Full list: Meat News

For Monte Winship — “pushing 59,” stout and jovial and a well-known itinerant butcher in southern Vermont — it was business as usual on a mid-November Monday morning. With a reporter in tow, he’d taken the back roads to Spoon Mountain Farm in Middletown Springs in his black Ford F-150, admiring the views and chatting about the history of old farms along the way.

Having left his .22 rifle behind in the cab, he knocked on the door of the little white farmhouse and said his good mornings to the Lewis family, who milk about 25 Jerseys at their organic dairy.

But it wasn’t milk on the menu today — it was meat. Winship, who has been butchering animals in Vermont since his boyhood, was here to dispatch a beefy steer destined for the dinner table.

“Hi, girls,” Winship said to the doe-eyed Jerseys as he followed longtime friend and farmer Toby Lewis to the corral near the house.

Lewis and his adult daughter, Bess, spent a few moments cornering the steer in the corral, sending the gaggle of a dozen or so cows hustling this way and that. “You might want to come in here, too, Monte. Join the party,” Lewis called, so the butcher, a second halter in hand, slipped into the pen. Lewis sprang into action at an opportune moment, and soon they had a halter over the steer’s head; the animal went still and calm as Bess and Toby Lewis leaned heavily against his sides.

“He’s in good shape, Toby,” said Winship, appraising the 2-year-old animal — a Jersey-Hereford cross that Lewis nicknamed a “Jerford.” Out of the ring, the steer went a little stubborn, reluctant to move down the dirt road to the barn, but Bess and Lewis urged him along. “That’s a good boy,” Lewis said in a low, pleasant tone. “What a good boy.”

Soon enough they had him alongside the rear of the barn, at the top of a slight incline and out of sight of most of the herd. Winship pulled the .22 from his truck and loaded two bullets. “Not that I thought I’d have to shoot him more than once,” he said later, “but better safe than sorry.”

“He’s going to go down quick,” Lewis warned Bess. Winship raised his rifle, pointing the barrel directly at the steer’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. Just like that, the steer collapsed, as if his legs had turned to jelly beneath him. Winship slit his throat next, and the cow’s thick, red blood began its slow trickle down the hill. “No fuss, no muss,”

Winship said. What used to be the routine manner of acquiring meat for many Vermont farm families — raising and slaughtering an animal at home — is today a choice that borders on countercultural. Individuals are free to raise and slaughter meat for their own families’ consumption, but to buy or sell meat that has been slaughtered like the Lewises’ steer is illegal, and it’s hard to pretend otherwise. Meat processed at custom cutting shops, as this steer will be, leaves the shop wrapped in butcher’s paper stamped “Not for Sale.”

Yet farmers, butchers, meat inspectors and ag advocates all say there’s a thriving underground market for meat slaughtered on farms instead of in slaughterhouses. “What we hear, we figure, is the tip of the iceberg,” says Randy Quenneville, section chief for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture’s meat-inspection unit.

For farmers, on-farm slaughter can be a way to make a little extra money, hashing out deals under the table with friends and family. And some consumers are choosing this route — despite its illegality — for any number of reasons, from taste preferences to philosophical beliefs about how animals should be raised and killed.

“[A farmer might] have a bunch of people over for dinner, and everyone says, ‘Oh, this is fantastic. Can I buy some?’” explains Andrea Stander, director of the advocacy group Rural Vermont. “If they want to be legal, they have to say no.” But that leaves farmers — especially small-scale producers — facing something of a conundrum. Shipping animals to a slaughterhouse is expensive.

Slaughterhouses are slammed during the times of year when many producers want to process their meat, typically the fall. In some cases, Stander says, “people are booking slaughter dates literally before the animals are born.”

There’s more to the choice than just convenience. Stander says some farmers — and consumers — much prefer killing an animal in the low-stress environment of the farm where it was raised to loading it onto a truck and shipping it to a slaughterhouse.

Rural Vermont has pushed hard for laws that would allow on-farm slaughter, and helped pass a 2008 bill that would allow customers to purchase living livestock, which the farmer would then raise and slaughter on the farm. At the time, it seemed like a loophole that might loosen on-farm regulations. But the state ag agency, after consulting with the feds, said the law would threaten Vermont’s standing with the USDA. Stander maintains the state wasn’t asking the right questions and didn’t push hard enough at the federal level.

“We have been arguing all along that they didn’t get a definitive answer from the USDA,” she says. “They didn’t really go to bat for this law.”

