2009 Mid-Atlantic Grass Finished Livestock Conference

2009 Mid-Atlantic Grass Finished Livestock Conference

Topics included: forage systems for grass finishing, alternative marketing outlets, small scale processing facilities, meat cutting and cooking demonstration, building healthy grazing systems, supplementation in pasture finishing, factors affecting meat quality, genetics for grass finishing, and marketing.

Speakers included: Anibal Pordomingo, Denise Mainville, Joe Cloud, Ed Rayburn, John Andrae, Susan Duckett, Jeremy Engh, V. Mac Baldwin

Courtesy of "Meet the Farmer". More here.

Notes from a Slaughterhouse: Using the Whole Animal

In her 2008 book, “The Compassionate Carnivore,” Catherine Friend makes a rough estimate that America throws away 7,500 cattle, 18,000 hogs, and 1 million chickens a day.  Every day. Even if the accurate number were half that amount, it would still represent a sinful amount of waste. When the Local Food movement really succeeds, we’ll be mirroring the days when our grandparents used every “everything but the squeal”. There are some major hurtles to leap before we get there, and there are some encouraging signs that we just might be able to succeed.

Small abbatoirs are under tremendous economic pressure.  In recent memory rendering plants paid us for fat and bones and blood and entrails, all of which are used to create an enormous variety of products including cosmetics, minerals, and animal feed. Now we pay the rendering plants every time they pick up the parts of the animals that we can’t sell directly, as if they were just like any other waste disposal service, even though we are supplying them with usable materials.  The most painful change is the cowhides.  Where the rendering plants paid as much as $65 a hide a few short years ago, we now get just $3 a hide!  Part of it is the economic downturn, but the bigger factor is that consolidation and vertical integration in the meat processing industry have motivated the big plants to construct their own rendering plants.  Consequently, the few companies that dominate the industry can control the market in hides and waste products, and there is little room for the raw materials that small abbatoirs produce.  We used to be able to offset a significant part of our labor costs with the income from rendering plants, but those days are over.  This is part of the sad story that is destroying community-based slaughterhouses all across America.

So we need to get creative.  I recently got a phone call made me laugh.  A man’s voice on the other end asked “Is this Joe?” After I replied in the affirmative, he quickly said “I have a question for you, but PLEASE, PLEASE don’t hang up.  This isn’t a joke, I am very serious.” I assured him I would not hang up.  He took a deep breath and asked, “Do you have any bull penises?”

I laughed out loud, but immediately told him I understood what he was looking for, and yes, I could help him out.  A bit more conversation let me know I was talking to Chris Haney in Richmond, VA (www.puredogtreats.com), and we have now begun doing a little business together in not only bull penises but also beef hearts for his pet treat business.  All male beeves, bull or steer, have a long thick cord that goes from their kidneys to the scrotum then down to their belly that performs both sexual and urinary functions.  This can be dried and prepared into a dog chew toy called a “bully stick.”  Before I started to do business with Chris, this tasty tidbit typically went into the barrel with the rest of the offal for pickup by the rendering plant, but from now on, they’ll be going into the freezer.  Chris told me that he had wanted to make bully sticks for a while, but the only source of raw material he could find was from Argentina, and he didn’t feel good about using it.

I love that Chris will pay me a fair price for the animal parts that I used to have to pay to dispose, and that he’s turning these raw materials into something useful and desirable.  It’s a perfect example of a basic sustainable manufacturing principle in action:  One industry’s waste becomes another’s raw material, and everyone makes out in the deal.

Locally-produced, sustainable pet food products are direct-to-consumer items, and supplying producers with raw materials can create a dollar return to local slaughterhouses, which small

plants like T&E need.  We not only work with Chris, but also with another start-up run by Adam Beslove, who creates Wolfie’s Dog Food (www.wilddogfood.com) in a small facility in neighboring Augusta County.  One of his principal ingredients is green tripe, which is basically the washed out fresh stomach of a cow or steer.  He picks up barrels of bellies from our kill floor every other Wednesday when we harvest Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm beef.  The stomachs immediately get hauled back to his manufacturing facility where they’re washed, mixed with other ingredients, and ground into a raw frozen dog food that Fido cannot get enough of.

