait, and see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to the USDA, Americans are producing and eating more locally-raised food every year.\u00a0 But the market for local meat has trailed behind the market for local produce.\u00a0 Until recently, reasoning has been that there\u2019s a shortage of local slaughterhouses. But as three slaughterhouses open their doors in NH this year, industry-wide studies show that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":14173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[472],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14172"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14172"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14433,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14172\/revisions\/14433"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}