A Drive to Build Local Processing Capacity

By Briana Olson

Photo by Esha Chiocchio.

“Their quality of death is the most important thing,” Matt Freeman said, his voice spilling out of a phone held out for everyone to listen in at a Rocky Mountain Farmers Union meeting in April. His heritage sheep farm outside Las Vegas had been spared from the Calf Canyon / Hermit’s Peak Fire, but he was unable to join the meeting in person. The topic of the day was “meat processing,” as the harvest and butchering of animals is known, and, specifically, the State of New Mexico’s intent to reboot its own meat inspection program some fifteen years after having ceded that right (and responsibility) to the USDA.

But how do you measure quality of death? Is it the serenity and control of the setting, the surprise of the departure? Is it the number of miles traveled to the slaughter facility? The cumulative moments preceding the final one? The kindness and spaciousness with which one was fed, run, handled during breeding and birthing and all the rest of life? Might it also be how one’s body is handled afterward—what one is turned into? And what about the hands and bodies of those who harvest? I’m thinking not only of their skill, their accuracy and swiftness, nor only of whether they say something like a prayer, but also whether they are recognized for their work. Whether their own lives and deaths are honored, considered, cared for.

“People have been shocked to find out this service exists,” Freeman continued, referring to the mobile slaughter unit that allows him to travel directly to farms and focus on “completely low-stress on-site harvesting.” Lucet Mobile Butchery is what’s known as custom-exempt, meaning that meat from the animals Freeman harvests cannot be sold commercially, and his purpose in joining the union meeting by phone was to advocate for “super small-scale producers being able to sell meat directly.”

According to Google Trends, search interest in the topics of “meat processing” and “meat market” peaked in May 2020. So did search interest in “slaughterhouses near me.” I don’t know if producers were driving that interest, or if consumers, panicked about reports of impending meat shortages, were looking for places where they could harvest live animals. I do know that in April of that year, thousands of pigs and millions of chickens were shot or gassed or otherwise “depopulated” when some of the nation’s mega-slaughterhouses closed down or reduced capacity in response to COVID outbreaks among plant employees. It was a moment of reckoning for the doctrine of efficiency.

In January 2022, the Biden administration announced a $1 billion plan to make the meat and poultry supply chain fairer, more competitive, and more resilient. The consolidation of the meat market is not news in itself; most of the stats laid out in the administration’s fact sheet have been roughly true for years. (The USDA published a report examining the causes of consolidation in 2000.) In beef, four meatpacking companies, known as the big four, control 85 percent of the market. In pork, the top four processors control 70 percent of the market. Year after year, farmers receive less and less of each dollar consumers spend on meat.

What is news, or what at least was newly felt—and felt by a much wider percentage of the human population—is that consolidation weakens supply chains. A system that produces mad abundance (four-packs of pork tenderloins, endless racks of five-dollar roast chickens, etc.) in “normal” times may provide a sense of food security, but when fifty plants are processing almost all the cattle, closing a single one has an outsize impact. In the administration’s words, “Our overreliance on just a handful of giant processors leaves us all vulnerable, with any disruptions at these bottlenecks rippling throughout our food system.”

“We have had to use Mountainair [Heritage Meat Processing]. Mel’s [Custom Meat Processing] in Romeo and Salazar [Meats] in Manassa and Sunnyside are all still booked out eight to ten months,” Tommy Casados of C4 Farms told me in June.

Like most producers in northern New Mexico—C4 is based in Tierra Amarilla (colloquially, TA), about two hundred miles and four hours from Mountainair—Casados did not need COVID bottlenecks to know that there was a shortage of small-scale processors, although “COVID made it more obvious that we need more processing.” (While there are around thirty processors in New Mexico, most of those are custom-exempt, like Freeman’s, meaning that meat harvested and butchered there cannot be sold commercially.)

Top: The skull of an Icelandic sheep, raised at TerraVita Heritage Ranch and harvested by Lucet Mobile Butchery, photo by Briana Olson. Bottom: A grassfed, humanely raised Angus heifer harvested by Lucet Mobile Butchery, photo courtesy of Lucet Mobile Butchery.