Federal guidelines dictate that if farmers want to sell and butcher an animal on-farm, they must, at the very least, use a “custom” slaughter facility. That doesn’t have to be fancy — basically, it boils down to a sanitary room that has hot and cold water as well as washable floors, ceilings and walls.

Quenneville says the state could face serious consequences if it ignores USDA rules and allows farmers to butcher meat on farms and sell it to whomever they like. The USDA could yank its funding for Vermont’s meat-inspection program and step in to enforce federal rules.

With advocates and regulators at a standstill on the issue, a few farmers are looking into the USDA-sanctioned option of building small, custom slaughter facilities. Chip Conquest, a legislator and farmer from Wells River, is rebuilding his barn after a fire destroyed it several years ago. He’s including a small slaughter room and meat-cutting facility.

“I’m finding out that it is expensive,” says Conquest, who has a small beef herd of about 21 cows. He can’t separate the cost of the slaughter facility from the overall cost of rebuilding his barn, but he does say it’s greater than he had anticipated.

Conquest and Stander want to see a pilot project that would make available basic floor plans and designs for on-farm facilities. And the state is on board. Earlier this year, the Vermont Agriculture Development Board recommended a similar plan.

“A lot of producers felt like the cost of that [facility] would just be prohibitive,” says Chelsea Bardot Lewis, the senior agricultural development coordinator at the ag agency. The pilot project would not only nail down costs but give producers a blueprint for moving forward.

Bardot Lewis still calls commercially inspected meat processing the “gold standard” in Vermont, but she acknowledges that, for small producers with direct relationships with their consumers, legal on-farm slaughter could be a better business model.

“It’s a nice stepping stone,” she says. “Selling halves and quarters is a really great way for small producers to be profitable, and if we can get more consumers to think about buying meat that way, that’s fantastic.”

At the Lewis farm in Middletown Springs, Winship worked in the open air. First he rolled the massive steer onto its back and propped up the animal with a steel bar. He stepped into rubber boots and strapped on a long, black rubber apron. He filled a bucket with soapy water, which he used to splash his hands and instruments every few minutes. Though Winship admitted, “You’re not in a controlled environment” on the farm, he said he always does his best to keep his tools clean.

Before beginning the heavy work of skinning, gutting and cleaning the carcass, Winship rolled the steer’s long tail between his toe and the grassy ground. He always tests the tail because an old butcher once taught him that a cow’s tail is especially sensitive.

“Usually I take the tongue out first,” he continued, slicing the foot-long muscle from the animal’s head and tossing it into a plastic bag lining another bucket. Here he would collect some of the vitals — tongue, heart, liver — for adventurous diners. The feet followed, removed at the joints to make the severing easier and then tossed aside.

Winship has been butchering at least one animal every year on the Lewis farm for the past 35 years. “When you go, there won’t be many people doing what you’re doing,” said Toby Lewis, who sat on the grass near the butcher, looking on while Winship worked. “Do you want this fat for the birds?” Winship asked, as he began the long cut down the steer’s stomach.

Before long, he was ready to hoist the animal up on two hooks dangling from the bucket of Lewis’ John Deere tractor. A foul-smelling liquid gushed out and rushed down the hill. Winship didn’t balk. He moved around the animal methodically, loosening its hide from the body with quick flashes of his knife. The animal’s fat — yellow, owing to its Jersey genes — gleamed in the mid-morning sun.

When he finished splitting the steer’s belly, an enormous pile of innards — four stomachs and a curling mass of intestines — rested on the ground beneath the carcass. Winship stepped in among them and continued his work.

It’s not just inspectors who are skittish about on-farm slaughter. Some farmers take offense at the idea, too. Among them is Arthur Meade, who used to skirt the rules and allow Muslim customers to slaughter their animals in the Koran-prescribed halal fashion on his Morrisville farm. He straightened out after some run-ins with the state, and became the first farmer in Vermont to build a custom slaughter facility on his farm. Now he, and other farmers who rent his facility, can sell customers a live animal and then kill it legally on-site.

Meade alleges that there’s a “tremendous amount” of underground meat sales.  Meade says it’s just not fair when another farmer undercuts his prices by ignoring the rules. So when he heard about a farmer allowing illegal on-farm kills during the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in October, Meade filed a complaint with the meat-inspection unit at the Agency of Agriculture.

