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

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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 […]

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

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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 […]

Next Slaughterhouse Extinction Wave

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This should be the slowest time of the year for butchering, but T&E Meats is booked months in advance, like the other small meat processing plants in my area. We’re all working at almost full capacity to bring locally grown, pasture-raised, and humanely slaughtered quality meats to market. The local food movement and the bad […]

Surprise

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Ever hear the phrase “Sometimes life is what happens when you are making other plans?”  I purchase pigs regularly for our sausage making enterprise, and almost always have some in the barn.  Imagine my surprise yesterday to come in and find my little herd had grown by 6!  Someone had shipped a pregnant sow to […]

The Beauty of Local Hogs

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Why eat local? Why know your food source? Why care about humane husbandry practices? As owner/operator of a small local slaughterhouse, I see a lot of pigs over the course of a month. Some of them are mine – mostly raised in industrial conditions in Pennsylvania farms, and purchased to be converted to sausage in […]

2009 Mid-Atlantic Grass Finished Livestock Conference

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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 […]

Notes from a Slaughterhouse: Using the Whole Animal

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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 […]

Notes from a SlaughterHouse – The One That Got Away

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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; […]

Education Outreach

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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 […]