“We started direct marketing the beef we raise in 2013,” Casados told me, and eventually “ventured into retail and then into value-added products. Starting in 2017 we got into value added—snack sticks, jerky, summer sausage. Then got into fresh sausages and bratwurst. We started renting a commercial kitchen here locally. That spurred on wanting to process these products ourselves, you know, the traditional carne seca that is very popular here.”

Casados received a grant from the state to build a USDA-certified processing facility in 2019. “People were coming forward because a lot of people like us were taking their animals to Colorado or even down south,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is really to start working with neighboring ranching cattle producers here—buying [animals] at weaning and putting them into our forage pasture-based program. We want to provide another market for local producers.” According to Casados, the cow herd in Rio Arriba County is estimated to be thirty-seven thousand head, and most of those are currently being exported out of the county.
“At our facility, we have USDA kills waiting, on call till we get inspection. We’re already booked out till the end of this year.”

It was “basically brought about by the COVID situation,” said Belinda Garland, executive director of the New Mexico Livestock Board, when I asked her what was behind the renewed interest in rebuilding the state’s meat inspection program. “The reason there’s been bipartisan support of this program is that it really gives the state control of its own destiny. It helps the state be self-sufficient for the consumers out there.”

In part, this is because the program will allow the state to control how many plants are operating, she said. “Right now, part of the federal restrictions on us is they don’t have enough employees.” She described a vision of hiring meat inspectors based around the state, “so if we have a small plant out there that doesn’t need a full-time inspector,” they could be shared between different plants. “We’ve got a vision of assisting small processors as well. We have heard from other states that people coming on have found it easier to work with them than with the federal [system],” she said.

There’s a catch, though. In order to run an in-state program, “you have to enter into an agreement with [the USDA] Food Safety and Inspection Service [FSIS].” For New Mexico, this means (among other things) focusing on the areas that FSIS cited as reasons for withdrawing their agreement back in 2007: staffing, training, and funding.

By July, the livestock board had adopted a set of rules from the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which will guide their setup of the program. This includes “9 CFR, Part 313, humane slaughter of livestock,” a nearly four-thousand-word definition of humane slaughter that emphasizes “a minimum of excitement and discomfort” and “immediate unconsciousness.” It also includes “9 CFR, Part 417, hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) systems,” an overview of the quality control protocol that small-scale producers like Freeman often perceive as an administrative burden too big to bear.

Ewe and lambs from TerraVita Heritage Ranch. Photo by Briana Olson.

“You have to have a HACCP [pronounced ‘hassip’] plan for every process, one spelled out for slaughter, one spelled out for aging, one spelled out for raw processing not-ground products, one for raw ground products, heat treated, heat treated fully cooked shelf stable,” said Casados, who used funds from a USDA meat and poultry expansion grant to buy a custom smokehouse and get training in some of those processes.

“It’s a difficult business, and particularly for small processors. When the administration made this $1 billion commitment, they knew that if they just put money out there for grants [to get new plants started], they would fail,” said Dave Carter of the Flower Hill Institute. “This program is the most expansive that’s ever been done. They knew they needed a whole cadre of folks with different expertise.”

More than a quarter of that $1 billion will be granted to independent processors. Some funds will leverage guaranteed loans. Some will be allocated to training programs.

The Flower Hill Institute, cofounded in Jemez Pueblo by Roger Fragua, is serving as the coordinator for the USDA Meat and Poultry Processing Capacity Technical Assistance Program. During the pandemic, Fragua and Carter worked together with Chris Roper (now also with Flower Hill) to help the Osage Nation set up a USDA-certified plant within seven months.
“When I was working with tribes in Oklahoma,” Roper said, “we were focusing on food security before COVID ever hit. We had coolers and freezers, and were able to store and distribute. We were able to supply our own stores. We had beef, we had bison, nobody had to worry about food security in our community.”

USDA funds are available for a wide range of projects, from building new plants and converting custom-exempt processors into USDA-inspected processors to accessing capital for improving distribution infrastrastructure (cold storage, for instance). One person the team at Flower Hill has talked with is a retired teacher trying to put together a community kitchen so that she and her neighbors can process their chickens and market them at the farmers market.