A few years ago, after his new facility was up and running, Meade could sell 40 or 50 animals for that feast holiday. This year, he sold two — a change he blames on illegal farmyard slaughter. The complaint resulted in an ag agency investigation, which is still under way. Meade says he only filed the complaint after first approaching the farmer and offering to help explain the regulations.

“I just want everybody to play in the same sandbox,” he says. Meat inspectors admit it’s impossible to clamp down on illegal slaughter unless they receive such complaints. The state doesn’t even keep a registry of itinerant butchers, so no one can be sure who is providing the service. What’s more, Quenneville says, it’s difficult to catch illegal slaughter in the act. If an inspector stumbles on an on-farm slaughter, and the farmer says the animal is for his or her personal use, it’s hard to prove otherwise.

By the end of the morning, Winship had transformed the steer into a skinned carcass — not the living, breathing animal it had been two hours earlier, but not quite a supermarket steak, either. He cut the carcass in half lengthwise with a reciprocating saw run off an extension cord from the barn, but left the two halves joined at the shoulder. Lewis kicked the John Deere into action and slowly rumbled toward Winship’s Ford. Winship explained that he liked waiting to make the final cuts until the tractor was poised above the truck — otherwise, two swinging halves of meat, each more than 300 pounds, could leave a smaller tractor “tippy.”

This time, though, that wasn’t much of a concern. “That tractor could hold up an elephant,” Winship said. With the carcass still dangling in the air, Winship and Lewis unspooled a roll of heavy plastic wrapping and lined the deep truck bed. Then Winship severed the last bonds at the cow’s shoulder, and, as Lewis lowered the massive halves into the truck, the butcher made his final cuts — slicing through meat and fat and connective tissue to render the carcass into four hulking quarters.

He folded the edges of the plastic around the quarters and covered the meat with a few clean, faded sheets — to let it breathe, he said. “It’s all over but the crying,” Winship added. But the mood on the farm was far from somber. Lewis’ wife and adult daughter ambled out to visit with the butcher. “It just looks so small now in the back of the truck,” Bess Lewis said, peering into the truck bed. She remembered Winship visiting the farm when she was a little girl, and the sense of horror and fascination she felt in those days about the process of slaughtering animals. Winship was always kind to her, she recalled, dutifully teaching her about the parts of the animal’s body as he plucked them, still warm, from a carcass.

“This cow didn’t even know to be afraid,” she said a few minutes later. “That’s the nice thing about Monte. He always has such a calm presence.”

Depending on how far he travels, Winship charges between $50 and $75 to slaughter a cow and transport it to a custom meat-cutting shop. He also takes the animals’ hides; after cramming the steer’s thick, heavy hide into a large bag at the Lewis farm, he told me he could sell it for perhaps another $20 to a fur buyer in New York.

Winship first took up itinerant slaughter work as a young newlywed trying to make ends meet, but he said it was no get-rich-quick proposition. On this particular morning, the task required him to schlep from his home in Clarendon Springs down to the Lewis farm in Middletown Springs, then over to Fair Haven to deposit the quarters at Tom’s Custom Meat Cutting Shop. All in all, it took between four and five hours — and at 3 p.m., Winship would start his eight-hour shift at the General Electric plant in Rutland, where he’s worked for 32 years.

After a morning with Winship, it was hard not to suspect that he was in the slaughter business, at least a little bit, for more than just the money. He was a talker, and, after packing up the steer, he spent a long time leaning against his pickup, gabbing with the Lewises about old friends and neighbors.

As he took the back roads to Fair Haven, Winship had a story about every other farm along the road, not to mention every meat cutter who worked in this part of the state. There was Stanley Baker’s “cut-up shop” in Ludlow, and the Tarbell place, and the old Clark Norton farm. In the ’70s, it was “a lot of pigs, a lot of pigs,” he recalled.

When Winship’s three sons were teenagers, he used to take on lots of poultry jobs, bringing the boys along to earn spending money. All along, he said, his work had been mostly for backyard farmers. In Fair Haven, Winship backed his truck right into the meat-cutting shop attached to Theresa and Tom Fitzgerald’s house on 2nd Street. Tom, 77, was wearing a Marine Corps ball cap and a white jacket.

Winship and the Fitzgeralds fell into a practiced routine: Winship pulled the quarters to the edge of the truck and snagged them with a large metal hook; Theresa operated the winch that hoisted the meat from the truck bed. They weighed each half — 311 and 326 pounds, respectively — and Tom Fitzgerlad stamped each quarter with a blue “Not for Sale” label. In five or six days’ time, the meat would be cut, frozen, packed and ready to truck back to the Lewis farm. “That’s a nice clean job, Monte,” Tom said approvingly.