In addition to supplying raw materials for Pure Dog Treats and Wolfie’s Dog Food, we also run special lamb slaughter days for Chow Now (www.chownowpetfood.com), which produces raw frozen pet foods. We slaughter the lamb for a product that combines ground lamb bone, offal, and meat as well as organic vegetables into a high quality product designed as complete meal containing all of the necessary vitamins, minerals, and calories, without allergens like wheat and corn.  Like Adam, Chow Now’s founder Carole King is passionate about providing the highest quality pure pet food, and they’re committed to sourcing lamb, chicken, turkey, and other meats, as well as organic vegetables, directly from Virginia’s family farmers.

Clearly, the local sustainable meat industry is not just about satisfying human cravings for high quality, humanely raised meats. There is also a local pet food revolution going on in these parts, and we enjoy being a true and essential player in that arena. And needless to say, we also enjoy the mutual economic benefits that flow out of the process to everyone involved.  

Notes from a SlaughterHouse - The One That Got Away

One of the more fascinating things about working as meat processor to a large variety of small farmers is experiencing the diversity of their livestock.  I never quite know what to expect from day to day.  On New Years’ Eve alone we had heritage Gulf Coast and Highland Cheviot sheep; Berkshire, Duroc, and Tamworth hogs; and Black and Red Angus cattle.  One Gulf Coaster was a large ram with an excellent curling rack of horns, which his owner had us save for his sons.  I completely understand that sentiment: visitors to my home are met at the end of the driveway by a large bony skull with great down sweeping horns, placed strategically where it can scare the bejesus out unsuspecting guests when the glare of their headlights catches the thing on a dark night. The skull is what remained of a small group of Scottish Highland cattle that passed through the T&E plant.

A few weeks ago we had two of the most unusual animals I have ever seen in our barn.  The owner had called to say that he had a couple of mature Texas Longhorns and asked if we’d be able to process them. “Sure, bring ‘em in“ was our reply.  I wasn’t at T&E when they arrived, but I was definitely impressed when I finally saw them.  Most cattle have prosaic numbered ear tags, but the tags on these animals set them—and their owner--apart. They had names, not numbers.  The black and white female was “Queen of Spades,” and the magnificent yellow-brown bull was “Gingerbread Boogie.” His horns were an amazing 62” from end to end.  And don’t think for a minute that he doesn’t know where those tips are.  When I first went out to see him, he walked up to the door of the pen.  I had heard that he was tame, so I put my hand through boards, thinking he might want his chin scratched. Well! He jumped back with a snort, glared at me, then very deliberately and slowly swung his head, bringing the left horn tip to where my hand had been. “Bam!” He slammed the tip against the stall door with impressive power.  He deliberately brought the right horn tip around and repeated his action, then stared at me as if to say, “Now we understand each other, don’t we?”  Yes, sir we do!

Queen of Spades lifted her tail and had a little pee.  I watched as Gingerbread Boogie tasted her urine, sticking his tongue in the stream, then curling his lips back and inhaling deeply to catch the fine aromas, like a wine aficionado with a premier cru Burgundy.  Bulls do this to see if the cow is coming into heat.  Here he was in the abbatoir, and he was enthusiastically thinking of one last fling.  I admired his spirit.

We ran the kill floor the following day when I was away at a meeting. I called in for a progress report, and my staff reported that things hadn’t gone well.  Gingerbread Boogie’s horns were too long to make it up the lane into the knock box, so they had called his owner to come take them back home.  I can’t say I was sorry to hear that they were back on pasture.  We have work to do, but we admire the animals and their beauty too.

originally published January 1, 2009

Education Outreach

It is no secret that a lot of the energy driving the local food movement is connected to schools. Much of that energy has coalesced in the past several years into organizational focus and legislative action to get more locally produced whole foods into local school systems. At the same time, institutions of higher learning are experiencing an unprecedented push from within the student body to offer more local foods in the dining halls. The breadth and depth of the energy driving these movements is astonishing, such as concern for childhood obesity; climate change, farmland preservation, nutritional density of foods, animal welfare, local living economies, as a short list.