“We really get intimate with these applicants,” Roper said. “We like to ask them a lot of questions about what their goals are, why they’re trying to start a meat processing facility. Who they want to feed, what size of facility they want to build, if they actually want to slaughter animals, do added value. . . . And then it kind of gets down to what you can afford to do. It’s all scale. What their labor pool looks like, what the market looks like. And then we help them achieve their goals.”

“There’s nothing here, job-wise. The majority of jobs are government provided. Schools. The economy is only as strong as what it produces, so my thought is we need to provide them,” Casados said. “There are a lot of kids who want to stay, who don’t want to move to the city. We’re actually looking at hiring a kid [from Chama] with a marketing degree from NMSU. Using a marketing position in TA, who would’ve thought of that?”

At the time I spoke with Casados, he and his wife, Jessica—C4’s plant manager and certified HACCP person—were getting ready to submit their application for a USDA grant of inspection, with hopes of being up and running by the end of August. C4 had six open positions. That may not sound like much, but most estimates put Tierra Amarilla’s current population under five hundred, and 75 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line.

“What we’re seeing now is a need for professional butchers,” Carter said. “You can’t take someone who’s been working in a JBS or Tyson plant and put them in a smaller plant. These smaller plants need someone who can go all the way from the kill floor to the retail counter.”

“Some meat departments still have workers who are doing cutting and grinding,” Roper explained, but “people from grocery departments don’t know how to break down a carcass. They’re used to portion-cutting a primal or maybe grinding hamburger through a grinder and packaging into a retail package. . . . There’s big gaps when you think about working in a processing facility versus a grocery department versus charcuterie. In a large plant, say you’ll have five hundred workers. The person will stand every time a carcass lands in front of them; think of an automobile factory—these meat plants are the same way. Maybe you’re pulling a hide down or cutting a tail, but you have one job.”

“At smaller plants,” Carter added, “it’s not just the people on the floor—it’s the plant manager, marketing, food safety, and sanitation.”

“We’ve even talked with colleges about programs that develop plant managers,” Roper said. “It’s hard to find someone with processing experience, management experience, accounting, teaching. I think that’s a benefit. A lot of people don’t want to be stagnant.”

C4 Farms. Photo by Esha Chiocchio.

“I typed ‘butcher’ on Craigslist,” Freeman said when I asked what training opportunities had been available in California, where he lived before he and his wife and business partner, Alyx Schaeffer, decided to return to her home state of New Mexico. What he found on Craigslist was a mobile butcher, and harvesting on-site resonated with their philosophy. Freeman showed up to shadow for a day, loved it, and signed on for a four-month apprenticeship in Sacramento County and Northern California. That stint also included a day shadowing a master butcher in a brick-and-mortar shop, who broke down eight hogs a day with the help of three employees.

I visited with Freeman in the East Mountains, where he and Schaeffer had evacuated with their animals, so I didn’t have the chance to see his mobile slaughter unit. But he described the process in detail. His approach meets—or maybe exceeds—the federal code for humane slaughter, but his definition is simpler: “Animals are being animals until they’re not.”
He emphasized limiting stress, sanitation, meticulous cuts, the importance of getting it right.

“Meat cutting is an art,” said Manny Encinias of Trilogy Beef Community. “It’s a skill set. It doesn’t happen overnight.”

Encinias is a fifth-generation rancher whose family launched Trilogy, a now-thriving local beef business, just before the pandemic. He also runs a consulting business and is a professor and discipline coordinator at Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari. I get the impression that one of the only times he sits down is when he’s driving, which he happened to be doing on the afternoon we talked.

With Trilogy, Encinias said, “we harvest every week out of Western Way in Moriarty.” Western Way Custom Meat Processing is New Mexico’s longest-running multispecies slaughter facility with a USDA grant of inspection, and is fifteen minutes from the Encinias family ranch. “We have a long-standing relationship with the Minifie family. They do a good job, they’re multigenerational,” he said, noting that by processing locally, Trilogy maintains a low carbon footprint and supports the thirteen employee families on Western Way’s payroll.