Winship said he thought about opening a slaughterhouse as a younger man, and, a few years ago, the state approached him with a similar proposition. But now it’s too late for him — at nearly 60, he’s no longer game for the risk and investment of starting a business.

Winship admitted the work is hard — tough on the fingers, in cold weather and physically demanding — but he’s determined to keep with it as long as he’s able. “I don’t want to be one of those guys who fishes all day and drinks beer all night,” he said. Winship described the work in prosaic terms — “not the most pleasant job in the world” — but said he likes to be outside and work with farmers.

“I don’t think too much about the killing part of it. You can’t dwell on it.” He respects the animals, he added, and prides himself on working quickly, efficiently and cleanly. Does he care whether the farmers he serves sell their meat on the underground market? “It’s like that old saying: If you don’t know, you don’t have to lie about it,” Winship remarked. He takes the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach, he said, just trying to do right by his customers and the animals. “It’s honest work,” Winship said. “It keeps me out of trouble.”

9/16/12
By Peter Burmeister
Full article available at http://www.timesargus.com/

There is a striking contrast between the stated positions of the two leading gubernatorial candidates on a matter of great concern to small Vermont livestock farmers and their customers. Gov. Peter Shumlin, who often expresses his interest in local food matters, has taken an unbending position against farmers who wish to sell meat harvested from animals that are raised and slaughtered on the farm. In so doing, he is in contravention of a Vermont law that was passed by the Legislature and signed by his predecessor.

Shumlin bases his stance on a few sentences in a single document signed by a mid-level unelected Washington bureaucrat. Neither he nor his secretary of agriculture, food and markets have seen any reason to pursue the matter further, either by appealing to higher levels at USDA, or through the courts.

Sen. Randy Brock, on the other hand, expresses his support of Act 207 which, in part, reads:

“An itinerant slaughterer may slaughter livestock owned by an individual who has entered into a contract with a person to raise livestock on the farm where it is intended to be slaughtered.”

In a recent letter to me, candidate Brock wrote:

“I agree with you that Act 207 is clear as to Vermont’s legislative intent. Provided that all parties understand whatever risks exist, and the meat belongs to the owners who have contracted with the farm and who will be the exclusive recipients of their own meat (i.e., it is not for further resale), I support the Vermont Legislature’s position.”

Full article at Blurt: the Seven Days Staff Blog
Posted by Kathryn Flagg on April 24, 2012
When I reported on LaPlatte River Angus Farm last week for our cover story on the local meat industry, farmer Jim Kleptz told me about plans to fire up a family-owned slaughterhouse on recently acquired land in Milton. The reason? Kleptz and his sons want complete control, from raising a calf to slaughtering the steer to, finally, packaging and selling the meat.

Well, add another farmer to the roster of those considering the DIY-approach. Walter Jeffries and his family (pictured) have been painstakingly building a butcher shop and abattoir from the ground up at Sugar Mountain Farm, the 70-acre farm in West Topsham where the family raises pastured pigs and other livestock. The family’s been at it — slowly but surely — since 2008. Back then, a series of slaughterhouse-related headlines prompted them to build their own facility. A Rutland slaughterhouse burned to the ground. A Grand Isle plant shuttered its doors after being outed for inhumane treatment. The family’s St. Johnsbury butcher was talking of retirement. For Jeffries, who had turned a homestead hobby into a family farm, the trend didn’t bode well.

“We were looking at that from the point of view of, ‘Wow, we’ve got all these pigs in the field, and if we can’t find a place to slaughter them, we’ll be strung up,’” Jeffries said.

It’s been slow going. In 2009, the family tore down an old hay shed, poured the insulated slab foundation, and began putting up walls. Construction was piecemeal, because to a very large degree the family has funded the operation upfront. They pulled $32,000 from a savings account they’d set aside for a future greenhouse. They routed the cash flow from their pork sales toward the project. A community-supported agriculture “pre-buy” drummed up capital from customers, and friends and neighbors pitched in with personal loans. Had a bank been willing to loan money for the project, Jeffries would have taken it, but the farm made do without. In the most recent bid for funding, Sugar Mountain Farm has taken to Kickstarter to rally the troops. With the help of more than 230 contributors, the farm has already raised more than $20,000 of its $25k goal.

[...]

