How high-tech butchers, niche operations differ (SFGate)

T&E Meats was recently featured in the San Francisco Chronicle's SF Gate.

Here's an excerpt:

Cloud was lured to this underappreciated link in the local food chain by Joel Salatin, the hyperarticulate farmer made famous by UC Berkeley's Michael Pollan and the film "Food, Inc." Salatin was worried about the Harrisonburg plant, T&E Meats, which was among the last that could process his tiny herds.

Small farms that want to brand their meats the way Napa vintners brand wines rely on small, federally inspected slaughterhouses to do it. T&E owners Tommy and Erma May would soon retire. Two years ago, Salatin persuaded Cloud, 52, a self-described foodie and dedicated carnivore, to plunge his retirement savings into the venture.

Read more by clicking here.

The Fight to Save Small-Scale Slaughterhouses (The Atlantic)

T&E Meats co-owner Joe Cloud is a regular blogger at The Atlantic.

His latest post is titled, "The Fight to Save Small-Scale Slaughterhouses".

An excerpt:

Picture an hourglass and you'll understand the sustainable meat crisis: there are plenty of willing consumers out there, and there are more and more farmers looking to "meat" that consumer demand (sorry—couldn't help myself!), but the real bottleneck is processing capacity. Small, community-based meat processing plants have become an endangered species, done in by an ocean of super-cheap industrial meat and the challenge of meeting the Byzantine demands of USDA regulations without a Ph.D. in microbiology.

Read the entire article online at The Atlantic. Subscribe to Joe's future posts by clicking here.

2009 Mid-Atlantic Grass Finished Livestock Conference

2009 Mid-Atlantic Grass Finished Livestock Conference in Staunton VA

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, local artisans.