In Encinias’s view, training is paramount. “Because we’re actively involved in the meat business as a family, we’re very much aware of [the needs] for workforce,” he said. He echoed Carter’s view that expanding independent processing has to be multifaceted. “There’s no sense in building a $20 million facility that runs at 50 percent efficiency because they don’t have the people to run it,” he said. Previously, “the feds have invested in capacity to build but those plants are not running at max because they don’t have the trained workforce.”

He described the program at Mesalands as highly adaptive—a combination of a standard hybrid curriculum and in-person training customized for businesses. “I just got off a call with one of the new plants coming under USDA inspection. Focused on doing some needs assessment. What employees are they looking for? What type of equipment do they need training on? Every one of these plants has different needs, they have different equipment, and they have different challenges.”

As far as who’s signing up for these trainings, he mentioned a recent in-person butcher training in Wisconsin where the students “came from all aspects of the community, from hunter to plumber to physical therapist.”

Tommy Casados’s eldest son, Jacob Casados, at C4 Farms in Tierra Amarilla. Photo by Esha Chiocchio.

“We’re also providing training for culinary experts. Especially working with restaurants, getting restaurants to better understand the challenge of being a small [producer]. Everyone knows what a rib eye is. We’re hoping to have more people get into whole-carcass utilization.

So at Mesalands, the focus is not just on meat training, but to help from production [at the ranch] all the way to the plate.”

If there’s a thread that runs through all the notes I took while interviewing for this story, it’s a vision of local and regional self-sufficiency. Autonomy. But the drive to build local processing capacity is also about what goes into these animals. It’s not only that travel is stressful for animals, and that wait times at existing federally inspected plants are long; it’s how the animals live, what they eat, and the human labor involved in the intensive rotational grazing practiced at ranches like C4.

“We’ve trained our cows to eat thistles, invasive weeds, and sagebrush in the winter time,” Casados said. “We use them more as a tool to steward our land. We claim ‘forage fed,’ so they’re eating grasses and legumes and forbs, a smorgasbord of plant species to feed on.”

Most cattle in the United States, including most of those raised in New Mexico and shipped out of state for processing, are “grain finished,” typically spending their final months in feedlots near the mega-slaughterhouse where they will be processed and packaged, often labeled with one or another fake farm name used by the big four.

“We see a huge potential to shift, using what we have to produce beef here,” Casados said. “The processing facility is really the missing puzzle piece to create that local market and local distribution network.”

Almost immediately after greeting me, Freeman handed me a small skull. It was from a sheep he’d raised, meticulously cleaned but unbleached. “I really like the natural bone color,” he commented as I turned it in my hands, looking at the hole where the captive bolt had entered, a clean shot that rendered the animal insensible, unconscious. Later, he showed me the salted pelt of another sheep.

In bureaucratic parlance, these might be what’re called “value-added products,” but they don’t feel that way to me. They feel like love—perhaps an odd claim if you’re someone who unilaterally opposes killing animals, but not odd at all for anyone who’s spent time visiting with farmers who raise animals for food.

New Mexico’s state meat inspection program and the federal initiative to strengthen small-scale processing are works in progress, and there are many open questions. Is the livestock board agile and creative enough to truly support small-scale processors while meeting federal regulations? Will training programs help butchery become a viable field in the state? Can new plants buck the historic pattern of opening and closing, being bought and sold, as so many processors have done since the consolidation of markets began? Not least, will chefs and consumers join the effort and buy meat locally even if the price point means eating a little less meat? Can we live into the truth that we, too, have a hand in the quality of life and death of the animals we eat—and in the lives of those who raise, harvest, and butcher them?

“People spend a lot of time raising these animals,” Freeman said as he described the options Lucet Mobile Butchery offers customers. “Very little goes to waste.”

Left: Fifteen-year-old Elia Encinias uses beef-cutting skills learned at Mesaland Community College to carve top round for custom beef jerky for an upcoming movie. Right: Mesalands Community College instructors, Eddie Behrends and Arquímides Reyes, demonstrate the initial break of a beef forequarter at a beef fabrication training held at Oneida Nation outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, in June 2022. Photos courtesy of Manny Encinias.

Briana Olson
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Briana Olson is a writer and the editor of edible New Mexico and The Bite. She lives in Albuquerque.