By Kathryn Flagg [04.18.12]
Vermonters can’t get enough local meat — and that’s good news for beef farmers
Full Article

Rambling over a gently sloping pasture in Charlotte, a stone’s throw from Lake Champlain’s edge, Jim Kleptz observes, “This is good grazing country.” It’s a warm day in mid-April, and he is visiting one of his several small herds of black Angus cattle that make up the now-sprawling LaPlatte River Angus farm. Kleptz and his sons run several hundred cows over 600 acres of leased land in and around Chittenden County. The field here is set against the backdrop of a few abandoned grain silos and empty dairy barns — leftovers from the pasture’s recent history.

An old-timer in the Vermont beef business, Kleptz has been raising cattle, first as a hobby and then professionally, since the 1970s. Some things have changed since then. After years of hand-wringing about the state of meat processing in Vermont — the perceived shortage of slaughterhouses, the dwindling population of skilled meat cutters and the exodus of culled dairy cows to out-of-state processing facilities are among the topics of concern — local foods experts say something is finally starting to give.

Consumers are asking for more local meat. Farmers are stepping up to supply it. Interested parties in between — from distribution specialists to would-be butchers — are moving in to fill the gap.

LaPlatte’s growth has mirrored that of the local meat industry. Kleptz moved to Shelburne to work as an engineer for General Electric, and in the early 1970s acquired a few cows. Why Angus? “It was just an accident,” he says — at the time he didn’t know much about raising cattle.

What started as a hobby is now a farm with 60 to 70 brood cows. When 10 acres in Shelburne weren’t enough for the animals, the family began leasing what were essentially backyards: odds and ends of pasture too small for neighboring dairy farmers to find useful. As “the dairy farmers started dwindling away,” Kleptz says, he and his three sons, Mark, John and Chris, seized the opportunities. With an almost encyclopedic knowledge of soils and grazing, Kleptz applied his training as a systems engineer to building an efficient, sustainable farm.

“We’ve got land all over hell,” Kleptz says, tallying up the acreage spread over Chittenden and Addison counties. More recently, the Kleptzes bought some 200 acres in Milton on which they intend to build a slaughterhouse. Controlling every aspect of raising and selling beef — from calving to meat cutting — allows them to explore innovative new ways to use the whole animal. For example, Kleptz is considering smoked dog food as one way to employ parts of the cow that aren’t popular for human consumption.

Local meat wasn’t always so enticing. Kleptz remembers trying to peddle beef at local fairs back in the ’70s and ’80s. Even the name was different then.

“They called it ‘native beef,’” says Kleptz, who struggled to convince customers to buy his product. “Native beef” meant culled dairy cows, which were bound for out-of-state slaughterhouses where they were turned into ground beef. Potential customers lumped Kleptz’s Angus cattle into the same category as old, tough milkers — and typically passed on the purchase. Kleptz even went door to door at one point, trying to sell frozen meat.

“It was a disaster,” he says with a rueful chuckle.

Some of the customers who now clamor for local beef weren’t interested then, either. Nina Lesser-Goldsmith, co-owner of Healthy Living Market & Café in South Burlington, recalls that when the store first opened its doors nearly 30 years ago, meat wasn’t part of the equation. Even after Healthy Living began selling it, customers typically didn’t want to see the stuff. The store stocked its meat in windowless freezers.

Now all that’s changed. Healthy Living hired a butcher, who breaks down animal carcasses into specialty cuts and in-house delicacies such as sausages and sauces. Ninety percent of the meat sold at the store is local — including LaPlatte beef, which Healthy Living has carried for three years. The store sells more meat than ever before. In fact, Lesser-Goldsmith says the only problem is getting enough.

“I don’t want to see it get to the level where it starts becoming factory farms,” says Lesser-Goldsmith. “But as a retailer, it does make it difficult for us when our farmers can’t fill the orders that we place.”

Consumer demand for local meat grows every year, according to Jennifer Colby, a farmer and outreach coordinator for the Vermont Pasture Network at the University of Vermont. But it “isn’t always matching the pace at which Vermont farmers are increasing their livestock.”

Because large livestock take about two years to mature, scaling up quickly to meet demand isn’t easy. Last year at this time, Colby says she heard from three people who couldn’t meet all the requests for their grass-fed beef.

But demand — even demand that can’t yet be met — is an exciting prospect for Vermont’s ag scene. And while Colby says there are still some “pinch points” in the system, particularly around processing and distribution, she says there’s an all-hands-on-deck approach to ramping up the industry.