This movement has certainly affected our work at T&E. We have begun sending local meats to the dining services at Washington and Lee and Virginia Tech universities. Last year, the Harrisonburg School System built its annual local food meal around 1000 pounds of locally-raised ground beef from T&E (produced by a Holstein steer from a farm in Elkton, VA and a Holstein cow from an organic dairy in Dayton, VA – how’s that for knowing where your food comes from?). This spring we hosted a group of students – both graduate and undergraduate- from the University of Virginia, who are part of a large multi-year project studying local food systems in central Virginia. They spent the afternoon touring the plant and learning about the potential and limitations for production of locally processed meat.

Recently a group of high school students from a local private school connected to Eastern Mennonite University came through. That week was a mid-semester break for them, and a teacher was taking the opportunity to teach a week-long class on local food systems. They went around to local farms, dairies, poultry plants, distribution centers, and T&E. The students came through T&E on a day when we were running the kill floor. They joked around nervously as we put everyone into process room hair nets and butcher wraps, as required by our sanitation procedures. I led them through the process room and the coolers, and their eyes got big looking at the hanging carcasses and the meat cutting process. Then we went on to the high point of the tour – out onto the kill floor where, that day, we were slaughtering pigs.

Naturally, there is a fair amount of blood, some neat piles of offal in trays awaiting inspection and disposal, and a few warm carcasses waiting to be pushed into the cooler. There is a warm biological smell, difficult to describe – the smell of blood? of offal? – that permeates the air. The odor can be faintly nauseating at first and yet simultaneously attractive at some atavistic caveman level. Some people find the smell intolerable, so I told the students that if they did, they should walk out then and there, and there would be no shame in that.

But in fact they all stood their ground, fascinated. Our kill floor is small enough that an observer can witness the entire process from beginning to end from a single vantage point. Due to the compact footprint of our building, our rail line is not linear, but moves through an S-shape from the knock box to the cooler door. Right after the group walked onto the floor, Phillip knocked a large hog using the fixed-bolt stunner, which caught the group’s attention immediately. A blank .22 cartridge fires the stunner, so the noise is inescapable. Playing tour guide, I explained the entire process, but there were few eyes on me. Everyone gazed in rapt attention as Phillip stuck and bled out the hog, and watched as other hogs were being skinned and eviscerated.

We proceeded to the large carcass cooler where beef and lamb carcasses were hung, along with the hogs. There we discussed anatomy, pointing out where the actual cuts of meat found in supermarkets came from, but I noticed that half the class lingered at the cooler door or listened for the sound of the bolt gun discharging. The death of any animal is profound, whether it is a beloved pet, a barnyard friend, or simply an anonymous pasture denizen. That this process can be executed in an atmosphere of simple respect is revealing. The fact that our inspector literally touched not only every animal, but also did a simple autopsy on all major organs was also revealing, both for the concern for the consumer but the animal itself.

Several days later I had a chance encounter with the teacher again. He told me that the day after their tour at T&E, the class had visited a large poultry plant. Rockingham County has the reputation as the birthplace of the modern turkey industry in America, and is home to a number of major poultry plants, operated by the usual suspects: Tyson’s; Cargill; Pilgrim’s Pride; Perdue; as well as some independent plants. These are very high volume plants, with thousands of birds going through the line every day. After that visit, he asked that class what they thought of the difference between the mega-plant they visited and T&E. He said the answer was summed up by one student when she said: “After today, I never want to eat turkey again, but after yesterday, I would be happy to eat any meat that came from T&E.”