Compared to the past, “now feels so much more positive,” Colby says. “At all levels of livestock production, we’re working on it.”

“Processing” the Problem
Colby’s optimism comes after years of doom-and-gloom talk about the slaughter industry in Vermont. Small farmers looking to butcher one or two pigs or cows complained about booking appointments six to 12 months out at some of the state’s far-flung slaughterhouses. Others worried that the small, aging facilities weren’t providing the most efficient or up-to-date techniques for killing animals.

These problems still exist, though they’ve arguably been overstated. Starting in 2009, and acting on the charge of the legislature, the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund took a deep-dive look at Vermont’s agricultural network. It was clear at the time that energy was mounting in the local foods movement, but big-picture planning and large-scale investments were hard to come by.

The resulting 10-year Farm to Plate Strategic Plan determined that slaughter facilities in the state were not operating at full capacity. A survey conducted by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont found most were at between 30 to 80 percent — except during the busy fall, when summer-fattened livestock typically head to market. What emerged from the analysis was a far more nuanced understanding of the problems around slaughtering and processing livestock in Vermont.

It turned out slaughter wasn’t really the “pinch point,” as Colby calls it, that many thought it was. Navigating an animal across the kill floor takes a fraction of the time required to age the carcass, cut the meat and package the final product, aka “processing.” That’s where the Farm to Plate plan saw the industry’s greatest opportunity for improvement. The state didn’t necessarily need to pony up for a new slaughterhouse, but it did need to find ways to make slaughter and processing more efficient, consistent and profitable.

Policy makers and producers are still hard at work on that goal, but entrepreneurs aren’t waiting around. They’re jumping into the business. And a number of public-funding opportunities have sweetened the deal.

A combined total of $110,000 in public funding facilitated the official opening of the Mad River Food Hub in January: $50,000 from USDA Rural Development via the Mad River Valley Chamber of Commerce; $26,666 from the Vermont Agriculture Innovation Center; $15,000 from the Vermont Specialty Crop Block Grant Program; $10,000 from the Vermont Farm Viability Program; and $7500 from the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund. The shared processing facility gives small-scale producers access to licensed processing equipment, such as refrigerated storage and specialty meat-cutting equipment. Hub founder Robin Morris says that new United States Department of Agriculture certification — slated to kick in on Monday, April 23 — will give producers access to out-of-state markets.

“There’s lots of farmers with ideas, but they don’t have access to a facility,” says Morris. He hopes the food hub will change that, pointing out that it’s tremendously expensive to open an approved, inspected facility. A shared resource gives more small producers a seat at the table.

In Addison County, longtime meat handler Carl Cushing is angling to construct a state-of-the-art, nearly 12,000-foot slaughterhouse in Middlebury. He owns Vermont Livestock, a slaughter facility currently located in Ferrisburgh, and has partnered with the nonprofit Castanea Foundation on the expansion effort. Cushing told the Addison County Independent that operating at both the Ferrisburgh and potential Middlebury sites could double what Vermont Livestock currently processes each week — somewhere in the neighborhood of two dozen beef animals, 30 hogs, and a few sheep and other smaller animals.

Cushing’s proposed facility would also provide some hands-on training in a new meat-cutting program for adults soon to be offered at Middlebury’s Patricia Hannaford Career Center. Director Lynn Coale says that the first classes, in collaboration with Vermont Technical College, could be offered as soon as this fall, though the entire curriculum will have to wait until the school has access to red meat and poultry slaughter facilities.

Meanwhile, more experienced butchers are sharpening their knives. In North Springfield, Black River Produce recently purchased a defunct Ben & Jerry’s factory to retrofit as a meat-processing facility. They won’t be slaughtering there, but will receive carcasses from slaughterhouses, such as Cushing’s, and break them down, package them and distribute the meat. Black River co-owner Mark Curran and the distributor’s local meat buyer, Tom Biggs, hopes Black River’s investment will signal to farmers that there’s room to ramp up their own businesses.

Dairy Don’ts
Vermont’s slaughter and processing infrastructure appears to be changing for the better. But there are still big-picture questions to answer. Will the industry be one of small producers, peddling products with a distinctive terroir? Will consumer demand incentivize, or even require, larger-scale production? How big is big enough, and how big is too big?

Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund director Ellen Kahler, a champion of the Farm to Plate plan, says the industry is looking for the sweet spot. In the meantime, though, there are lessons to be learned from the commodity that still dominates Vermont’s ag receipts: dairy.

“It’s really about whether or not [meat] becomes a commodity, and who owns and controls the flow of those commodities,” she says.

And the dairy industry, at least in Vermont, has shown that bigger isn’t always better: Just as larger conventional dairies struggle to compete with cheaper operations in other parts of the country, farmstead value-added producers — such as cheesemakers — are finding more success.

Similarly, experts say that Vermont can’t excel on the commodity beef market: Input costs are high, and farmers here don’t have access to the same economies of scale that exist in other parts of the country. That leaves room for something in between — a system larger than individual farmers selling direct to customers, but still more specialized than the national beef market.

“I do think that scale is a very important part of the equation,” Kahler says.

Growers’ cooperatives are one intriguing option. Already some vegetable farmers have used this tool to make the jump from farmers markets to regional distribution to larger supermarket chains. Kahler points to Deep Root Organic Co-op in Johnson as an example; one of the oldest organic vegetable co-ops in the country, the collection of Vermont and Québecois farmers employs a hybrid approach. The farmers sell some of their vegetables directly to consumers, which yields the highest price for their goods. But the rest is collected at a shared facility and sent to grocery stores such as Whole Foods and City Market.

Another option is one of aggregation, which some businesses are already doing. Take Hardwick Beef, which sources grass-fed beef from individual farmers and then packages, markets and distributes it.

The identity-crisis questions of scale and terroir also get at the tricky balance that Vermont meat has to strike. Consumers want to support small, artisan products but often expect big, factory-farm reliability. Farmers and consumers point to the challenge of achieving consistency in a field that, as Colby puts it, is “inherently unpredictable.”

“We want individuality but also consistency,” she says. “How do you do both of those things?”

LaPlatte’s success suggests it’s not impossible. Restaurant buyers praise the Chittenden County operation for both the high quality of the product and the reliability of the operation. Some of that owes to the Kleptz family’s tight control over every aspect of the animal husbandry, from rearing to slaughter. It also has to do with their grazing practices. While cows are raised for most of their lives on grass and hay, they’re finished for three months on grain. That removes the problem of seasonable variation in feed.

At this time of year, “They’re waiting on grass, just like the rest of us,” Kleptz says, as one of the sprightly black calves bounds up and down the pasture, racing the fence line. This is when the leggy little creatures are at their fastest. Nearby, other brood cows linger over their resting calves, eyeing the cattleman passively.

Kleptz is wearing a wool cap and faded flannel. His pants are well worn and speckled with mud. Farming keeps him robust in mind and body, he says, and at 80 years of age, he plans to keep at it until he dies. Kleptz ambles over the pasture in search of a bull he finds especially impressive and, when he spots him, points out how sturdy and healthy the animal looks. Next, he pauses to admire one particularly fine-looking calf. Kleptz can’t quite put his finger on what it is that he appreciates about the cow, but he knows a good one when he sees it.

On the road back to his Shelburne home, Kleptz comments on how different the town — and all of Chittenden County — is today than it was when he moved here in 1971. The dairy barn up the road from his house is newly empty, its surrounding land portioned off into residential lots now under construction.

Farming turned out to be a great second career for Kleptz, but he warns that raising meat is unlikely to be a get-rich-quick scheme for anyone. Still, juxtaposed against empty dairy barns, could it be the next big thing in Vermont agriculture?

It’s a timely question, as the last big thing — conventional dairy farming — is hitting its latest stumbling block. The industry that accounts for an estimated 90 percent of Vermont’s ag income is caught in a boom-and-bust cycle of erratic milk pricing. One year might be a bumper year for farmers, who have no say over the price they receive for their milk. The next — like this one — may see prices dip below the cost of production, which means dairy farmers are going into debt for the privilege of selling their milk.

“It’s not my nature to go do all that work and then hope and pray that someone treats me right,” says Kleptz.

Pittsford farmer David Mills knows something about that. He runs a herd of approximately 300 Devon, Hereford and Angus cattle on Millbrand Farm, his former dairy farm. Asked why he decided, about 11 years ago, to stop milking cows, Mills suggests: “Read the newspaper.”

By that he means the economics of dairying just didn’t make sense. A new father at the time, Mills wanted more time to spend with his growing family. He says he probably spends just as many hours, if not more, maintaining his beef herd, but has more flexibility than he did. He’s not tied to a milking schedule, and if he wants to leave the herd for a day, he can.

Mill says that so long as a farmer knows how to feed a cow — and all dairy farmers do — he thinks the switch isn’t that tricky. For now, he’s not worried about newcomers crowding the market.

“Could there be too many little guys out there selling [meat]? I suppose,” Mills says. “It’s going to take years before that is an issue, I think.”

Republican Legislator Vows To Reverse Restrictions With Legislation
9/23/2011
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MADISON, Wis. — A decision by a Dane County judge to block a northeastern Wisconsin farm from selling raw milk might have reignited a longstanding debate over free taste and health safety.

Kay and Wayne Craig, owners of Grassway Farm in Calumet County, had sued a state department after it shut down a membership program established for the farm’s customers. The Craigs created the memberships so customers would become part-owners of the farm, claiming that complied with a state law that a farm’s owners could legally drink unpasteurized milk from their own cows.

The state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection ended the farm’s plan because it allowed a regular base of customers to buy raw milk, which is illegal. DATCP officials said that state law wasn’t meant to extend to dozens of farm members and the judge agreed, WISC-TV reported.

Dairy farmers’ families have consumed unpasteurized milk for decades, and they’re not unhealthy, said state Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend. Grothman has sponsored a bill, co-sponsored by other state Senate Republicans, to legalize most raw milk sales from licensed producers.”It’s an archaic law,” he said. “I think we can look forward to the day, hopefully this time next year, where everything can be above board.”

Sellers now must sell at night or use tactic such as the Craigs’ to avoid the law. Raw milk producers contacted by WISC-TV for this story declined comment, and said they feared state inspectors would shut down their operations down, too.

Both houses of the state Legislature passed a similar version to legalize the sale of unpasteurized milk last year. But then-Gov. Jim Doyle vetoed the legislation, citing its negative health consequences.

by Taylor Dobbs
June 21, 2011
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The state Agency of Agriculture and Rural Vermont are at it again — this time over a misunderstanding about on-farm slaughter regulations.

The state says if meat is sold from a farm, the animals must be slaughtered under federal guidelines. Rural Vermont, an advocacy organization for small farms and local food growers, argues that state statute allows farmers to contract with consumers directly for animal husbandry and slaughtering services.

It’s the second time in six months the farm advocacy group has had a run-in with the Agency of Agriculture. Last winter, the agency shut down Rural Vermont’s popular raw milk yogurt, ice cream and cheesemaking classes. By May, the advocacy group had persuaded lawmakers to pass S.105, which clarified that raw milk may now be sold for personal consumption. Gov. Peter Shumlin signed the bill in May. The classes have been reinstated.

The current disagreement between the agency and Rural Vermont is over the on-farm slaughter of animals that have been raised for consumers under contract.

The practice, which is of growing popularity in the localvore movement, allows individuals to own animals and pay a farm to raise them. The animals are then slaughtered on the farm, processed and sent to the owner for consumption.

The state calls this practice “custom slaughter” and says such services are subject to federal sanitation requirements. According to Randy Quenneville, chief of the meat inspection program at the Agency of Agriculture, animals killed on a farm for consumption by anyone other than the property owner must be slaughtered in a sanitary room, as defined by federal regulation.

Agency policies are lenient for farmers who raise their own livestock for meat and slaughter them for their own consumption. The regulations are much stricter when slaughtered animals are sold to outside parties. Custom slaughterers are required to have a sanitary room with hot and cold water as well as washable floors, walls and ceilings, said Quenneville.

Jared Carter, director of Rural Vermont, a Montpelier-based organization that advocates for farmers, said a 2008 Vermont law allows on-farm slaughter of animals contracted to be raised by the farmer.

“Clearly the Legislature did pass a law, and we have to assume that that law meant what it says,” said Carter. The 2008 law, Act 207, states that “An itinerant custom slaughterer may slaughter livestock owned by an individual who has entered into a contract with a person to raise the livestock on the farm where it is intended to be slaughtered.”

Quenneville said the law is superseded by federal regulation.

Carter said Act 207 falls under an exemption, which states that “The custom slaughter by any person of cattle, sheep, swine, or goats delivered by the owner thereof for such slaughter … exclusively for use, in the household of such owner.”

Quenneville said the Agency of Agriculture is working with Rural Vermont to educate farmers about sanitation and the creation of sanitary rooms. He suggested farmers could renovate a barn room for that purpose. Adherence to federal standards, he said, “will help in the long run to bolster the infrastructure and make more local foods available.”

September 10, 2010
By Melissa Pasanen
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